CLEVELAND — As 2024 comes to a close, the war between the Browns and the city of Cleveland rages on.
In a letter obtained by 3News Monday, Mayor Justin Bibb told Browns owners Jimmy and Dee Haslam the city intends to invoke the so-called “Modell Law” in an effort to keep the club from leaving downtown in favor of a new domed stadium in nearby Brook Park. The letter cites the statue first passed by the Ohio General Assembly in 1996, a year after Art Modell moved the original Browns from Cleveland to Baltimore.
Bibb first announced in September that the Browns were moving ahead with plans for a Brook Park facility rather than a new or renovated one in Cleveland proper, an announcement the organization confirmed shortly thereafter. Law Director Mark Griffin told 3News that month that the city would “move forward” with using the Modell Law to stop the team from leaving, only for the team to preempt them with their own federal lawsuit seeking to have the entire law declared unconstitutional.
The entire statute from the Ohio Revised Code reads as follows:
“No owner of a professional sports team that uses a tax-supported facility for most of its home games and receives financial assistance from the state or a political subdivision thereof shall cease playing most of its home games at the facility and begin playing most of its home games elsewhere unless the owner either:
To Bibb and others sharing his position, the law applies just the same regardless if a team is merely moving one town over or to an entirely different state. As the Browns have played in the “tax-supported facility” that is Huntington Bank Field since returning to the NFL in 1999, the city believes local interests should now be afforded the opportunity to purchase the team rather than see the club move to Brook Park.
“Yet, to date, the Browns have not provided the City or others with the opportunity to purchase the team, as required by law,” Bibb wrote. “And if that opportunity were provided, the City intends to take a leadership role in assembling an ‘individual or group of individuals who reside in the area’ in purchasing the team.”
The mayor concluded his letter by giving the Haslams until Jan. 9 to respond to his demands. Should they refuse, “the City intends to take appropriate legal action.”
You can read Mayor Bibb’s entire letter to the Browns and Haslams below.
With the Browns’ lease of Huntington Bank Field along Lake Erie expiring in 2028, the Haslams announced earlier this year that they had narrowed their future stadium options down to either renovating the current facility or building a brand new one. On Aug. 1, Bibb and the city unveiled a $461 funding proposal towards a $1 billion revamp of the existing site, but the Haslams instead opted for the Brook Park option, a $3.6 billion project (when including surrounding development) that would cost taxpayers more than $1 billion.
“A solution like this will be transformative not only for Cleveland and Northeast Ohio, but also the entire state of Ohio from the resulting events, tourism, and job creation,” the Haslams said at the time. “Additionally, moving the current stadium will allow the city and region’s collective vision for the Cleveland lakefront to be optimally realized, and downtown will benefit from the major events the Brook Park dome brings to the region.”
The owners also turned down a proposal to build a new stadium on the existing site of Burke Lakefront Airport, calling it “cost prohibitive and not feasible, especially with no certainty regarding potential timing of closure of the Airport.” The Brook Park stadium would be placed on 176 acres of land near Cleveland Hopkins International Airport that the Haslams were given the option to purchase.
Cuyahoga County Executive Chris Ronayne has blasted the Brook Park proposal, vowing not to give the Browns a dime of taxpayer money unless they remain in Cleveland. State leaders like Gov. Mike DeWine have been more neutral on the issue, but following the team’s move to have the Modell Law thrown out, Attorney General Dave Yost moved to intervene on the city’s behalf, a motion that has since been granted. Bibb also copied Yost in his letter to the Haslams on Monday.
“People who live in Cleveland are part of the state of Ohio too, and they’re the folks that are intended to be protected by this (law),” Yost told 3News’ Candice Hare last week when asked about the lawsuit. “There is a lot of public interest here, and I think that we will see a lot of interesting arguments made over the coming months.”
The Modell Law has technically never been tested in court and has so far been officially invoked only once, when in 2018 the state sued Columbus Crew owner Anthony Precourt to keep him from moving the Major League Soccer club to Austin, Texas. That case ended up being dropped before trial when Precourt was awarded an Austin expansion team in exchange for agreeing to sell the Crew to an ownership group led by (ironically) the Haslams.
The city of Cleveland has yet to officially respond in court to the Browns’ lawsuit. The current deadline for them to do so is Jan. 15, although that date has already been pushed back twice.
3News’ Dave DeNatale contributed to this report
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