What once looked like a lost cause is looking more realistic.
The Cincinnati Bengals and Hamilton County have been locked in negotiations on their lease involving Paycor Stadium.
One of the more recent points in their negotiations has been the hopeful inclusion of funding from the state of Ohio after they initially proposed funding $600 million for the Cleveland Browns’ brand-new stadium via bonds that would be paid back. That has since been called into question as it adds a ton of debt onto the state and the estimates for the Browns and Brook Park estimates were “overly optimistic.”
One thing that is for certain is there will be an added way of Ohio getting more tax money from legal gambling. It is just a matter of what it looks like.
Dan Monk from WCPO recently wrote this on a promising new proposal, one that could actually mean that the Bengals are in better position to potentially get funding over the Browns:
[Bill] Blessing introduced Senate Bill 199 on May 14 to propose a 2% fee on Ohio’s sports betting handle, which is the total dollar value of all bets accepted by state-licensed sportsbooks. Ohio’s handle was $8.9 billion last year, which means the fee could raise about $180 million per year, if approved.
Blessing’s proposal came one day after Sen. Nathan Manning, R-North Ridgeville, proposed the legalization of iGaming in Ohio in Senate Bill 197. It would allow online betting for casino games, including slot machines, poker and Blackjack, along with state lottery games and horse racing. Supporters claim it will raise up to $800 million in new taxes annually, money that could fund a reduction in state income tax or stadium projects.
“Just in talking with other members, there’s a lot of skepticism over [Cleveland’s financing plan],” Blessing said. “They don’t like the fact that it’s bankrolled by state general revenue funds. I think that’s probably one of the reasons why there’s a mad dash to do iGaming as a potential alternative.”
This could give us a better reason why the Bengals were so taken aback by Hamilton County hiring someone included in the Browns Stadium funding process. If they knew that support was waning for the Browns funding then hiring someone included in a possibly competitive process for funding could be problematic.
In fact, the lawyer Hamilton County fired, Tom Gableman, actually had a hand in developing this proposal with Blessings.
Essentially, the proposal deals out up to $200 million a year created by this two percent “privilege fee” on each gambling transaction. The way that $200 is divided up would depend on several factors that favored the Bengals and Hamilton County after an agreement would be set up for a 10 to 20-year lease agreement.
“The way we structured it, there were ten factors to allocate funding,” Gabelman told Monk. “The age of the stadium, capacity of the stadium, the public use of it, how many years are left in the term, or the new term. The amount of capital repairs put in by the local entity, by the team, and so on. Under those metrics, Paycor gets funded first.”
This is still a proposal and is far from being set in stone, but it is a far easier pill for taxpayers to swallow than outright paying for the Browns to make a stadium from scratch outside of Cleveland and footing the entire bill upfront. This would still allow funding to go to the Browns, but it’d be much more of a supplemental payment than the original proposal. That ultimately fits the needs of the Bengals and Hamilton County much better.
This all still depends on the two sides coming to an agreement before their deadline, which is less than a month away. Hamilton County’s changing negotiators certainly put that process in more doubt than it appears they needed to.
Hopefully, it still gets done, and the Bengals stay by the river for generations to come.