CLEVELAND — Closing Burke Lakefront Airport wouldn’t deal a major blow to the city of Cleveland. And the upside – for almost everyone – would be greater than the loss.
Those are the headline findings of two studies commissioned by Mayor Justin Bibb’s administration. The mayor and his staff at City Hall haven’t firmly decided to shut down the Downtown airport. But they’re leaning in that direction and trying to find the best route.
“Can we close Burke? We think we can,” Jeff Epstein, the mayor’s chief of integrated development, said during an interview. “We’re going to work as quickly as we can to get to that final answer. I don’t have a timeline.”
After a century of talks and largely unrealized plans, Cleveland is trying to reimagine its Downtown lakefront with a focus on public access. The Bibb administration is pursuing federal grants and loans to help build a land bridge over the Shoreway. And city leaders are trying to keep the Cleveland Browns from leaving the edge of Lake Erie for the suburbs.
Eliminating Burke could be a huge step toward giving residents better ways to reach the water. But it won’t be easy.
The city would need to get buy-in from the Federal Aviation Administration – or an act of Congress. A closure would involve moving tenants and shifting flights to Cleveland Hopkins International Airport or the Cuyahoga County Airport in Richmond Heights.
“If you live in Cleveland, one of the constant questions you get is, ‘Why do we have this huge piece of real estate on the lake that’s an airport?’” Epstein said. “And it’s one of the questions the mayor got on the campaign trail.”
Bibb talked about the prospect of shutting Burke when he was running for office in 2021. Now, he’s building the case to do just that – a process that still could take years.
Epstein gave News 5 an early look at the studies and the city’s potential paths.
“We want to make sure that we do this right,” he said. “But we have a belief that both in the short term and the long term, opening up this critical piece of downtown real estate to the public is in the community’s best interest.”
‘Barbed wire between them and the waterfront’
The city-owned airport spans about 250 acres just east of Downtown. That doesn’t include the areas north and east of the runways, where the Port of Cleveland and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers store sediment dredged from the Cuyahoga River.
Burke, which opened in 1947, is a money-loser. It handles an average of 100 takeoffs or landings each day, according to federal data. Most of that traffic is private airplanes and medical flights, from air ambulances to pilots moving organs for transplants.
Activity at Burke peaked in the late 1990s and early 2000s at roughly 100,000 flights a year. Now, though, Burke handles just over 40,000 flights each year.
“When we had a lot more corporations in Downtown Cleveland and corporate travel, Burke was a lot more used,” Epstein said.
If the airport closes, Cuyahoga County would lose $9.6 million in annual economic activity, according to estimates from Econsult Solutions Inc. But redeveloping the site – a long-term proposition – could lead to much bigger gains.
The Bibb administration asked two consulting teams to study a possible shutdown.
CHA Consulting looked at what it would take to close Burke – the process, legal and financial complexities and potential impact on other airports. That analysis is part of a bigger update to Burke’s airport layout plan, a hefty document required by federal regulators.
Separately, Econsult crunched the numbers on Burke’s economic impact.
The firm determined that the airport accounts for $76.6 million in annual spending. If Burke closes, 58% of that money would stay in Cleveland. Most of the rest would stay in Cuyahoga County.
The biggest blow would come from losing the Cleveland National Air Show, an annual event that draws tens of thousands of attendees on Labor Day weekend.
“That’s three days a year,” City Councilman Kerry McCormack said during a recent interview in front of the hushed terminal, where only a handful of cars were parked outside.
“So there’s the other 362 days a year that this sits. Like this,” he said.
Consultants said no other airport in Cuyahoga County can accommodate the air show, in its current form. Epstein said city leaders plan to explore ways to keep the U.S. Navy's Blue Angels buzzing past Downtown office towers, even if they don't take off and touch down at Burke. He mentioned Chicago, where air-show planes pass the city but lift off and land in nearby Gary, Indiana.
McCormack represents most of Downtown and leads the council’s transportation and mobility committee, which handles airport-related issues. And he’s blunt about Burke.
“It’s unnecessary,” he said.
But former Mayor Frank Jackson, who held office for 16 years, wasn’t willing to shut Burke down. McCormack applauded the Bibb administration for taking a different tack.
“Residents … deserve access to this most precious resource that is Lake Erie,” he said. “Especially when all this property is owned publicly. It’s owned by the citizens of the city of Cleveland, and it’s barbed wire between them and the waterfront.”
‘This is about Burke and not the Browns’
The consultants considered a few alternative uses for the airport property just to get a sense of the tax revenues and jobs that might come from a redevelopment.
