The City of Cleveland is suing the Browns over the team’s plan to build a new, roofed stadium in Brook Park.
The lawsuit comes as no surprise. City Hall warned back in October that it was preparing a case based on Ohio’s “Modell law,” which aims to give cities leverage over professional sports teams that are moving out of town. Later that month, the Browns preemptively sued Cleveland in federal court.
Cleveland filed its lawsuit Thursday in Cuyahoga County Common Pleas Court. The case is before Judge Lauren C. Moore.
Here are a few takeaways from the city’s complaint.
What does the ‘Modell law’ say?
Cleveland’s lawsuit asks the judge to halt a move to Brook Park until the Browns comply with the state’s “Modell law.”
Popularly named after Art Modell, the Browns owner who moved the team to Baltimore, Ohio Revised Code 9.67 only goes so far. The law gives the owner of a professional sports team two options for leaving a taxpayer-funded stadium.
The first option is to sign an agreement with the host city permitting the team to move. The second option is to give the host city six months’ notice of the owner’s intention to leave. During those six months, ownership must give the city or other locals an “opportunity to purchase the team.”
As Cleveland State University law professor emeritus Alan Weinstein pointed out in an interview last year, team ownership doesn’t have to accept a purchase offer.
“They remain free to say, ‘Thanks but no thanks,’” he said.
So what does an “opportunity” to buy the Browns look like? That may be up to a judge.
Cleveland’s lawsuit gives the judge some adjectives to work with. The complaint asks the court to require the Browns to give prospective buyers a “good-faith” or “reasonable” opportunity to purchase the team.
A Dec. 30 letter to the Browns from Justin Herdman, a former U.S. attorney under the first Trump administration who is representing Cleveland, goes even further. Herdman asked owners Dee and Jimmy Haslam to name a date for a sale. He also urged the team to give the city a chance to inspect the Browns’ business records.
The Browns, meanwhile, have asked a federal judge to declare the Modell law “vague” and “unconstitutional.” Lawyers for the team have argued that the state law interferes with interstate commerce and with the Browns’ franchise agreement with the NFL.
Judges have yet to rule on the city’s and the team’s arguments in either of the cases.
$78 million in public money spent on capital repairs, lawsuit says
Cleveland’s complaint includes one number of interest for those watchdogging taxpayer expenses at the stadium: $78 million. That’s how much the city’s attorneys say Cleveland has spent repairing the lakefront football stadium since 2003.
The lawsuit doesn’t explain exactly how the city arrived at that number, nor does it say what specifically those repairs were.
City Hall previously provided Signal Cleveland with a list of $28 million in capital repairs dating back to 2014. Other city records reviewed by Signal Cleveland suggested that the city had spent around $52 million between 2003 and 2021 – an overlapping time period – on capital expenses related to the stadium.
However you count it, repairing a professional sports stadium is no cheap proposition. Every five years, the city prepares an audit that prices out the upcoming fixes needed at the stadium.
The latest audit detailed $252,300 in immediate repairs and $10.4 million in what are known as “emergency repairs” – all near-term expenses at the stadium built in 1999. Nevertheless, the audit found that the stadium’s overall health was good considering its age.
