The question of whether the Cleveland Browns should play home games in suburban Brook Park, at left, or in Downtown Cleveland, at right, has been put to Greater Cleveland’s business power brokers (HKS, left; Vocon, right). CLICK IMAGES TO ENLARGE THEM.
Haslam spells out process, cost comparisons
Yesterday morning, Cleveland Mayor Justin Bibb, Cuyahoga County Executive Chris Ronayne, Cuyahoga County Council President Pernel Jones Jr., Cleveland City Council President Blaine Griffin arrived at the monthly board meeting of the Greater Cleveland Partnership (GCP). There, they asked the 70-member board of the region’s corporate CEOs and presidents to side with them on where the Cleveland Browns should play their home games after 2028.
In the private meeting, Bibb, Ronayne, Jones and Griffin urged the board to take action in support of keeping the National Football League Browns playing their home games downtown. They apparently don’t care whether the downtown venue is a renovated, city-owned Huntington Bank Field, where the team plays now, or a glitzy domed stadium built on the site of a proposed-to-be-closed, city-owned Burke Lakefront Airport.
What they didn’t apparently know is that, the day before, one of the GCP’s board members, Dee Haslam, CEO and co-owner with husband Jimmy of Haslam Sports Group (HSG) which in turn owns the Browns, preempted the civic leaders’ message. She sent an email to her fellow board members urging them to support the Browns’ move to a planned, enclosed, multi-purpose stadium on a 176-acre site off Snow Road in suburban Brook Park.
The city’s and county’s message was shared again — the parking, transit, hotels and restaurants are already in place for either downtown site. Plus Brook Park may end up competing with Rocket Mortgage FieldHouse, Huntington Convention Center and other downtown venues for events. A lot of investment was made by the public and private sectors in that infrastructure and more is coming, including a $200 million land bridge to the lakefront that was originally requested by the Haslams.
NEOtrans reached out to the city and county officials regarding the meeting but they declined comment either directly or through spokespersons. In fact, they were surprised that NEOtrans was aware of the private meeting.
Since 1999, the Cleveland Browns have played their home football games at what is now called Huntington Bank Field. If and when the team moves to Brook Park, that enclosed stadium will also be called Huntington Bank Field. But city and county officials want the team to stay downtown (Cleveland Browns).
Haslam made her own case in the email which NEOtrans received from an anonymous source. The rest of her email summarized its three attachments, including an executive summary of recent negotiations between HSG and the city-county. That two-page summary had a comparison of the stadium options, too.
HSG’s basic message was that a $1 billion renovation of the existing, 1999-built stadium doesn’t make sense because it merely kicks the can down the road. And, Burke is way too uncertain and expensive for the Haslams and for the taxpayers, the summary noted.
“In light of tomorrow’s session with the Mayor and County Executive to discuss our stadium situation, we felt it was important that you hear directly from us regarding our process as we continue our path towards building an enclosed stadium and adjacent mixed-use development in Brook Park,” Dee Haslam wrote in the Dec. 10 email.
Peter John-Baptiste, chief communications officer for the Browns and HSG, also declined comment on the email. However he did not refute it and expressed surprise that NEOtrans had received a copy of Haslam’s email, thus confirming its legitimacy.
For the existing stadium, a $1 billion renovation would add only 20-25 years to the team’s lease and would still require an additional $350 million to $500 million for capital repairs over the life of the extended lease, the summary said. It added that there is no dedicated funding source to pay for those repairs. In recent years, such repairs have come out of the city’s general fund which also pays for basic city services.
An enclosed stadium with about 67,000 seats would not only host Cleveland Browns home games but could also attract other college and professional sporting events plus concerts and other special events (HKS).
In late-summer, city and county officials presented the idea of a domed stadium on the site of Burke Lakefront Airport. HSG said it set into motion a team of its experts to vet the Burke dome’s viability and had several working sessions with local officials this past fall.
