Cleveland is bidding farewell to the Browns.
In its last regular meeting of the year Monday, City Council signed off on a deal to drop the city’s lawsuits over the team’s move to Brook Park in exchange for $100 million. Council voted 13-2 to approve the settlement, with Council Members Brian Kazy and Michael Polensek opposed.
The vote came after council pushed to amend the deal to peel off $5 million intended for lakefront development. Instead, that money will go to other neighborhood projects. Council took the deal despite a plea from former Mayor Dennis Kucinich to reject it.
Council President Blaine Griffin, who met with team owner Jimmy Haslam over the weekend, said that many of the people he had spoken with advised him to take the deal.
“I know that it is gut-wrenching,” Griffin said.
Kucinich presses for a No vote on the deal
Kucinich, also a former congressman and presidential candidate, upstaged the Bibb administration at a hearing Monday.
While aides to Mayor Justin Bibb sat in the audience, Kucinich said the city’s lawsuit opposing the Browns’ move was merely a “wet noodle.” The former mayor is also a plaintiff in his own legal battle over the team’s move.
As a state lawmaker, Kucinich wrote the “Modell Law” — named for the Browns owner who moved the team to Baltimore — giving cities more leverage over departing teams. He urged City Council to continue the fight and draw up a plan for the public to buy the team.
“Reject this legislation,” Kucinich said. “Demand that the administration fight to keep the Browns. Make the owners pay more. Enforce the lease. Enforce the city’s rights under the Modell Law. Keep the stadium where it’s at.”
Law director: Browns will pay Cleveland, not the other way around
But the Bibb administration won the majority’s support. Chief of Staff Bradford Davy said that Cleveland would stand out for winning money from a team leaving town.
Law Director Mark Griffin rebuffed Kucinich’s argument that the city had let the team go. He said that the city had mounted an aggressive legal fight, racking up $1.5 million in bills with the law firm Jones Day.
But even if Cleveland had won its court battle, that would only have delayed the Browns’ departure, not stopped it, he said.
“I think that you can say to your constituents that after 2029, the City of Cleveland is not subsidizing professional football anymore,” the law director told council members Monday afternoon. “Instead of us paying them, they will pay us $100 million.”
Last-minute deal sweeteners added to the agreement
Under the agreement, the Browns will demolish the downtown stadium, work that’s estimated to cost $30 million, and give Cleveland $70 million in the coming years for lakefront development and local projects.
Council took $5 million in settlement dollars that would have gone to the lakefront and dedicated it to neighborhood projects instead. Under that amended deal, the city will receive $45 million for lakefront development and $25 million for community benefit projects.
The deal doesn’t sever City Hall’s ties with team owners Dee and Jimmy Haslam. The Browns and city will decide together how to spend the $25 million — although the administration stressed on Monday that projects will need City Council’s sign-off.
The city will also give the team and its ownership public acknowledgements for their donations. The money will be spread out over 10 years, beginning when the lease ends in 2029.
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Griffin, the law director, said that the Browns had agreed to make up to $3 million in additional payments if the team needed to extend the lease while the Brook Park stadium was under construction.
The settlement will also clarify that Cleveland is not obligated to spend money supporting the team’s move to the suburbs. The city would also require that 30% of the demolition work go to Cleveland businesses and 20% to small and minority-owned businesses, the law director said.
The end of a long fight?
Monday’s vote caps years of negotiations and months of court battles between City Hall and the NFL franchise. The city had proposed putting $461 million toward renovating the lakefront stadium. Instead, the Browns opted for a $2.4 billion stadium in Brook Park, helped along the way with $600 million from the state.
Among Polensek’s objections to the deal was the question of who owns the rubble from the city-owned lakefront stadium. In a written response to council questions, the Bibb administration said the Browns would “control all components of the demo work, including potential recycling / reuse of materials.”
Cleveland Documenters took notes at this meeting.
Learn more of what happened at the Dec. 1 Cleveland City Council meeting from Documenter Tucker Handley.
The team could potentially recoup millions from its demolition costs by selling the scrap, Polensek said at the Monday night meeting.
“Think about all the steel that’s in there,” he said. “The aluminum. The copper, the brass, the stainless steel. I could go on. They get control of it. But it’s our building.”
Council Member Kris Harsh had long argued in favor of keeping the Browns. But at Monday afternoon’s hearing, he made a reluctant argument in favor of the deal: that it would spare taxpayers from having to pay for stadium demolition.
Harsh, who went on to vote yes, bemoaned the fact that Cleveland was losing a piece of its culture.
“What part of this city do we keep?” he said. “What part of this city actually belongs to the people that live here?”