New life to yearslong lawsuit between cities of Cleveland and Brook Park over failed airport expansion (2024)

BROOK PARK, Ohio — There is new life to a long dispute between the cities of Brook Park and Cleveland, and it has nothing to do with building a new stadium for the Browns.

Brook Park is suing Cleveland over a failed deal to buy hundreds of homes to make way for an expansion at Cleveland Hopkins International Airport that never happened. On Wednesday, Cleveland announced it would notify Brook Park residents this week to ask for their depositions in the lawsuit.

The signs of grand airport plans from decades gone by are still evident in the ghost of a residential street along Sheldon Road in Brook Park, just south of the airport runways. Empty plots of land from home razed years ago sit undeveloped, with weeds and grass poking through the concrete slabs of old driveways and sidewalks.

This is where the expectation of expansion crash-landed two decades ago.

"I think it's caused a lot of consternation for everyone," Mark Griffin, Cleveland's law director and chief legal counsel, said Wednesday.

Back in 2001, when Cleveland was looking to build a third runway at Hopkins, then Mayor Mike White and then Brook Park Mayor Tom Coyne reached a massive deal that involved Cleveland buying hundreds of homes to the south of the airport, while Brook Park traded the I-X Center in exchange for NASA Glenn Research Center. The deal avoided Cleveland's threats of acquiring the land through eminent domain.

In Cleveland's eyes, Brook Park got a sweetheart deal.

"We redrew our (city boundary) lines so they got NASA Glenn within Brook Park and all the important employment that went with that," Griffin told 3News.

But after more than 300 of homes were bought and razed, Cleveland dropped its plans for a new runway. The original agreement provided that after homes were razed at the end of Phase I of demolition in 2009, Cleveland then had seven years to buy the homes in Phase II.

When the plan was abandoned, Brook Park sued Cleveland in 2017 to force Cleveland to uphold its end of the deal for the 55 homeowners they say were left in limbo, but the passage of time has complicated the litigation. There are newer homeowners who had no idea about the history of the 2001 deal, and we also found construction workers making renovations to a home in the impacted area.

Meanwhile longtime residents we spoke to barely remember their homes being talked about as part of a two-city agreement.

Griffin says the letters from the city of Cleveland will alert the homeowners that they will be deposed to testify and establish their level of engagement with this matter back in 2002. He explained that Cleveland has no intention to purchase, acquire, or use the affected residential properties at any time.

"I want to be clear that the city of Cleveland should not be forced to purchase any of these homes," Griffin stated. "Cleveland is not interested in purchasing or seizing the homes of these residents."

Brook Park Mayor Edward Orcutt on Wednesday declined to comment on the ongoing civil case that has progressed from a trial court, to an appellate court, and finally to the Supreme Court of Ohio, which sent the case back to trial court last fall. Orcutt deferred any questions to his Law Director Carol Horvath, who said in a statement:

"The City of Brook Park's utmost concern is and has always been to protect its residents and the welfare of the Brook Park community.

"Cleveland's partial and incomplete performance of the residential acquisition program has harmed Brook Park and the affected residents. The residents of Brook Park always have had the right to accept or not accept Cleveland's offer to purchase their properties."

The trial court has not set a date to hear the revisited case. In its own statement, the city of Cleveland outlined the questions that it will ask homeowners at the deposition: