During a press conference Thursday, a frustrated Mayor Justin Bibb announced the Cleveland Browns will move to Brook Park.
The relocation, he said, was "profoundly disheartening."
Speculation has been swirling that the city's NFL team would decamp for the suburbs since February, when news broke that the team's owners had reportedly secured an option to purchase 176 acres in Brook Park.
The team's owners, billionaires Jimmy and Dee Haslam, have said they were strongly considering moving the team to the neighboring suburb, where they would build a $2 billion domed stadium complex, something that city and county leaders have opposed.
The city negotiated to keep the team in its current lakefront stadium, offering nearly half-a-billion-dollar incentive deal to stay Downtown. Cuyahoga County leaders also urged the Haslams to keep the team in Cleveland and build upon existing infrastructure.
"I am deeply, deeply disappointed that our exhaustive efforts that the Haslam Sports Group has chosen to pursue a move to Brook Park," Bibb said during the press conference. "They had the opportunity to reinvest in Cleveland ... and remain highly profitable. We put those options on the table in good faith. But unfortunately, that was not enough."
The move will "undoubtedly damage the city, county and region in a multitude of ways," Bibb said, adding that the Brook Park complex "threatens viability of Downtown sports" that the city and county have already heavily invested public subsidies in.
Bibb, who has vowed to move forward with his sweeping lakefront plan with or without the team, said preliminary plans already exist for possible uses of the Browns site, which is about 50 acres.
In September, the Browns struck a deal with Huntington Bank for naming rights of the lakefront stadium or any other stadium the team would call home should they choose to relocate. That stadium will be known as Huntington Bank Field.
Bibb said when discussion first started on a new stadium, the team said it was not interested in a domed stadium because the cost would be too high. The team changed its mind, Bibb said, pitting the Brook Park site against Downtown Cleveland. The mayor said the city lost critical time to find a new site and even floated the idea of building a domed stadium on land now occupied by Burke Lakefront Airport. It was not to the team's liking, he said.
Bibb said the city would welcome the team back "with open arms" if public financing for the Browns planned Brook Park stadium does not pan out.
Cleveland City Council Member Brian Kazy released a statement Thursday urging the county and state to draw a red line when it comes to investing any taxpayer dollars toward the new stadium.
"With the Haslams, it’s all about feeding at the public trough," Kazy wrote. "It's disappointing that the Haslams are looking to pit City against City to fleece taxpayers out of money to build a shiny new fortress. This move demonstrates a lack of genuine commitment to Cleveland and the region... Their lack of investment in the city is frankly embarrassing."
The Browns' owners respond
The Haslams confirmed the news Thursday afternoon.
Read their full statement here:
“Our stadium planning process started in 2017 and as Mayor Bibb mentioned today, for the last two years, we have had positive, productive, and collaborative dialogue with the Mayor and his staff, working together to find the optimal long-term solution for our stadium.
We pursued many possibilities, with our initial focus on renovating the current stadium and engaged design, construction and engineering experts to develop a plan to do so. We also explored building a new stadium on multiple sites, both within and outside of Cleveland. We’ve learned through our exhaustive work that renovating our current stadium will simply not solve many operational issues and would be a short-term approach. With more time to reflect, we have also realized that without a dome, we will not attract the type of large-scale events and year-round activity to justify the magnitude of this public-private partnership. The transformational economic opportunities created by a dome far outweigh what a renovated stadium could produce with around ten events per year.
In the spirit of exhausting all downtown options and continuing to work in good faith with the Mayor, when he announced his efforts to potentially make Burke available for development last month, we engaged in further diligence with the city and County Executive Ronayne’s staff regarding a potential dome stadium on Burke. The significant design, construction, geotechnical and environmental challenges were again apparent. Our work reinforced that despite the City, County and our team doing their best to make the economics work, building a stadium on the Burke property is cost prohibitive and not feasible, especially with no certainty regarding potential timing of closure of the Airport.
We have communicated to the Mayor and his team at every step of the process regarding our mutual efforts to keep the stadium downtown and we conveyed to them yesterday, our most impactful investment for our region is to focus on making a dome stadium and adjacent development in Brook Park a reality. With the funding mechanisms we continue to work on, this stadium will not use existing taxpayer-funded streams that would divert resources from other more pressing needs. Instead, the over $2 billion private investment, together with the public investment, will create a major economic development project that will drive the activity necessary to pay the public bond debt service through future project-generated and Browns-generated revenue.
A solution like this will be transformative not only for Cleveland and Northeast Ohio, but also the entire state of Ohio from the resulting events, tourism, and job creation. Additionally, moving the current stadium will allow the city and region’s collective vision for the Cleveland lakefront to be optimally realized, and downtown will benefit from the major events the Brook Park dome brings to the region.
Cleveland and Northeast Ohio are the fabric of the Browns and that will always be the case. Our community commitment to Cleveland and efforts to improve the lives of its residents will not change.
Again, our work with Mayor Bibb and city officials has been transparent and collaborative throughout. We will continue to work in earnest with city, county, and state officials to work together on these transformational opportunities.
As we have previously said, we understand this is a complex process with more questions still to be answered and we will continue to communicate openly as our process evolves. We recognize our season on the field has not had the start we all hoped for and are working hard to improve each week to make our fans proud. At the same time, it is critical that we remain committed to the best long-term, sustainable solution for our stadium and to providing the world-class dome experience our fans deserve. We are confident that the Brook Park project will significantly benefit the Northeast Ohio region for generations to come.”
