CLEVELAND, Ohio – The year was 1996. Former Cleveland Browns owner Art Modell had just moved the city’s longtime football team to Baltimore. Cleveland sports fans and their elected representatives - including then Ohio Sen. Dennis Kucinich - were outraged.
“Taxpayers invested many millions of dollars in the Cleveland Browns before 1995, and when the team left, it was not only our civic pride that was severely wounded, it was the fact that the taxpayers were left holding the bag,” Kucinich recalled this week.
As Ohio’s state legislature deliberated over the state’s budget in 1996, the former Cleveland mayor and future congressman who represented part of Cleveland’s West Side saw an opportunity to keep future sports franchises from betraying taxpayers by relocating.
He offered a budget amendment requiring that teams playing in tax-supported facilities keep playing most of their home games there unless the host city agrees otherwise or unless its owners give six months’ notice of their intent to relocate. Before relocating, a departing owner would have to give the city or local residents a chance to buy the team. Kucinich’s amendment passed unanimously, and made it into the final bill signed by then-Ohio Gov. George Voinovich.
“When I got to the State Senate, I just waited for the opportunity to be able to to pass a law that would protect the taxpayers, the sports fans and the communities from that ever happening again, and that’s what this law does,” Kucinich said. “If we had this before, the Browns would not have gone.”
The Browns resumed Cleveland operations in 1999 as an expansion team. When current Browns owners Jimmy and Dee Haslam broached moving to a domed stadium in Brook Park as an alternative to renovating the lakefront stadium, Cleveland councilman Brian Kazy invoked Kucinich’s law as a way to keep the team in Cleveland.
Kucinich was delighted. Although he is currently mounting an independent campaign for the congressional seat that represents the section of Brook Park where the stadium would be located, he questions whether a stadium could actually be built on that site because of environmental considerations and its proximity to Cleveland Hopkins International Airport. The Republican congressman who currently represents that area, Rocky River’s Max Miller, has encouraged the Haslams to relocate to his district
Kucinich pointed out that Brook Park, or any other community in Cleveland that uses tax money to attract a sports franchise, could use the law he drafted, from investing hundreds of millions of dollars in a team “only to find their investment is for naught.” He also isn’t sure that a community like Brook Park, with a population under 20,000, would be able to provide the sort of taxpayer-funded investments sought by team owners that a bigger city like Cleveland could offer.
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“My concern is they’re just using Brook Park as a foil and they may be looking elsewhere, out of state,” Kucinich continues. “This law protects the taxpayers wherever they live ... If the Haslams no longer want to be in Cleveland, then let a group of investors from Cleveland keep the team here. And again, nothing against Brook Park, but you know, this a law that that must be abided by.”
Kucinich says Mayor Justin Bibb’s administration has an obligation to let Cleveland’s taxpayers know exactly what is being discussed, and to provide an accurate tally of how much tax money has already gone to help the Browns.
It took more than two decades before the law was invoked to stop a team from moving. Now, it could happen twice in the span of six years.
The only other time the law has been invoked in Ohio, then-Attorney General Mike DeWine and the city of Columbus filed a 2018 lawsuit in Franklin County Common Pleas Court to fight the Columbus Crew professional soccer team’s proposed move to Texas. The team’s owners argued the law is unconstitutional and the lawsuit should be dismissed, but the judge said they didn’t prove their case.
That case eventually settled, though, with help from the Haslams. They stepped in with other investors to purchase the Crew, while the team’s previous owner established a new franchise in Texas.
Kucinich noted that the law he wrote doesn’t apply to teams unless they take tax money from host communities. Teams that finance everything on their own are not affected.
“We’ve got to put an end to this manipulation of cities by the sports team owners,” says Kucinich. “It’s time to take a stand for taxpayers and for the sports fan and to stop this endless chess game that goes on, where the taxpayers and the sports fans always lose.”