The latest media reporting has it that taxpayers could be on the hook for $1.2 billion of the Cleveland Browns proposed new $2.4 billion domed-stadium complex about 15 miles south of downtown Cleveland.
And as more than a few Fourth Estaters have reminded, Cleveland Browns owner Jimmy Haslam is, as of this year, personally worth $8.5 billion dollars.
And he wants taxpayers to take on half the risk and underwrite his profit-seeking?
There’s daft and then there’s delusional.
At least one important voice of reason and sanity in government is speaking up and out against such mountebankery. Cuyahoga County Executive Chris Ronayne has dismissed such attempted robbing of taxpayers as “a fantasy.”
Allegheny and Pittsburgh officials should take note, if and when the Pittsburgh Steelers seek to yet again yank the taxpayers’ chain when their current lease at Acrisure Stadium expires.
But Haslam & Co. also are taking heat from the architectural community for some of the initial design features of the proposed new Browns stadium. And it’s just not over aesthetics but functionality.
As Ryan Scavnicky, an assistant professor at Marywood University School of Architecture (and coordinator of the new Bachelor of Virtual Architecture degree program there), recently wrote:
“The proposal … by global architecture firm HKS is still in early stages, but uniquely the field is sunken below ground level which is clearly a response to the need to dig much of the existing site out for brownfield remediation,” the former Cleveland resident notes.
“This gives the project an opportunity for a low profile above-ground visual language of smaller, angular and occasionally gabled roof structures. The renderings show old growth trees—which should be illegal for publicly funded projects if it isn’t in the budget—lining walkways improbably covered in swaths of adoring fans.”
But then Scavnicky goes in for the kill:
“The extremely thin and vaguely supported glass roof over the field itself is the most questionable element of the proposal. I’m curious how snow load and heat gain will manage the … lake-effect weather, but more so disinterested in the busy lines and disappointing payoff.”
Again, object lessons abound for Pittsburgh. And though it remains early in Cleveland’s latest Great Stadium Debate, the general and growing sense of opposition is encouraging.
But will it hold? Or will it be defeated yet again by the dishonest brokers and end-arounders who promise grand things from kow-towing to a high-profiting private cartel whose public rewards historically have been de minimis?
It’s past time (and what a welcome game-changer it would be) for the bully barons of sport to not eat their cake and have it, too.
For once. And for all.
Colin McNickle is communications and marketing director at the Allegheny Institute for Public Policy (cmcnickle@alleghenyinstitute.org).
