COLUMBUS, Ohio — If you were in Northeast Ohio in November of 1995, you remember.
That’s when Cleveland Browns owner Art Modell announced his plans to move the team to Baltimore – spurring lawsuits from the city and brokenhearted fans.
The following year, the NFL announced a settlement deal. Cleveland could keep the Browns name and colors. The city would build a new lakefront stadium for the replacement team. Modell, meanwhile, would get a new franchise in Baltimore.
Then the General Assembly passed a law meant to prevent a replay of that story.
That three-paragraph statute, Ohio Revised Code Section 9.67, is often referred to as “the Art Modell law,” even though it doesn’t mention the team’s former owner by name.
The law applies to owners of pro sports teams that play most of their home games in taxpayer-subsidized venues. It requires them to do one of two things: Negotiate an exit with their host city. Or give local investors a shot at buying the team.
Now the Modell law is in the spotlight again.
The Cleveland Browns hope to move to a new stadium and entertainment district in neighboring Brook Park in 2029 after their lease ends at city-owned Huntington Bank Field. In dueling lawsuits filed in federal and state court, the Browns and the city are sparring over whether the Modell law applies – and what a pro sports team owes its community.
In the nearly three decades since it was enacted, the law hasn’t been fully tested. But it’s been invoked once before when Columbus was at risk of losing its soccer team.
The people involved in that fight say the Modell law isn’t a silver bullet. It didn’t save the Columbus Crew. It merely bought the community time to come up with a solution.
“It was probably an element along the way,” Alex Fischer, the former president and CEO of the Columbus Partnership, said of a similar lawsuit filed in Franklin County in 2018. “If you listed out 25 things that we were doing, that would have been one of the 25 things.”
Fischer led the private-sector negotiations to keep the Crew in Columbus after the team’s then-operator, Precourt Sports Ventures, said it would move the franchise to Austin, Texas – and had a right to do so under a clause in its Major League Soccer contract.
“It was very abrupt. It was very specific,” Fischer recalled during an interview at his office at Easton Town Center, a sprawling shopping center in northern Columbus. “It was kind of like when Art Modell left the city of Cleveland in the middle of the night for another state.”
‘It was there. We decided to use it.’
Precourt Sports Ventures went public with its moving plans in the fall of 2017.
The following spring, the city of Columbus and the state filed a lawsuit against the company and Major League Soccer to enforce the Modell law. Court records show that litigation in Franklin County Common Pleas Court didn’t get very far.
In December 2018, the Haslam and Edwards families announced that they’d struck a deal to take over the Crew and build a new soccer stadium Downtown. And yes, that’s the same Haslam family that has owned the Browns since 2012.
Fischer, who grew up in Tennessee, has known Jimmy and Dee Haslam for decades. He sometimes hears people in the Cleveland area say it’s ironic that the Haslams are now challenging a law that helped them in Columbus.
“They never used the law,” Fischer said.
But the Columbus Partnership took advantage of the litigation “to spin up a lot of publicity around town and to do everything we could to cause MLS to come to the table,” Fischer said. He described the lawsuit as a stunt – an attention-getting delaying tactic.
“I’m not a lawyer,” he said. “It wasn’t my job to decide whether or not the Modell law was constitutional. … It was there. We decided to use it.”
Josh Cox is a lawyer, the former chief counsel in the Columbus city attorney’s office. He was part of the team that represented Columbus in its efforts to enforce the Modell law.
“It’s not a prohibition. It doesn’t prevent a team from leaving,” Cox stressed during a recent interview outside the Crew’s home stadium in Downtown Columbus.
“Look at it like an option contract or a right of first refusal for the local community to try and keep the team,” he added. “I think that the statute recognizes that it’s not just an emotional investment by the community, but there’s a financial investment by the community in the facility where the team’s playing. These places aren’t built in a vacuum.”
Cox, who retired a few years ago, believes the law did make a difference in the fight to keep the Crew. But it was just one play in a complicated game.
“You just have to have realistic expectations as to what it’s going to be able to do,” he said. “And it provides the window for the business deal to be done.”