One scenario focused on green space and recreation, with a 170-acre park, athletic fields and an indoor sports complex. Another concept kept the park but added hundreds of apartments, a 100-room hotel, restaurants and shopping, including a grocery store.
Those are just ideas.
Epstein stressed that any development plan will involve “a very robust public process.” And there are technical challenges to building anything on the man-made land, which used to be a landfill and included a military installation during the 1950s.
“Anyone who tells you they know what’s gonna happen with it – if and when it closes – is lying to you,” McCormack said. “We don’t know.”
But the push to close Burke is growing while the Bibb administration tries to keep the Browns downtown, at a city-owned stadium where the team’s lease ends after the 2028 season.
The Browns are seriously considering a move to Brook Park, where they’re pitching a domed stadium ringed by private development on 176 acres along Snow Road.
RELATED: Cleveland Browns release first renderings, details of Brook Park stadium proposal
Other public officials, including Council President Blaine Griffin, have floated Burke as an alternative site for the Browns.
During an interview, though, Epstein dismissed that.
“These studies were done independently of our sports teams,” he said. “And we are continuing to work with the Browns to try to keep them on their current site.”
In a letter to fans in early August, the team’s chief operating officer said the Browns already had looked at Burke and, with the city, had ruled it out as a potential stadium site. He also cited FAA restrictions – height limits – as one of the barriers to putting a roof on the existing stadium.
“This is about Burke and not the Browns,” Epstein said last week.
‘Airports have been closed before’
Closing an airport is complicated. There are a few paths Cleveland could take.
The first, and likely the longest, is seeking FAA approval and working closely with the agency. Consultants predict that it could take at least 3 to 5 years. And the FAA would have to determine that shutting down Burke is an overall win for aviation.
“The FAA has been clear to us,” Epstein said. “They’re not in the business of closing airports. But airports have been closed before.”
Burke is what’s known as a reliever airport. It takes the pressure off Cleveland Hopkins International Airport by picking up smaller flights and handling overflow traffic. It’s also the beneficiary of federal grants – money the city would need to repay in a shutdown.
If Cleveland closed Burke today, the city would have to pay back $10 million in grants, in addition to getting the FAA's approval. The agency provided most of that money for studies and upgrades. The city’s repayment obligations won’t burn off until 2036.
So Cleveland's second option is to wait more than a decade, until that repayment window ends, and to avoid borrowing any more federal funds to maintain the airport. Then the city could shut things down by sending a 30-day closure notice to the FAA.
But there’s another, faster route to a closure. The city could ask Congress to get involved. Federal legislation could speed up the process and cut the strings tied to the FAA grants.
That’s the approach McCormack favors.
“My preference … is that we would engage our Congressional delegation as a united front to have them legislate the closure,” he said.
Epstein said the administration plans to continue talking to the FAA, no matter what.
“I think the mayor would like to close Burke,” he said. “But we have some work to do to make sure that that is the responsible decision for the city. … I think we’re closer today, with the release of these studies. But there is a lot of work still remaining to be done.”
‘It’s just holding up space’
On a recent afternoon, brothers Derek and Michael Lewis were fishing near the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. They live in Cleveland and have driven past Burke for years.
“There’s really nothing over there. They probably should make it into a beachfront,” said Michael, who described the airport as a historical artifact.
Burke was the nation’s first downtown airport. It underwent a series of expansions in the 1950s, ’60s and ’70s. Now, it’s home to an eclectic mix of tenants, including a sports media company, a cryptocurrency mining business and a small law firm.
The buildings sit on land that Clevelanders created over many decades by dumping trash, dirt and construction debris into Lake Erie. Over the years, environmental studies of the property have turned up clay, rock, brick, concrete, plastic, wood and metal shavings – along with traces of methane gas and petroleum, the city’s consultants noted.
A few miles away, to the east, another former dumping ground shows what might be possible. The Cleveland Lakefront Nature Preserve, off Interstate 90 near Bratenahl, started out as a landfill. It later became a confined disposal facility for dirt dredged from the river.
Now, it’s an 88-acre green space, a refuge for hikers, butterflies and migratory birds.
Michael and Derek come down to the water for peace and tranquility. They like the idea of finding more places to relax and explore, if Burke becomes something else.
“If they turned it into … an attraction or something that the city can come together and enjoy, then that would be fine,” Derek said.
His brother nodded.
“It’s really not benefitting nobody right now,” Michael said. “It’s just holding up space. So, yeah, we probably do need to cancel it.”
