Tax district to fund Browns upgrades could push public stadium cost to $2B

I mentioned briefly here the week before last that Brook Park had designated the land around a planned new Cleveland Browns stadium to be “blighted,” which Mayor Edward Orcutt said “gives us the opportunity to be able to maintain this site in the future.” It’s now becoming clearer where that maintenance money would come from, and as Cleveland Plain Dealer columnist Leila Atassi explains, it’s Cuyahoga County property tax money that would otherwise go to pay for public services:

Here is how it works. Under a tax-increment financing deal, the property taxes on the land as it exists today keep going to the usual places. But the new taxes generated as the property’s value climbs — the growth, which is the entire point of development — get peeled off into a separate fund. School districts are often spared in these deals. Everyone else is not. The county’s share, the library’s share, the Metroparks’ share, Tri-C’s share are all redirected.

That’s how a TIF district works, yup: Any increase in property tax receipts gets peeled off and set aside for special projects — in this case, stadium upkeep and upgrades — regardless of whether the added tax money would have come in anyway without the new development, either in the TIF district or somewhere else in the region. (The stadium itself will already be tax-free, a gift to Browns owners Jimmy and Dee Haslam worth more than half a billion dollars.) And Brook Park has the power to divert property tax money that would go to Cuyahoga County, too, because that’s also how TIFs roll. And while school districts are supposed to get a carveout to ensure they aren’t drained of funding, the same is decidedly not the case for, say, county-funded libraries and parks.

As Atassi notes, giving up this money for future stadium maintenance would be especially crazy because the Browns stadium is happening either way: “The Haslams have committed $1.8 billion of their own money, and the stadium is scheduled to open in 2029. The cranes are already there. Nothing about this TIF is coaxing a reluctant project into being.” (Ohio requires that TIF projects pass a “but-for” test where a project will not move forward without the TIF funding, but it’s not immediately clear whether Brook Park has to actually show evidence of this, or just declare it unilaterally.) But despite the project being well underway, Brook Park and the Haslams have yet to agree on a lease determining, among other things, who would pay for future stadium upkeep — and with a TIF deal, the costs would fall squarely on city and county taxpayers, making this a classic grift that keeps on giving.

How much this would add to the total public price tag of the Browns stadium is unknown: We’d need to know the size of the TIF district first and have some projection of how much tax money it would siphon off, and the former hasn’t been decided yet and the latter could end up pretty much anything. “Hundreds of millions of dollars” is a reasonable guess, though, which would likely push the total public cost into the $2 billion range. That’s no longer unprecedented, but it is starting to talk real money; it’ll be interesting to see how (or if) Mayor Orcutt tries to justify throwing good money after bad once the Brook Park council takes up the TIF legislation in the coming weeks.