At Recent Panel, Sports Stadium Financing Experts Warn Against Massive Public Subsidies for Cleveland Browns

If you were to pick out any average Browns fan or Northeast Ohioan off the street, you'd probably get a mixed bag of answers to what's become an increasingly controversial question: What should come of Cleveland Browns Stadium?

Let the Haslams relocate to Brook Park with a $2-billion dome (with half coming from the taxpayers of Ohio, Cuyahoga County and other sources). Focus on renovating the current one to the tune of $1 billion (again, with the Haslams asking for half the tab to be picked up by the public). Forego costly renovations and instead do the best we can with the current stadium?

Last Thursday afternoon at the Cleveland Public Library a panel of experts on stadium builds and sports politics gathered for two hours to discuss the hard facts and real-world implications of those possibilities.

The panel—comprised of Ward 16 Councilman Brian Kazy, former Law Director Ken Silliman, and stadium economics experts Brad Humphreys and Victor Matheson— offered lots of opinions and facts but one seemed to come with agreement: That erecting a $2.4 billion Brook Park dome and surrounding village, saying goodbye to the lakefront, would not carry the perks to Clevelanders some have been touting.

Namely, Cleveland plus Domed Stadium equals Wealthier City.

"There's zero evidence in 30 years of peer-reviewed academic research that a professional sports team in a city generates any substantial jobs, raises wages, raises income, raises property taxes," Humphreys, an economics professors at the University of Alberta, said.

"What professional sports are good at," he added, "is moving economic activity around to different parts of the city."

With Browns owners Jimmy and Dee Haslam's stadium lease with the city to end in 2028, time is closing in on a decision that's divided Clevelanders, just as it seemed to divide attendees at Thursday's panel: Ask for public dollars to bankroll a projected $1.2 billion upgrade of Cleveland Browns Stadium where it is, or use (more) public dollars to construct a $2.4 billion football neighborhood 14 miles south in Brook Park, across from the airport and where the old Ford plant once stood.

The Haslams have been vague on their intentions after it was announced, in April, they secured the rights to buy 176 acres of land east of I-71 big enough for a ballpark village to stand. The move, seen by Thursday's panelists as a chess ploy, has nevertheless prodded local politicians, from Mayor Justin Bibb to Councilman Kazy, to ensure that Cleveland doesn't lose—with some PTSD—the Browns to a southwest suburb. (Bibb has said his preference is for the Browns to stay downtown, and has argued the city has put forth what, is in their opinion, a good deal for the city and the team).)

It's what seemed to beckon Kazy, who was the face of Council's emphasis of the 1996 Art Modell Law that attempts to protect cities from billionaires seeking to pick up their team and leave, to gather three experts on stadium deals to espouse the starry-eyed Clevelander's wish for a shiny new domed megapalace. Like Nissan Stadium in Nashville. Or Jerry's World in Dallas. Or Los Angeles' behemoth that is SoFi Stadium.

Sensing some in the crowd yearned for a Taylor Swift-level echelon of concerts, or say another Rolling Stones stopover, Matheson was quick to shut down the perception of huge change with some hard data. From 2002 to 2022, he and Humphreys found, Cleveland Browns Stadium hosted 12 concerts. Detroit's dome hosted 38. Indianapolis' Lucas Oil Stadium, 31. (And two Super Bowls, in 2006 and 2012.)

The bottom line for the two visiting professors, who speak regularly against city-subsidized stadium deals, was evident: the billions of dollars that go into inviting a Swiftie World Tour doesn't produce a sound return in investment. They quoted a Chicago economist: "It would be better to drop [money] from a helicopter than invest it in a new ballpark."

"So if you said, 'Well, look. There's so much more you can do with an indoor stadium," Matheson said. "Well, yeah: one more concert [a year] here. You might get a men's basketball Final Four. And a Super Bowl—but you'll get one ."

For Silliman, the former chair of the Gateway Economic Development Co. who recently published a 600-page memoir-slash-stadium exposé on Cleveland's own chaotic history with sports stadiums, the more sensible route was to convince the Haslams, the city and its denizens to reframe Cleveland Browns Stadium in the historical vein of Fenway Park in Boston, or Wrigley Field in Chicago.

Which meant, he said, doubling that dollar stream Cuyahoga County residents have been using for stadium upkeep since 1990. The tax on booze and cigarettes. The tax on concerts and shows. The tax on parking lots and car rentals.

"You know, our sin tax has never been adjusted for inflation," Silliman, who was an adviser to former Mayor Mike White in the 1990s, said. "If you were to double the annual amount available for each sports facility that would take it from $4.5 million per facility, to about $9 million."

Silliman, like Kazy himself, reminded everyone in attendance that he was first and foremost a Cleveland sports traditionalist.

And believed that, in reality, most Clevelanders had more practical priorities than the Haslam Brook Park renderings. (Only five percent of members of the Cuyahoga County Progressive Caucus thought the public wanted to or should pay for a new stadium in the first place.)

"If you ask the average ticket buyer at Cleveland Brown Stadium," Silliman said, cracking a smile, "they would say, just give us a team that's consistently competing for the playoffs." [content-4]

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