Adding Insult to Injury
Don’t know if you noticed but there’s a little dispute between the Cleveland Browns and the Cleveland-Cuyahoga County Port Authority.
Very interesting.
The issue is the cost of parking. Presently, the cost to the Browns of parking facilities owned by the Port Authority is $225,000 a year in rent. The Browns want a $25,000 reduction, and a $20,000 a game discount in case of a pro football strike.
Port officials thus far rightly decline the Browns offer to pay less. Bet that won’t last.
Here’s my thought. Did anyone think it strange that the Browns pay $225,000 a year for parking facilities around Browns Stadium.
Yet, the Browns pay only $250,000 for the use of the city’s entire 73,000 seat stadium, including loges and food and other sales. That’s a cheap price that doesn’t increase over the 30-year lease. What a sweetheart deal.
Furthermore, the football stadium sits on city lakefront land that is valued at $15 million. Each year the taxes on the land are some $400,000 (2009 figure). Who pays? Not the Browns. The city pays. The land, unlike the stadium, is not tax exempt.
I guess neither the PD nor the FBI was interested enough to examine why Diane Downing and Fred Nance – both worked with the Mike White administration on the stadium deal – later went to work for, yes, Lerner & the Browns, possessors of the sweetheart deal.
Once again no one at the Plain Dealer – editorial writers, columnists or other writers – seems to notice the massive piracy. More brainwashing, editors? Or does it just come naturally by now. I guess.
Isn’t there a single Council member – or even Mayor Frank Jackson – alert and courageous enough to call Randy Lerner to a committee hearing to ask: Why don’t you pay your taxes, Mr. Rich Guy?
It’s time someone put some pressure on Lerner.
Here’s one way. Why not insist on naming rights for the stadium with all proceeds going to the Cleveland school system. Or do we just rob from the Cleveland schools? That could earn the schools tens of millions of dollars over the rest of the 30 years.
Does anyone expect that to happen? Not me.
Here’s my advice:
Teachers, firefighters, police tighten your belts.
Randy, loosen your belt another notch. Isn’t that fair?
Roldo Bartimole celebrates 50 years of news reporting this year. He published and wrote Point of View, a newsletter about Cleveland, for 32 years. He worked for the Plain Dealer and Wall Street Journal in the 1960s.
He was a 2004 Cleveland Journalism Hall of Fame recipient and won the national Joe Callaway Award for Civic Courage in 1991. [Photo by Todd Bartimole.]
Click here to download the free app from the Apple App Store.
[Click here to return to the current issue of Cool Cleveland]