CINCINNATI — It didn’t have to be this difficult.
All indications were that the Bengals and Tom Gabelman – lead lawyer for Frost Brown Todd – were making significant inroads on a new lease by the June 30 deadline to notify Hamilton County if they plan to exercise their option to extend their current lease for Paycor Stadium.
This option would extend the lease by two years, allowing the team to remain in the stadium through the 2026 season. If the Bengals choose not to exercise the option, they could be free to leave after the 2025 season.
But a new lease would make all of that moot and the team and county could then move forward with an $830 million, four-phase plan to overhaul the home of the Bengals. The deadline for that term sheet on the Memorandum of Understanding is June 1.
The Bengals have offered to pay $120 million, with half coming via an NFL loan. The county’s share would be $64.5 million from the initial sales tax increase that began in 1996 to build Paycor and Great American Ball Park.
However, a wrench was thrown in all of that when Hamilton County prosecutor Connie Pillich, someone who has not participated in negotiations with the team, decided to recommend the firing of Gabelman just as talks were in the red zone and ready to complete a successful scoring drive to a new agreement with the county.
To the Bengals, the timing couldn’t be worse or more suspicious. Combine that with Pillich’s odd comments that the team has not negotiated in good faith with the county on the verge of a deal raises questions about the motives of the county.
While the team certainly has fielded its share of criticism over the last 29 years, since a 0.5 percent sales tax increase was passed to fund the building of both stadiums, Mike Brown and now Katie Blackburn cannot be blamed for negotiating a deal that is good business.
After all, that’s what they do extraordinarily well. And it’s certainly good business for the County to keep one of its biggest attractions for The Banks.
What are the motives? Pillich would only tell WCPO-TV she’s not going to “trade barbs” with the team and “just wants to get a deal done.” Well, her words and actions in the past two weeks don’t match that sentiment. The County is trying to play hardball with the team and if they’ve paid attention to how the team does business with its stars, they are willing to do business at the bargaining table in private.
But the minute you try to embarrass them in public, they take a different direction. Witness the scathing letter, which was a perfectly crafted legal takedown of a prosecutor totally new to the game, who just won election last fall and is trying to take a political run at a team that has decades of taking apart opponents who try to publicly humiliate them.
Bengals’ lawyer Emma Compton’s letter struck right to the heart of the matter, noting that Pillich had never been part of the negotiations. As for Pillich’s suggestion that the team was not willing to come to the table to get a deal done, Compton laid out the many examples of what the Bengals have done to contribute to the partnership over the life of Paycor Stadium in establishing the team’s classification of Pillich’s claims as “plainly false.”
Bengals Letter To Connie Pillich Hamilton County
“I don’t see the Bengals coming faithfully to the negotiating table,” Pillich insisted.
The current lease expires in June 2026, and the Bengals have until June 30 of this year to decide whether to extend the current lease another two years, something the team could repeat four more times.
Compton’s correspondence with the County also noted WKRC-TV’s interview with Gabelman from Tuesday, in which he said the team was bargaining in “good faith”, and that the two sides were “90 percent” of the way to meeting a June 1 deadline on a key part of a new long-term deal.
Even more damning for Pillich is Gabelman coming out and reaffirming his own comments made in a memo, claiming his firing was unethical and possibly tied to his refusal to contribute to Pillich’s campaign for prosecutor last year.
The Bengals know criticism of their on-field performance is fair game, and they have to answer to a frustrated fan base that worries they are letting Joe Burrow’s best years slip away. But to the Bengals, taking negotiations public and attacking them in the media is a low blow they aren’t going to take lying down.
If Connie Pillich and the County is waiting on the Bengals to blink, they may be waiting a while.