Fischer echoed that.
“When you’re suing each other, that’s the definition of having problems,” he said. “And we had a problem with that previous owner because we couldn’t work with them. But that wasn’t how we got a solution. We got a solution by getting everybody in the room together to stack hands and work together – and to work toward a common purpose.”
‘We’re having continuing dialogue’
The Browns filed a lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of the Modell law in October. That lawsuit is pending in federal court. The team argues that the law is vague and unenforceable – and that it violates the NFL’s rules.
RELATED: Browns sue city of Cleveland over Modell law as stadium battle heats up
The Browns also say the law doesn’t apply to them for several reasons. They’re only planning to move a short distance. They expect to stay put until their existing lease with the city is up after the 2028 NFL season. And their original franchise deal and stadium lease on the lakefront were signed in April 1996, two months before the Modell law took effect.
Cleveland followed up in January with a lawsuit filed in Cuyahoga County Common Pleas Court, asking a judge to make the Browns and Haslam Sports Group comply with the law. “You can’t take the money and run,” the city’s attorneys wrote in a filing.
RELATED: 'You can't take the money and run:' City of Cleveland sues the Browns over Modell law
The city and Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost also are trying to get the federal court case thrown out. They argue that state court is the place to decide whether the law applies to a situation where a pro sports team wants to move to a neighboring suburb – not another state – and relocate after a lease expiration – not during the lease term.
RELATED: Attorney General Dave Yost weighs in on Modell law battle
The Browns, meanwhile, are trying to keep the fight in federal court.
During a meeting with a small group of reporters last week, Jimmy Haslam declined to discuss the litigation. “I will just say this: We’re having continuing dialogue with the city over the Modell lawsuit,” he said near the end of a presentation about the team’s quest for $1.2 billion in public money to help pay for a new, enclosed stadium.
RELATED: Browns detail their Brook Park stadium financing plans publicly for the first time
Dave Jenkins, the team’s chief operating officer, said the state, pro sports teams and communities need clarity on the Modell law. “We’ll continue down multiple paths and hope to resolve it all,” he told reporters.
‘It raises its head again’
The Columbus Crew litigation never got a full hearing. But a Franklin County judge rejected an early attempt by Precourt and Major League Soccer to get the case dismissed.
In December 2018, after the pending deal with the Haslams and Edwards families had been announced, Judge Jeffrey Brown wrote that the law was constitutional, clear and not overly burdensome. He was willing to let the case play out.
“These emotions and the interests at stake in this matter reach well beyond just the parties,” the judge wrote. “The outcome in this case has the potential to either uplift the spirits of, or drive a stake through, the devoted heart of a loyal and vocal sector of the local citizenry – the sports fan.”
Just a few weeks later, the city and the state agreed to drop their lawsuit. The Crew stayed. In 2021, they left their longtime stadium for Lower.com Field, about 5 miles away.
Cox and Fischer have been watching the drama over the Browns’ suburban proposal unfold. When he first read about the project, Cox thought of the Modell law right away.
“Sure enough, that was one of the next stories,” he said. “It arose out of the situation in Cleveland, so it’s kind of appropriate that it raises its head again.”
Moving from Cleveland to Brook Park isn’t the same as leaving Columbus for Austin, he said. But as a former city lawyer, he sees where Cleveland’s coming from.
“The issues are the same,” Cox said. “They’ve invested money in the infrastructure around the stadium, and they want to protect the asset for the city.”
Fischer, who works in real estate development now, has a different view.
“I think it’s pretty ridiculous, candidly,” he said of the litigation and pushback against what the Haslams want to do.
He agrees with the Haslams’ assertion that a 176-acre stadium district in Brook Park could be a transformative project for Northeast Ohio, a region that’s struggled to grow.
But Fischer admits that, because he knows the Haslams, he’s not entirely objective.
“Doesn’t matter to me, ultimately, what happens in Cleveland,” he said. “What’s missing right now is everybody ought to be working towards a common goal in a common direction – not fighting each other.”
Pausing, he added, “That’s easy for the guy from Columbus to say.”
