Three leading Northeast Ohio city planning experts endorse Browns' lakefront plan, reject idea of moving stadium

CLEVELAND — Three of Northeast Ohio's leading city planning experts, speaking in an online panel discussion Thursday, gave an emphatic thumbs up to the new plan proposed by Haslam Sports Group to connect downtown Cleveland to Lake Erie. "Really good design is a powerful thing,'' said Lillian Kuri, executive vice president and chief operating officer of the Cleveland Foundation, and an architect. "I was really stunned by the design as put forward by the Haslams. I think it's brilliant." Kuri spoke as one of three panelists in an hour-long discussion about the lakefront organized by the nonprofit Green Ribbon Coalition. The coalition, which advocates for better access to Cleveland's lakefront and organizes public dialogues, invited Kuri to speak, along with Linda Sternheimer, director of urban planning and development for thePort of Cleveland; and Mary Cierebiej, executive director of the Cuyahoga County Planning Commission. Allison Lukacsy-Love, director of planning for the City of Euclid, moderated the panel. The discussion was the first public forum to address the new lakefront plan since it was unveiled by Jimmy and Dee Haslam and the City of Cleveland last month. It followed by one day an official presentation about the plan made by the city and the Browns to the Ohio Department of Transportation's Transportation Review Advisory Council in an online meeting as part of a grant application process. The city and the Browns are seeking $5.6 million from the TRAC group to pay for additional engineering and traffic studies needed to realize the Haslams' proposal. The city has offered $2.5 million in matching money. Under the Haslams' plan, the city would extend the downtown Mall, which doubles as the roof of the Huntington Convention Center, north across the lakefront rail lines and the Ohio 2 Shoreway to create a seamless connection between downtown and North Coast Harbor. The connection is intended to spur additional real estate development based on improved public access to the waterfront. Generations of planners have sought to create such a connection, without success. The Green Ribbon Coalition, which has for several years promoted the idea of a "land bridge" to extend the Mall to the lakefront, wanted on Thursday to challenge the notion that FirstEnergy Stadium and the Browns should remain next to North Coast Harbor after the team's lease at the city-owned facility expires in 2028. The city built the stadium in 1997 on the former site of Municipal Stadium, built in 1931. Chris Lynn, a landscape architect with AECOM, introduced Thursday's discussion by displaying a provocative image of Cleveland's downtown lakefront with a 50-acre tabula rasa in place of the stadium. Kuri and the other panelists weren't having any of it. Kuri said that the Haslams' plan would integrate the stadium into a larger urban ensemble, rather than leaving it as it is now, a stand-alone object. Cierebiej said that leaving the stadium where it is would make a great deal more sense than building a new one along Orange Avenue on a site south of the downtown highway interchange south of the Gateway sports complex, a site considered in the mid-1990s but rejected by the city. She said the recent NFL Draft event held on the lakefront near the stadium proved that the area has development potential. Sternheimer questioned whether the environmental impact of demolishing the existing stadium on the lakefront and building a new one at Orange Avenue would outweigh any benefits, not to mention the cost. She advocated seeking new ways to activate the undeveloped city-owned lakefront land around the stadium to generate more activity in and around the stadium year-round. Kuri said it's essential for the city and other partners to form a lakefront development authority to carry out big plans and to fight consistently for design quality across election cycles and through changes in political leadership. It's important, she said, to resist pressures to dilute the lakefront plan over concerns that modifying the Ohio 2 Shoreway to enable the northern extension of the Mall would add to east-west commute times across the lakefront. Such concerns, she said, watered down the $100 million redesign of the West Shoreway, completed in 2017. "We need to follow through and fight for things that fell short on the West Side,'' she said. ©2021 Advance Local Media LLC. Visit cleveland.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.