Not to be outdone by Missouri, the Ohio state senate yesterday approved $600 million in state funding for a new Cleveland Browns stadium in Brook Park. This now gives the state three conflicting plans for how to throw money at Browns owner Jimmy Haslam:
- Raise sports gambling taxes and use part of the proceeds for a Browns stadium (and other future stadiums for such teams as the Cincinnati Bengals), as proposed in February by Gov. Mike DeWine.
- The Missouri-style “add up all the state taxes paid at the stadium and write a check to the team” plan that was passed by the state house, even though these would be taxes paid by the team regardless, since the Browns would be moving from Ohio to Ohio.
- The senate plan, which would borrow the $600 million from an unclaimed checks fund and repay it by siphoning off stadium-related taxes as the house bill wants.
Since the Ohio house and senate passed two different bills, they will now go to a conference committee of members of both houses to hash out a compromise. Then it will go to the governor for his signature — which could be tricky, because DeWine has said that he doesn’t like the stadium tax diversion scheme, and would much prefer his own gambling tax plan. State senate finance chair Jerry Cirino told the Ohio Capital Journal that he’s “pretty confident” that the governor “will look at our approach,” which either means he’s gotten word that DeWine won’t veto the bill or he’s performatively trying to conjure that result into being.
All this has to be decided by July 1 — and even then, there’s still the city of Cleveland’s lawsuit charging that moving the team to the suburbs would violate the state’s Art Modell Law requiring that teams that got taxpayer-funded stadiums be offered up for sale to local owners before being moved. There’s even more steps to go yet than in Missouri, in other words — but in Ohio as there, the disagreement is more about who’ll throw money at the local sports billionaire and how, not whether to do it at all.