Will the City of Cleveland Sue to Keep the Browns from Moving to the Suburbs?
Cleveland Browns owners Jimmy and Dee Haslam have announced plans to relocate the team to Brook Park, a Cleveland suburb, where a new stadium can serve as the anchor of a new retail and entertainment complex. City officials, as you might expect, are not happy, and some local officials scoff at the idea.
Despite the wealth of academic evidence that local subsidies for sports team rarely (if ever) pay for themselves, city officials would prefer the Browns stay on the city’s lakefront, and have proposed substantial renovations to the current stadium, or the possibility of (yet another) new stadium.
City officials are not just proposing further subsidies for the team. They are also threatening legal action. Attorneys in the city’s law department are apparently preparing to invoke the “Modell Law,” which was enacted to discourage local teams from leaving.
Suing to keep the Browns sounds like an aggressive strategy, but it is not clear what that would accomplish. Here is what the Modell Law says:
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
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