ROLDO: Three Cleveland Billionaires Would Like to Pick Your Pockets for More $$$$

By Roldo Bartimole

How wise are the smart guys who take the rest of us to the cleaners because we are sports fans – and maybe suckers, too?

It’s not so much a matter of cleverness as influence peddling.

They OWN the politicians and the news media. They are a corrupting force.

With a property tax free football stadium just over a dozen years old and a baseball stadium six years older, these forces are softening us up for another touch.

They want more MONEY! Tax money.

Am I the only one who thinks this way? Not a cent more. Get off the dole, rich guys. I can’t believe it.

Take a look. Here are the three Cleveland sports team-owning families, according to the latest Forbes magazine listing of the richest 400:

– The Dolans – worth $3 billion. That’s 3,000,000,000. Yes, nine zeroes.

– Dan Gilbert – worth $1.9 billion. That’s $1,900.000.000. Yes, that’s a one followed by 9 and eight zeroes.

– Jimmy Haslam – worth $1.2 billion. That’s $1,200,000,000. Yes, that’s a 1 followed by a 2 and eight zeroes.

The Indians, Cavs and Browns. Welfare recipients.

The three owners represent more than six billion dollars in wealth.

That’s a lot of money.

Yet they want handouts. More city and county tax money to spruce up their sports facilities. They really want more money to build revenue enhancement to stadium facilities. To make bigger profits.

Why shouldn’t they get it from you? You’ve paid before.

You may have seen the photo the PD ran a week or so ago of a smiling new Browns owner Jimmy Haslam. He was visiting Cleveland City Council. You’d think by the smiles of the Council members that they were getting something from Haslam. Noooo.

He was asking to pick their constituents’ pockets. And they were smiling. Loving it.

To whom will Council members and Mayor Jackson send the bill? Here to us money-strapped pigeons, as the stats tell:

– Median income of all Cleveland households: $24,687, actually down from $25,928 from 2000 to 2009.

– Media income of all Black Cleveland household: $18,321.

– Median income of a Cleveland family: $17,458.

– Median income of a Cleveland Black family: $12,458.

We’re talking people scratching by.

Now, how do you make sense out of low income people providing any of their scarce income to support sports billionaires? Who could reasonably say this is fair?

Well, our newspaper will. TV stations will. Sportswriters will. Crain’s Cleveland writers will. Columnists will. Joe Roman certainly will. Fred Nance staunchly does.

But can you?

Mayor Frank Jackson, County Executive Ed Fitzgerald and Cleveland City Council – will they? I wouldn’t bet against these sellouts.

The PD photo sickened me.

Councilman Jeff Johnson, Matt Zone, Mamie Mitchell, Marty Sweeney and Tony Brancantelli are all smiling in the photo. So happy to be in the glow of the laughing billionaire. Jimmy’s not laughing with you boys and girls. But at you.

Browns stadium opened in the fall of 1999. The city has paid already for some fix ups. That’s after building the stadium. The cost: Hundreds of millions of dollars and still rising.

Now we’re being told the 73,200 seat stadium on the lakefront needs repairs. Something about the bad weather wear-and-tear on the open stadium.

Not content with the sweetheart deal Jimmy has on the stadium, he wants improvements to bring in more dollars. As one writer put it recently of fans, “They go to games as cash cows, to be milked in corporate barns.”

Just how mercenary are these guys?

At Yankee stadium fans in special seating can order their hot dogs and beer to be served to them. The draft beer at $10.50, working servers complain, comes with a 20 percent ‘service charge.’ But it isn’t a tip to the server. They get nothing. The Yankee-owned concession service takes the tips. How low and grasping can you get?

Haslam now wants the stadium to have a corporate name. And, of course, he wants to take the revenue it will raise. It’s not his.

Former owners – the billionaire Lerner family – had 90-foot by 25-foot Pro-Star animated signs hung on the east and west sides of the stadium, visible from the Shoreway. Electronic ads ran day and night. The signs advertised MBNA, the Lerner bank holding company. Free. They weren’t naming rights, Lerner said. That’s exactly what they were. Now Haslam – the new tenant – wants a name sponsor for the city’s stadium. And collect the revenue for himself.

Shouldn’t the city, which built, owns and repairs the stadium, get the naming rights revenue? Gateway’s baseball and basketball facilities had naming rights. Gateway got the revenue. For a time. But the money now is given to the team owners. Now the teams collect the millions of dollars from Progressive and Quicken Loans for their naming rights.

It’s called sport owner’s greed.

We saw a perfect example of this greed in the fight over chump change that allowed the NFL owners to lock out its referees. Until, of course, the scab referees proved deficient. Embarrassing.

Wealth is ruining this country. And first in line are sports billionaires.

Time to give them the stadiums and the arena. Just give it to them. For a buck. Get it over with.

Then tell them – pay your own bills. Get off the dole. Stop corrupting our city.

 

In 1991 he was awarded the Second Annual Joe Callaway Award for Civic Courage in Washington, D.C. He received the Distinguished Service Award of the Society of Professional Journalists, Cleveland chapter, in 2002, and was named to the Cleveland Journalism Hall of Fame, 2004. [Photo by Todd Bartimole.]

 

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