HUDSON, Ohio — The Cleveland Browns made their case for a new Brook Park stadium district in an unexpected place Thursday night – a town hall meeting in Hudson, about 29 miles away.
Haslam Sports Group executives presented the plans at a town hall meeting convened by state Sen. Casey Weinstein, a Hudson Democrat who hasn’t decided where he stands on the team’s request for $600 million from the state to help pay for the project.
Weinstein said he’s been getting a lot of questions from constituents and wanted them to hear directly from Browns executives. The town hall moved a conversation from the halls of power in Columbus to a packed meeting room at a suburban library – a decidedly unfiltered setting.
“You lost me at Deshaun Watson,” said Andrea Bucey-Tikkanen, a Hudson business owner who spoke up during a question-and-answer session near the end of the meeting.
A lifelong Browns fan and former season ticket holder, she said the team’s choice of the controversial quarterback turned her away. Watson came to Cleveland facing allegations of sexual misconduct. He’s settled civil lawsuits with two dozen accusers but was not criminally charged.
Bucey-Tikkanen loves some of the ideas the Browns are floating in Brook Park, where the team hopes to build an enclosed stadium surrounded by apartments, hotels, restaurants, offices, and massive parking lots near Cleveland Hopkins International Airport.
But, she said, “I can’t get behind anything when I’m still ticked, as a woman.”
Other audience members said it’s the wrong time to be talking about subsidies for professional sports venues, with so many pressing local needs and federal and state government cost-cutting.
“Asking for public funds as our veterans, our food banks and our libraries and our education are being defunded just seems morally repugnant to me,” one woman said.
The team’s general counsel and chief administrative officer, Ted Tywang, tried to head off those comparisons. He said the Brook Park stadium project won’t cut into existing tax-revenue streams and will be a net financial win for the state and the region.
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The Browns are asking the state to borrow $600 million for the new stadium by issuing bonds – debt the state would then repay, with interest, using increased sales-tax revenues, income-tax revenues and commercial activity-tax revenues from the entire Brook Park project.
That exact proposal made it into the Ohio House’s revision of the state budget bill this week – along with a potential change in state law that would let Ohio make outsize investments in major sports facilities that anchor so-called “transformational” mixed-use districts.
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The House is expected to vote on its version of the budget in the next few weeks. Then, the bill will be moved to the state Senate for more debate and changes. The General Assembly has to pass a budget and send it to Gov. Mike DeWine for his signature – and possible vetoes – by the end of June.
State support is an essential piece of the puzzle for the Browns, who are on the clock to get funding in place so they can break ground in Brook Park early next year.
The team’s lease on the existing lakefront stadium in Cleveland ends in early 2029. The Browns hope to move into a new suburban home by the beginning of the 2029 NFL season.
This week, team owners Jimmy and Dee Haslam acknowledged that without state buy-in, they’ll have to shift their focus back to renovating Huntington Bank Field Downtown.
But they're lobbying hard for Brook Park.
“There’s no bigger opportunity that a sports team has than kind of this generational time at the end of a lease to evaluate its future,” Tywang said during Thursday’s town hall meeting.
He described the Brook Park stadium as a long-term solution, a building that will serve the Browns for 50 years.
The team says the stadium would cost $2.4 billion to construct. They’re seeking $1.2 billion of that from the public – half from the state, half from local government. Cuyahoga County Executive Chris Ronayne has rejected that request. The Browns haven't said how they'll fill the gap.
The rest of the stadium funding, along with money for the mixed-use development around it, would come from private sources.
“We’ve done the work. This isn’t some pretty pictures,” Tywang said. ‘We’re putting up the capital. We’re investing in this. We’re taking the most risk.”
Bucey-Tikkanen said the presentation was too granular and technical for a general audience. And she said some of the remarks from the team of Haslam Sports Group executives sounded like platitudes.
Peter John-Baptiste, the team’s chief communications officer, said it was important to get public feedback – good and bad.
“There’s a lot of passion around the Cleveland Browns, and there’s a lot of passion about the future of our stadium and how it’s gonna be funded,” he said after the meeting. “If we’re not out here hearing from people and understanding what folks’ concerns are, we can’t necessarily address it.”
Several audience members approached Haslam Sports Group executives privately to express support for the project, he said. But people who spoke up during the meeting were largely critical – or focused on other issues, like public school funding challenges.
During an interview, John-Baptiste stopped short of committing to more town hall appearances.
“We feel like we have a great story to tell,” he said. “I’m not sure exactly what the format will be. But we’re definitely gonna be out talking to folks so they understand what this project is, how it can benefit them. And we want their concerns on how we might need to adjust things to make it better.”
