The Cleveland Browns announced their plans to move from Huntington Bank Field in downtown Cleveland to a new, domed stadium in the Brook Park suburbs on Thursday (October 17).
"Our stadium planning process started in 2017 and as Mayor Bibb mentioned today, for the last two years, we have had positive, productive, and collaborative dialogue with the Mayor and his staff, working together to find the optimal long-term solution for our stadium," Browns owners Jimmy and Dee Haslam said in a statement shared on the team's official website. "We pursued many possibilities, with our initial focus on renovating the current stadium and engaged design, construction and engineering experts to develop a plan to do so.
"We also explored building a new stadium on multiple sites, both within and outside of Cleveland. We've learned through our exhaustive work that renovating our current stadium will simply not solve many operational issues and would be a short-term approach. With more time to reflect, we have also realized that without a dome, we will not attract the type of large-scale events and year-round activity to justify the magnitude of this public-private partnership. The transformational economic opportunities created by a dome far outweigh what a renovated stadium could produce with around ten events per year."
"We have communicated to the Mayor and his team at every step of the process regarding our mutual efforts to keep the stadium downtown and we conveyed to them yesterday, our most impactful investment for our region is to focus on making a dome stadium and adjacent development in Brook Park a reality," Haslam added. "With the funding mechanisms we continue to work on, this stadium will not use existing taxpayer-funded streams that would divert resources from other more pressing needs."
Huntington Bank Field, formerly known as Cleveland Browns Stadium and FirstEnergy Stadium, has served as the franchise's home since its returning expansion season in 1999. The city of Cleveland previously offered the Browns a $1.2 billion renovation proposal for their current stadium, as well as a 30-year extension of the team's lease, which is set to expire after the 2028 NFL season.