Category: Cleveland Guardians

The Cleveland city council voted 13-3 last night to grant approval for a $435 million renovation of the Guardians‘ stadium, most of which will be paid for with public money. To recap the price list:

• The city of Cleveland will contribute $8 million a year for the next 15 years, from city parking revenues, Guardians ticket taxes, naming rights from a parking garage, and maybe additional sources if that’s not enough.
• Cuyahoga County, which already approved the plan two weeks ago, will kick in $9 million a year, from hotel taxes and alcohol and cigarette sales taxes.
• The state of Ohio has yet to approve $2 million a year in its own funding, but with Gov. Mike DeWine strongly backing it and the city and county already having signed off, it’s hard to see it being a sticking point.
• Guardians owner Paul Dolan will provide $150 million.
• The city and county have the option to extend the team’s lease for an additional five years, through 2041, but it will cost them an extra $112.5 million.

At $19 million a year in subsidies, this will be the second-priciest lease extension public expense in sports history, after the Indiana Pacers‘ Herb Simon somehow getting $600 million for a 25-year lease extension. The $285 million total price tag — or $397.5 million if Cleveland opts for the extended warranty — comes just 27 years after Cleveland taxpayers spent around $350 million to build the stadium in the first place, and just five years after the city gave $57 million worth of future tax revenues to the team to pay for more modest renovations to the place.

We’ve already discussed this deal at great length, and really there isn’t much more to say: Dolan has succeeded in turning his 1990s-era stadium into a subsidy gift that keeps on giving, and he’s set himself up to be able to demand even more renovations — or a whole new stadium — 15 years from now. That the whole process took place without much public debate, and without Dolan or his elected official pals even overtly threatening that the team would leave town otherwise, is a clear sign that we have not made very much progress in terms of transparency or analyzing the costs and benefits of sports subsidies since Dolan’s predecessor as team owner, Richard Jacobs, shook down Cleveland for stadium money in the first place in the early ’90s. And you have to figure that other owners of sports teams with stadiums of similar vintage — and there are a ton of them, since the early ’90s was when the new-stadium boom really kicked in — are going to be looking at this and thinking of how to replicate this in their own cities, and … yeah, this whole thing really is taking longer than I thought.

Whoops, did I forget to mention that the Cuyahoga County Council voted 9-1 last week to approve $285 million in public spending on Cleveland Guardians stadium renovations — which would turn into $397.5 million in public spending if the team agrees to stay in Cleveland for another 20 years instead of just 15? Well, yes, that happened, and here’s how some of the local government honchos explained it:

County Executive Armond Budish: “The improvements to the field are necessary to keep the team here. We’re fortunate here because the Dolan family wants to keep the team in Cleveland, but we still have to provide a competitive lease. And that’s what we’ve done.”

Gateway Economic Development Corp. chair Ken Silliman: “The fact is that, under the present legal environment, the leverage of cities and counties is minimal, unless you’re willing to lose your team.”

Councilmember Sunny Simon: “[This deal is] vital to a community of sports fanatics.”

We get the picture! Without a promise of nearly $400 million in public money, the Guardians owners would surely have hightailed it to … well, we’re not sure where, but there are all kinds of cities that would just love to have major-league baseball that are big enough to … no? Did the Dolan family at least threaten to move the team, scaring local sports fans and elected officials into opening the public checkbook?

Neil Weiss, the team’s vice president and CIO of Technology and Ballpark Operations, recently told cleveland.com that moving the Guardians out of Cleveland is something “nobody wants to do or would ever want to do.” During negotiations, in fact, the Dolans never brought it up, he said.

Ah, yes, the non-threat threat, that’s an oldie but goodie. As is leaving it to local politicians and sportswriters to make the implicit threat for you, though the Dolans didn’t manage to up the ante to the seldom-utilized ghost threat by having someone drop hints about the team leaving under the cloak of anonymity.

The Cleveland City Council still has to vote to approve the Guardians’ renovation subsidy, and according to Cleveland.com “has already warned that it will need further convincing that the cost-benefit ratio tips in favor of residents.” The city council has meetings coming up the next two Mondays at 7 pm, but no published agendas yet, so keep your calendar free and stay tuned.

