The Browns and Cleveland leaders spent the week trashing each others’ competing visions for the team’s future home.
Lawyers for the football franchise updated their federal lawsuit to argue that Cleveland is violating the team’s constitutional rights by trying to stop a move to Brook Park.
The amended complaint swipes at Mayor Justin Bibb’s lakefront plans. By trying to keep the team on the lakefront, Cleveland “seeks to hold the Browns hostage to its own failure of vision,” the Browns’ lawyers wrote.
The team’s attorneys also praised their clients, the Haslam family. The filing detailed the Haslams’ multimillion-dollar gifts to hospitals and, most importantly, their plans to keep the team in Greater Cleveland.
The point was to put as much distance as possible between the Browns’ current ownership and the unpleasant memory of the owner who scurried the team away to Baltimore in 1995. The team’s lawyers stressed — not once, but three times — that the Haslams were “nothing like Art Modell.”
Bibb hit back, calling the Browns’ Brook Park plan a “scheme” and a “ploy” that made “wild assumptions.” Cuyahoga County Executive Chris Ronayne followed up with a news conference in which he said a new, $2.4 billion stadium was “too risky” for county taxpayers. (The Browns countered that the city’s plan to renovate the open-air lakefront stadium was the risky one.)
The chest-thumping made for good headlines in Cleveland. But the real action is now in Columbus. State lawmakers are weighing $600 million for the new Brook Park stadium. That would get the Browns halfway to their goal of $1.2 billion in public financing.
If you’re scribbling this out on your scorecard at home, that means the Browns still want $600 million more from other governments. The team has its eyes on Cuyahoga County and the City of Brook Park.
Ronayne made clear he wouldn’t put a Brook Park stadium on the county’s credit card. He didn’t stop there. The Democratic county executive sounded a note of warning for Ohio lawmakers and their constituents.
“If I were in Dayton, if I were in Cincinnati, if I were in Columbus, if I were in Youngstown, if I were in Toledo, I’d be wondering about this plan in Cleveland and its risk to my taxpaying dollars to the state of Ohio,” he said.
The Browns may get the money they need for their domed dream home. But for now, the team is still $1.2 billion in public money short of a touchdown dance in the Brook Park endzone.
