The Cincinnati Bengals lease and stadium negotiations are getting even weirder. When last we left off, you will recall, Hamilton County commissioners were proposing a $1.2 billion stadium renovati0n, with no clear idea where the money would come from, in exchange for team owners the Brown family not renewing their super-sweetheart lease this June and instead signing a new one that would presumably be less-sweetheart. The Bengals owners, meanwhile, were demanding $350 million in state money as part of the deal, something that seems to be dead along with Gov. Mike DeWine’s plan for a $2 billion statewide stadium slush fund.
That all was weird enough, but then this month Hamilton County abruptly fired the lawyer that was representing it in Bengals lease talks, after the new county prosecutor complained he wasn’t returning her phone calls. And then this week Bengals execs announced they would pursue a new lease deal with the county without waiting to see if Ohio would chip in any money:
Duane Haring, the Bengals’ director of stadium and event operations, stated that while the team would welcome state aid, they are prepared to move forward with Hamilton County independently.
In a statement to Local 12, Haring said the following:
“The Team appreciates the State’s openness to supporting local stadium projects, as it has historically. We continue working hard in Columbus on funding options. An agreement between the Bengals and Hamilton County can be achieved now without waiting on what the State ultimately decides.”
That would seem to put a fork in any chance of state funding, as the Ohio legislature would have to be insane to pay anything toward a Bengals stadium when the team owners had already agreed to a new lease with the county. (Though legislatures have done more insane things, come to think of it, so maybe we shouldn’t rule it out entirely.)
This is all an insanely complicated game of chicken, as the county is desperately trying to head off the Bengals owners employing a five-year option for re-upping their lease — which, lest one forget, requires the county to pay for all features that other NFL stadiums have up to and including “holographic replay systems” when and if they’re invented — while team execs are trying to figure out how to leverage that into a stadium upgrade payday before June 30, when they have to decide whether to invoke the lease renewal. With the Ohio legislature bogged down in fights over how to fund a Cleveland Browns stadium, Bengals officials appear to be ready to punt on getting state money, at least for now, to focus on whatever they can extract from the county.
The county, meanwhile, can make a case that it’s worth putting some public money into stadium renovations now in order to get out of the commitment to keep paying for future renovations — depending, obviously, on how much public money now and how much they can get out of in a revised lease. The now-fired county lawyer says he had “had 90 percent of [a lease deal] done” before getting fired, but no details have been revealed, and who knows what the new lawyers will use as their starting point.
I’m often asked by journalists, “Have you ever seen anything like this stadium fight?” and my standard response is that while every unhappy stadium deal is unhappy in its own way, there’s also nothing entirely new under the sun. This Bengals saga, though, is testing that credo — depending how it plays out, it could be a unique occurrence, though whether uniquely bad or uniquely not so bad is yet to be determined.