Browns stadium or no Browns stadium, Cleveland is building its long-planned land bridge to the downtown lakefront.
That’s what James DeRosa, the director of the Mayor’s Office of Capital Projects, told City Council last week. The pedestrian bridge would connect Mall C to the lakefront land that’s home to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, the Great Lakes Science Center and the stadium — or whatever replaces the stadium.
In all, the project will cost $447 million, including the land bridge and extensive changes to the Shoreway. The land bridge portion, which features a parking garage, accounts for $145 million of that.
Cleveland has put together a $20 million state grant and $129 million in federal grants to pay for the work. City Hall also plans to seek a $135 million loan from the U.S. Department of Transportation.
The federal loan program offers favorable interest rates for transportation projects. The city would pay off that loan with diverted property tax revenue from Cleveland’s downtown TIF district.
Ward 8’s Michael Polensek didn’t like the sound of borrowing money for a lakefront that might lose its stadium. The Collinwood council member shared the pessimism about the project that he’d heard at a recent neighborhood meeting.
“We have no guarantee what’s going to be on the lakefront other than a bait shop or a vape shop,” he said. “I hope you guys have figured this one out and have thought this one out good, because I’m going to tell you, some people are believing this to be the biggest boondoggle.”
Another son of Collinwood, Ward 3’s Kerry McCormack, took the other side. He argued that it was about time the city connected people to the lakefront rather than putting things in their way.
“I believe one of the biggest mistakes and problems this city has made is [that it] walled off our publicly owned waterfront property, that our residents own, from them,” McCormack said.
Filing time for Cleveland candidates
If you want your name to appear on the ballot in Cleveland’s mayoral and City Council races, you have until June 11 to file signatures with the Cuyahoga County Board of Elections.
Incumbents Deborah Gray, Kris Harsh, Danny Kelly and Kevin Conwell have already made the ballot. So has Blaine Griffin, who passed on a mayoral bid this year to run for reelection in Ward 6.
Candidates for council seats need 200 signatures from people who are registered to vote in the ward. Mayoral candidates need 3,000 valid signatures from registered Cleveland voters. To count, signers’ addresses must be up to date with the board of elections.
It’s common for many signatures not to meet those standards. Candidates need to collect far more than the minimum number required — sometimes even twice as many.
Judge dings Cleveland in consent decree case
Last month, we told you that the U.S. Department of Justice was siding with Monitor Karl Racine in an in-the-weeds dispute with Cleveland City Hall over the consent decree. The city wanted Racine to produce a methodology to justify the conclusions of his latest report on the police reform agreement’s progress.
U.S. District Judge Solomon Oliver ruled against the city this week. He wrote that Cleveland’s complaints about methodology and the monitor’s bills “amounted to time-consuming distractions.”
Oliver added that he hoped everyone involved would work the rest of the year “with an eye toward cooperation and a renewed sense of purpose of ensuring constitutional policing in Cleveland.”
