$2.4B Browns Stadium Plan Clears Hurdle With $600M State Backing

The Browns’ $2.4 billion plan to build a domed stadium and mixed-use development in suburban Brook Park, Ohio, has taken a major step forward as the state legislature has approved $600 million in public funding toward the project, but many more hurdles remain. 

After weeks of debate, the Ohio Senate passed a $60 billion state budget for the next two years that includes the Browns funding, arriving in the form of a “performance grant” from an account of unclaimed state funds that would be paid back to the state through future tax revenues. That senate move follows a prior approval by the House that instead provides the funding in the form of state-backed bonds. 

A reconciliation process will now start to resolve the differences in the two funding mechanisms before it moves to Gov. Mike DeWine for his signature. What’s clear, though, is that there is state-level legislative support for the Browns and this project. 

“What this does is take idle money and puts it to work to create jobs, to create incremental taxes, and that’s why we’re so excited about this project,” said Ohio Senate budget chief Jerry Cirino, a key architect of the plan to use the unclaimed state funds, which derive from sources such as utility deposits, uncashed cashier’s checks, and forgotten bank accounts. 

Two big steps, however, remain for the Browns’ plan to become reality. Another $600 million in local money will need to be found to get to the 50-50 split the team envisions between public and private funds for the project.

The Browns will also need to resolve an ongoing legal dispute with the city of Cleveland, which is fighting the team’s move out of downtown. A law named for former Browns owner Art Modell, who moved the team to Baltimore in 1995, states that a team playing in a publicly supported stadium in Ohio cannot move without giving the city in question six months’ notice and an opportunity to buy the franchise. There are competing lawsuits from the team and the city surrounding the dispute, with little sign of an immediate resolution. 

Mile-High Move?

The Broncos, meanwhile, have been linked to a series of land purchases near Burnham Yard, a railyard property just south of downtown Denver that has been eyed as a potential site of a new stadium. The team’s lease at its current stadium, the 24-year-old Empower Field at Mile High, ends in 2030, and Broncos president Damani Leech told Front Office Sports earlier this year that “pretty soon, we need to figure out what we’re doing” after that expiration.

The team, led by the Walton-Penner family ownership group, declined to discuss the transactions, but regarding the stadium deliberations broadly said, “No determinations have been made as we continue to evaluate several options in and around the Denver metro area.”

An amassing of separate real estate, however, has a similarity to the Bears, who currently play in Soldier Field in downtown Chicago but are increasingly pursuing a new facility on land they own in suburban Arlington Heights, Ill.