The conclusion of that effort was that a domed stadium at Burke would be cost-prohibitive. Because of Burke’s site conditions — landfill set atop submerged land under Lake Erie — requires a stadium footprint 25 percent larger than the Brook Park stadium. The larger footprint is necessary to spread the stadium’s weight.
Because of that, the Burke domed stadium was estimated to cost $3.3 billion compared to $2.4 billion for Brook Park — and that’s assuming that both could start construction in 2026.
HSG said it can get construction underway at Brook Park in 2026 if a decision is made to start cost-intensive design work in 2025. By comparison, closing Burke is a complex process with an aggressive timeline being five to seven years. The Haslams said that for every year construction is delayed could add $100 million to $150 million in stadium construction costs.
That doesn’t take into account interim repairs to the existing stadium. An October 2023 stadium audit by Osborne Engineering said the stadium’s building systems will need $117 million in capital repairs over the next 10 years. The Browns’ lease at the stadium ends after the 2028 football season.
This is a conceptual masterplan for a domed stadium and supportive development built where downtown’s Burke Lakefront Airport now sets. The plan and other graphics were shared anonymously with NEOtrans and other media but was later confirmed by Destination Cleveland that they had commissioned the illustrations (Vocon).
For the Burke dome, HSG declined to increase its $1.2 billion private-sector contribution and $600 million request for state funds above what it is seeking for Brook Park. Thus, the up-front funding requirement from city and county governments would have to increase from $600 million to about $1.5 billion to fill the larger gap.
“In response to HSG projections, (the) city and county proposed $1.3 billion in various future revenue streams,” the HSG executive summary said. The Haslams reportedly said local governments would have to come up with another $650 million to $850 million in up-front funds for the Burke dome, with no path to solve that funding gap or to solve long-term capital repair needs.
But Ronayne recently said the county was asked by the Haslams to provide $300 million in cash and $300 million in bond issuance for the Brook Park stadium. He said the county has many other big capital projects in the works including a new jail complex in Garfield Heights, a downtown courthouse and having to guarantee MetroHealth’s bond debt for its campus redevelopment.
To renovate the existing stadium, Bibb said the city offered HSG $461 million financed by 30 years of admission tax revenues, Cuyahoga County sin tax revenues, plus stadium event-day parking revenues from the Willard Garage and the Municipal Parking Lot. Neither he nor Ronayne have disclosed any public funding scenarios for the Burke dome.
The HSG summary also noted that the city of Cleveland currently spends $4 million to $5 million more per year on Huntington Bank Stadium costs than it receives from Browns-generated tax collections. Costs include debt service, capital expenditures, insurance and operations. Tax revenues include admissions taxes and income taxes.
While about 2 million square feet of stadium-area retail, residential, hotel and office development in Brook Park is proposed to take place in phases, 233,000 out of 300,000 total square feet of traditional and experiential retail is slated to be built in the first phase (HKS).
But city officials argued that Cleveland would lose out on $30 million per year in economic benefits from people no longer coming downtown for Huntington Bank Field events. HSG last week countered in an economic impact study it commissioned of the Brook Park stadium that more people would be visiting Greater Cleveland and most of them would stay and dine downtown. Ronayne and Jones said they didn’t believe the study.
A second attachment to Haslam’s email was a 10-page summary of that study. The third attachment was a press release about the Haslams and Browns partnering with Lincoln Property Company, reported on two days ago, on a mixed-use entertainment district next to the Brook Park stadium.
Haslam’s email seemed to have its intended effect: although a motion was made by a GCP board member in support keeping the Browns downtown, it was not yet voted on, according to a source who spoke on the condition of anonymity. Another reason why no action was taken was because Dee Haslam is scheduled to appear before the GCP board at its next meeting in January to make her in-person case for moving the Browns to Brook Park.
Kelley Notaro Schreiber, GCP’s director of communications and media relations did not return a voicemail message prior to publication of this article, seeking confirmation of what happened at yesterday’s board meeting.
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