CLEVELAND, Ohio — Y’all know where I stood on Dee and Jimmy Haslam’s scheme to use money that should go for the public’s good to build a dome stadium in Brook Park. I hate what they’re doing; I hate what the state of Ohio and our lawmakers have enabled these Tennessee transplants to do.
I hate that the Haslams bought a mayor.
So, for $100 million, Mayor Justin Bibb gave up the fight with them to keep the Browns downtown. Bibb can call his backtracking whatever he’d like, but I’ll call it what it was: irresponsible governance.
For Bibb’s refusal to fight on, Dee and Jimmy will give the city $100 million over two decades. How will that money keep downtown alive and bustling? What will $100 million provide a city that has so many problems?
Look, I like shiny things too. But I expect to have the ability to pay for them. I don’t go begging friends and family for help when I don’t have the money for those shiny things I long for.
Dee and Jimmy needed to do no begging; they’re billionaires. Cleveland and Cuyahoga County are not, however, flush with cash. Nor is the state, which has projects aplenty it needs to fund.
I’d recommend state officials start with two: rebuilding public education and fixing our crumbling infrastructure. They can ill-afford to throw millions into new stadiums — the Bengals will want a new one, too — when children can’t read, rural areas lack access to reliable internet and politicians are bartering what’s best for us against what benefits them best.
Yeah, money corrupts absolutely, and the kind of money Dee and Jimmy insisted on tested what little integrity remained in the chambers of the Ohio Statehouse and in the corridors of City Hall, too.
In Columbus, politicians found $600 million for the Haslam stadium, a stadium next to Hopkins International Airport and in the middle of nowhere. It’s Richfield Coliseum revisited, an arena built with promises that upscale housing, restaurants and various other businesses would sprout around it. Nothing did, which is why the Cleveland Cavaliers moved back downtown.
It’s the same promises Kansas Citians heard in the 1970s when they built stadiums for the Chiefs and the Royals in an unwalkable area. Such promises produced beautiful stadiums, but ancillary businesses never followed.
Same can be said for MetLife Stadium in New Jersey.
“Build it, and they will come.” OK, that’s nice, misremembered rhetoric from “Field of Dreams,” but it’s lousy advice for when the building will cost millions a community can’t spare. “Build it … and pay for it yourself” might be a better way to see all of this.
To tell the truth, the thought of a stadium outside downtown troubled me, and it should trouble everyone else. It should certainly have troubled Bibb, because he’s seen Euclid Avenue abuzz before and after the Browns, Guardians and Cavs play. That buzz was sound business; it turned downtown into a destination.
I suppose Brook Park has its charm, but as home to an NFL franchise, it’s trying to punch above its weight.
I wish Bibb had told Dee and Jimmy he wanted to put their scheme on the ballot. Voters should decide what’s best for Greater Cleveland. Instead, Bibb relented. He sold out his city to billionaires for $100 million.
Justice B. Hill grew up on the East Side of Cleveland and still lives there. He practiced journalism for more than 20 years and later taught journalism at Ohio University. Since his retirement in May 2019, he’s been devoting his time to travel and freelance writing.
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