Lawmakers more focused on financing Haslams' new Browns stadium than taxpayers

Yahoo

30-03-2025

Thomas Suddes is a former legislative reporter with The Plain Dealer in Cleveland and writes from Ohio University.
Almost 57 years ago, the Cleveland Browns racked up a 10-4 record with Blanton Collier as head coach. That same November of 1968, Ohio voters approved an (initial) $759 million issue of state general obligation bonds.
Now, in 2025, Ohio's General Assembly may rejigger that 1968 bond authorization. Their goal is to somehow find $600 million to help Jimmy and Dee Haslam, owners of the Browns (2024 record 3-14, under head coach Kevin Stefanski), build their team a stadium in suburban Brook Park, not Cleveland.
Pricey bond lawyers will tell the legislature that using voters' 1968 bond authorization to help the Haslams would be OK. And, no doubt, those learned women and men — the lawyers, that is — would be persuasive. Legally.
But an Ohioan has to ask her or himself whether voters who backed the bond authorization had a clue that it might be trundled out decades later by deal-making state legislators to subsidize professional sports investors.
The state's official handout on the then-proposed 1968 bond plan said it earmarked $500 million of bond proceeds to build highways. The rest would:
fight water pollution
fund college-, technical- and vocational-school buildings, juvenile jails, and parks and airports; and, oh yeah —
finance "other state buildings and structures, including those for police and fire training.' (Emphasis added.)
Those same voters agreed that such undertakings would 'directly or indirectly create jobs, enhance employment opportunities, and improve the economic welfare of the people of the state.'
But there's robust debate over whether stadiums and other subsidized sports operations generate net new growth for a given region or cannibalize the entertainment spending a locality already produces.
No, Ohioans haven't been shy about approving state-backed bond issues, and it's also worth noting that thanks to Republican Gov. Mike DeWine's stewardship of Ohio's finances, the state has earned sterling ratings from the national bond-rating agencies.
The State Budget Office reports that Ohio voters, from 1921 on, have approved '20 constitutional amendments (authorizing) the incurrence of state general obligation debt and the pledge of taxes and excises to its payment.'
Still, if, as seems likely, Ohio's lobbyist-lubed General Assembly opts to sell bonds to help the Haslams, that — long range — is far more expensive to Ohio taxpayers than what DeWine has suggested.
Rather than rack up more bond debt, the governor wants to double Ohio's 20% sports gambling receipts tax — paid by sports gambling companies, not gamblers — to 40%. (Effective in early 2022, legislators initially set the tax rate at 10%. Effective in July 2023, they boosted the tax to 20%.)
Doing what DeWine wants, boosting the tax to 40% to help pay for a Brown stadium (and fund state aid for new venues likely demanded by owners of Ohio's other professional sports franchises) would be demonstrably cheaper for taxpayers than the legal fees and law-office work that a 25-year bond issue would require.
As drafted, the legislature's plan would instead find money to repay the Browns' stadium bonds by pooling state taxes collected inside the Brook Park stadium site. The legalese: '[The] incremental major sports facility mixed-use project district state tax revenues [that are] expected to be generated by the transformational major sports facility mixed-use project.' Note: Expected.
Meaning: Taxpayers wouldn't, in theory, be on the hook to pay off the stadium bonds because state taxes on hospitality, meals and merchandise paid for inside the Browns' proposed Brook Park enclave wouldn't go into Ohio's General Revenue Fund. Instead, that money — assuming it's enough — would pay off the bonds. If you think that sounds like one of those convoluted gizmos that the renowned cartoonist Rube Goldberg dreamed up, you'd be correct.
For now, forget that the Haslams' Brook Park plans snub Cleveland and its historic ties to the Browns. What's especially revealing is that a General Assembly that won't fairly fund public schools, yet lavishes tax money on private schools, and which offers no relief to Ohio homeowners crushed by skyrocketing property taxes, just can't do enough to comfort Ohio's financially powerful and politically connected.
Thomas Suddes is a former legislative reporter with The Plain Dealer in Cleveland and writes from Ohio University.
This article originally appeared on The Columbus Dispatch: Ohio plan to fund Cleveland Browns stadium needs scrutiny | Opinion