With $100 million in payments to the City of Cleveland, the Browns’ lakefront era looks to be ending.
The Browns agreed to pay that much in the coming years to settle court fights with the city over the team’s move to Brook Park, Mayor Justin Bibb and team owners Dee and Jimmy Haslam announced Monday.
That money will cover the demolition of the stadium on the Lake Erie shore where the Browns have played since their return in 1999, plus additional payments to the city. The mayor portrayed the deal as giving a boost to the city’s lakefront development plans.
Monday’s announcement caps a year of public, fractious negotiations over the Browns’ future home. Those talks — which sent lawyers for the team and the city flocking to state and federal court, provided grist for sports talk shows and tested Bibb’s first-term administration — concluded with a meeting over sodas at the Haslams’ Bratenahl home, according to the mayor.
“I went over to Jimmy’s house on Friday, we had two Cokes and we struck a deal,” Bibb said.
The mayor made the trip after Jimmy Haslam spoke with U.S. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy. Recently the city had opposed the Brook Park stadium project over its height and proximity to Cleveland-Hopkins International Airport.
Now Cleveland City Hall, which previously resisted the Browns’ departure to Brook Park, will help the team plan for its future home — for instance, by collaborating on traffic studies, Haslam said. Bibb cast the deal as mutually beneficial while standing by his decision to try to block the move initially.
“I think the fight we put up was the right fight, because at the end of the day, I was elected to protect the hardworking taxpayers of this great city,” he said.
The agreement brings the team another step closer to building a roofed stadium and commercial development outside the city’s borders. It wasn’t immediately clear how soon legislation approving the deal, if needed, would go before Cleveland City Council.
“I’d say this is a significant hurdle to get by,” Jimmy Haslam said. “We were always confident we’d work it out one way or another.”
What’s in the deal?
The Browns will break up their $100 million payment over more than a decade. According to City Hall, the team will pay:
- $25 million to the city by Dec. 1, 2025
- $30 million (the estimated cost to demolish the lakefront stadium to a “pad ready” state)
- $25 million in $5 million annual installments between 2029 and 2033
- $20 million toward community benefits projects, divided into $2 million annual installments for 10 years after the termination of the team’s lease, which ends in 2029
City Council: ‘Show us a spreadsheet’
Members of Cleveland City Council aren’t sold on the deal. At Monday night’s meeting, as Bibb and his cabinet listened on, several members asked about the fine print.
Old Brooklyn’s Kris Harsh said building a dome in Brook Park was a “terrible idea.” He questioned whether the estimated demolition cost of $30 million was too low.
“The people of Cleveland, as my colleagues have said before, need to be made whole by this, and I just don’t see $30 million doing that,” he said.
Michael Polensek of Collinwood pointed out that inflation will diminish the value of the Browns’ contributions in the coming years. His neighboring council member on the Northeast Side, Glenville’s Kevin Conwell, asked the administration to explain how it arrived at the $100 million number — and to bring paperwork.
“Don’t come and narrate to us and we sit down and we bob our heads,” Conwell said. “You got to show us a spreadsheet.”
Brian Kazy, one of council’s most vocal critics of the Browns Brook Park move, said Monday’s news hit him as hard as did the team’s departure to Baltimore 30 years ago. He criticized Bibb for agreeing to take any money from the team, rather than continuing to resist their plans.
“You have lied with the dogs, and now you have fleas,” Kazy said to the mayor in an apparent play on the team’s “dawgs” nickname. “I was shocked and utterly disappointed in the press conference this afternoon.”
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From Lake Erie to Brook Park
Cleveland had offered $461 million to renovate the lakefront stadium and keep the Browns downtown. That money would have gone toward a $1.2 billion stadium overhaul.
A year ago, when the team indicated it would stick with its plans for a $2.4 billion Brook Park stadium instead, Bibb said he was “deeply, deeply disappointed.” The team and the city sued one another over the legality of a move. The city warned of economic harm to downtown.
Asked about those warnings about a Browns-less lakefront at Monday’s news conference, Bibb instead emphasized everything downtown Cleveland has going for it. There are plans for lakefront and riverfront development and the WNBA is launching a new franchise in the city, he said.
“I know in this town change is very hard,” Bibb said. “We don’t like change sometimes in Cleveland.”
Then he pointed to a portrait of Mayor Tom Johnson, who led the city a century ago.
“But since that guy was mayor, Tom Johnson, on that wall, we’ve had plan after plan after plan about lakefront development in this city,” he said. “Finally we have the resources, the collaboration and the political will to make that plan a real reality.”
The Browns will rely on $600 million in state dollars and $300 million from Brook Park to cover the public’s share of the $2.4 billion stadium, Haslam said. The rest will come from the team and its financial partners. The team plans to build commercial development and parking lots around the stadium, too.
“We’re betting big on Northeast Ohio,” Haslam said. “Sometimes that gets lost in the shuffle of how much public money is being contributed.”
Ultimately, the nine-figure settlement with Cleveland is just a decimal point in the Browns’ Brook Park ambitions. At the news conference, Jimmy Haslam noted that the $100 million deal will raise the overall project cost from $3.5 billion to $3.6 billion.
