The Cleveland city council yesterday approved Mayor Justin Bibb’s deal to get Browns owner Jimmy Haslam to pay $100 million (sort of — more on that in a minute) to extricate himself from lawsuits and move to a new stadium in suburban Brook Park. After much grumbling by councilmembers, they voted 13-2 to approve Bibb’s agreement with a couple of changes:
- The city will dedicate an extra $5 million of Haslam’s payments to neighborhood spending, bringing that total to $25 million over ten years.
- Haslam will have to pay an extra $1 million if the Browns stay in their current stadium in 2030, and an additional $2 million on top of that if they are still there in 2031.
Adding in $30 million from Haslam for demolishing the old stadium, $20 million in payments to help redevelop the lakefront once the stadium is gone, and $25 million in cash for whatever the city wants to do with it, that gets the full deal to $100 million — though since a bunch of the payments will be over time, it’s only worth about $80 million in present value. Plus there’s the whole matter of the city agreeing to “support infrastructure plans related to road and air travel with respect to both the Brook Park stadium mixed-use project,” which Bibb’s office says doesn’t mean paying for the stadium, but which could mean bumping stadium road work projects to the head of the line. So we don’t know really what the city is getting in exchange for dropping its legal objections to the Browns moving, just that they’re getting something.
Bibb’s argument has been that something is better than nothing, and there was a strong chance the city would end up with nothing (other than a bunch of legal bills) if it hadn’t settled. That seems to have been the position taken by the councilmembers who voted to approve the deal — “This is not a vote that I am making with a smile on my face,” said councilman Charles Slife — while Mike Polonsek, one of the two no votes, declared, “My gut tells me this is not a good deal for the city of Cleveland.” In fact, everybody thinks it’s not a good deal for the city of Cleveland! It’s more a matter of whether this is the least bad deal Cleveland could get, which is unknowable without a time machine that would let us see how the lawsuits would have turned out. Either way it’s definitely not a great deal, and certainly not as good a deal as if the state hadn’t stacked the deck by offering Haslam $600 million to move from one part of the state to another, but this is the world that we live in.
This doesn’t seem like that bad a deal to me.
Yes, the city/state spent hundreds of millions building a stadium for the Browns that they only used for about 30 years (by the time they actually leave, they will be close anyway).
That’s dead money and everyone who voted for it should have known it the moment that ‘deal’ was agreed.
Now, all the city can do is get back as much as it can, starting with enough to demolish, remediate and maybe even start doing something with that land that benefits more people than Browns’ ownership…
They did that. Even if after demo costs and whatever they ‘contribute’ to the infrastructure around the new stadium (not from the area so it’s not clear to me why the city has to pay anything… but I’m sure there’s a perfectly good reason), they should come out of this in the plus.
It might not be a “good” deal for the city of Cleveland compared to what they spent to get the NFL back. But it’s a far better deal than what it would have cost to keep the Browns for another 30 years.
Cleveland fans can now watch the Browns live (insert your own joke here) for a far smaller subsidy than they have been paying for the past 30 years. Some may have to drive a little further. Others may have less trouble getting there.
It sure looks like a win to me.
I tend to agree with this — it might not be the best deal from the pure finance perspective for the city of Cleveland, but whatever downsides exist will be the worth the relief of not having to deal with Jimmy Haslam and co anymore.
The question isn’t whether Cleveland is better off getting the Haslams to pay the city off to leave than paying them to stay, but whether Cleveland is getting a sufficient settlement for dropping its lawsuits. That’s really tough to say unless you’re one of their lawyers assessing their odds of winning, and even then it’d just be a guess.
I would think that once a team left a city, that city would discover the joy of not spending on a stadium. But then Muriel Bowser and DC came along.
As we have seen from election results, people are not really concerned with their own economic interest. They make decisions based on pride and vibes. Politicians are no different. They often want to be seen as “big time players who make big time decisions”. We also can’t discount blatant corruption.
Fortunately, one of the December 1 Cleveland City Council amendments to the Browns settlement corrects the deal’s original terms to insure that Cleveland will neither contribute dollars to dome infrastructure nor prefer prefer Brook Park projects over Cleveland projects (the latter protection being achieved by removing previous “best efforts” language).
I don’t think there is a precedent of a team paying the city they are leaving at the end of their lease. Yes teams have paid off cities when breaking their lease but not when the lease expired. The state rewrote the Modell Law in the middle of the night to allow the Browns would be allowed to move to the suburbs.
Now I am not a lawyer, but I’ll make a prediction anyway. Even if the City won in the local courts eventually this would have gone to the Ohio Supreme Court. Judges in Ohio are elected and 6 out of the 7 judges on the Ohio Supreme Court are Republicans. Haslam is a big donor to the GOP, his brother was the Republican Governor of Tennessee. So I doubt the city would have won there.
The City can put the land up for bid and see what proposals come back. At the very least they no longer have to shoulder the costs of hosting the games while retaining the status that comes with having an NFL team (yes even a bad one), along with some of the benefits of tourists coming to town for games and spending money in the city proper.
The big question is does the city use the funds properly and does a good job developing the land
What a joke!