The Cuyahoga County Council finally had a public meeting on Tuesday on the county and city of Cleveland’s plans to spend up to $400 million on renovations to the Guardians‘ stadium in exchange for a 15- to 20-year lease extension. WKYC’s headline on its report on the meeting says the plan “drew mixed reviews,” so let’s see what people had to say:

• North Royalton City Council President Paul Marnecheck: “While the ballpark is located in downtown Cleveland, the benefits do ripple out to all of Cuyahoga County. It generates tax revenue, job creation, and other economic upsides that benefit every community in Cuyahoga County. There are thousands of jobs that are tied directly or indirectly to Progressive Field.”
• County resident Sally Hanley: “I love Cleveland. Cleveland is a great city to live in. But we also know that Cleveland is  one of the poorest cities in the country. This really makes me wonder if spending this much money on Progressive Field makes sense with all of these unmet needs. I really have to wonder why we would be doing this for the team owner, who is a billionaire. He’s the one that would mostly be benefitting from all of the park upgrades.”

And … that’s it? A two-hour public meeting, and WKYC can’t be bothered to watch the whole thing to quote more than one pro and one con commenter? I mean, i can’t be bothered to watch the whole thing, either, but let’s see if I can at least do better than that:

• Nina McClellan, “member of the community”: “I would like to speak with great concern about this deal, which looks like it’s being rammed through on a very fast track. … Why the rush? Is it to help a multibillionaire, Paul Dolan? He’s worth about $4.6 billion. … We have children who were for years being poisoning in this community, and there was no rush then.”
• Keith Wilson, Cuyahoga County Progressive Caucus: “There is a lot of myths about deals like this. … Since the ’90s, economists have known that the promises of economic development and the benefits simply don’t pan out for cities.”
• Ann Caruso, no ID given: “We have some of the poorest air quality in the country, we are the poorest city. … I don’t understand why certain groups come to the county council or City Hall, they ask for this public money, and they aren’t so readily given that money. … You go in poor neighborhoods, their sidewalks are crumbling, their curbs are crumbling.”
• William Tarter Jr., resident: “I am extremely concerned about the short-term and the long-term details, particularly around revenue, of this legislation.”
• Lou (or maybe Liu?), no ID given: “I remember back in 2019 when we had all the meetings on that particular project for the basketball court, Warrensville’s mayor had a very good point. He said, ‘To tie up this deal, if we can also plug in our public service funding which can get from the revenue, through different ways, it will be a very good deal. But unfortunately, I came up here two years ago, October 8, to tell you how horrible that renovation actually was. You want to create a facility for everybody, but now it’s only good for certain people enjoying beer.”

That’s everybody, and while it’s only seven people total, that is not a mixed reaction! That’s one guy who says spending on stadium renovation would be a good thing, and six people saying hell no it’s not. (Unless you’re either a billionaire or certain people enjoying beer.)

The rest of the meeting was devoted to staffers for the Gateway Economic Development Corporation talking about diverse hiring goals on construction projects, about how economic impact studies are better these days because they no longer “overstate the case for a public subsidy” but rather focus on rehabilitating “a desolate city neighborhood.” Councilmember Nan Baker pointed out that the economic impact statement provided for the Guardians project “does give those kind of numbers I think you said you were getting away from,” and asked some other technical questions about how new tax money would flow to the stadium project on top of public funding approved in previous years, and honestly that was as much as I had time for, but that’s still more than WKYC managed.

There was also a Progressive Caucus meeting Monday night at which an economist was set to speak on the potential impact of the stadium spending, but that doesn’t appear to have been livestreamed and nobody’s updated the Progressive Caucus website, so we’ll all just have to imagine what was said, in the absence of some sort of news-gathering enterprise that could attend events and report back to the broader public what was said.

The county council will hold its next meeting on October 26, at which point maybe we’ll learn more about the proposed subsidy. Or not! In the meantime, the only way to find out what Cleveland area residents think of this plan would be to, I dunno, you’d probably have to talk to people, maybe out on the streets, or even phone or email experts, that seems like a lot of work, sorry I mentioned it.