Columbus Way keeps Crew SC in city

Collaboration built on trust. That is the foundation for a plan to keep the Crew SC professional soccer team in Columbus — a plan built in landspeed-record time of about six weeks.

A process that typically would take more than a year happened in weeks because two families seeking to be the team's new owners developed mutual trust with city, county and state officials and agreed that collaboration was the only way to meet the Major League Soccer deadline of Dec. 31.

At Harvard University, they call that the Columbus Way. They study it and teach it, this distinctly Midwestern way of doing economic development through public-private parnerships built on trust and the mutual goal of increasing the quality of life here.

Take a look around: The Scioto Mile. The Scioto Peninsula. COSI. The new Veterans Memorial and Museum. The Arena District. Huntington Park. And now a new Crew Stadium near all of that at the confluence of the Olengangy and Scioto rivers.

That Dec. 31 deadline wasn't only to see Cleveland Browns owners Dee and Jimmy Haslam and the Edwards family of Columbus sign a purchase agreement to the tune of about $150 million, by the way.

It also hinged on solid plans for a new stadium in Columbus, which is

where government and business leaders had to come together.

When they were close, they announced the plans last week. They acknowledged that not all of the t’s were crossed and not all i’s were dotted. And some of those details were fairly significant, but when Dispatch editors and reporters met with all of the stakeholders for a briefing on the plans, the business and community leaders were confident that they would meet the deadline.

Why? Trust. To a person, Mayor Andrew J. Ginther, City Council President Shannon Hardin, City Auditor Megan Kilgore, Franklin County Commission President Kevin Boyce, County Administrator Kenneth Wilson, Columbus Partnership President and CEO Alex Fischer and likely Crew SC owners Dee Haslam and Dr. Peter H. Edwards Jr. all said they trusted each other to do the right thing and hold up their ends of the agreement.

Haslam, who is from Tennessee and has homes in Knoxville and Cleveland, said she has come to love Ohio and was concerned for Columbus when she read the news about the Crew potentially being removed from Columbus for a move to Austin, Texas.

And Edwards, who has been the Crew team doctor since the beginning, said that as a proud Columbus native, he felt compelled to do something.

Ginther, Hardin and Boyce said they see the benefit of investment by the city and county to leverage development of not only a world-class soccer stadium, but also a neighborhood of offices and housing around it — including what they described as affordable housing units.

“You had me at 1,200 jobs being created,” said Boyce. “Pathways to success are paved with jobs.

“For the county, this is about economic development,” he said about a commitment of $50 million over 30 years to support the Confluence Village development, as the stadium neighborhood west of Nationwide Arena and the countyowned Huntington Park is being called.

For Ginther and Hardin, it’s about retaining “a team that belongs to the Columbus community,” but also about creating prevailingwage jobs (with a requirement for significant minority participation in construction) and some low-cost housing, as well as redeveloping the Mapfre Stadium site as a training facility for the Crew that also will serve as a suburban-style recreation center for an inner-city neighborhood that has nothing like it.

They said the city also would commit $50 million over 30 years to leverage an investment of $645 million by the Haslam and Edwards families to buy the team, build the new stadium and surrounding office and residential buildings, and renovate the old stadium for use as the training facility.

And for all of that, they anticipate a return of $1.1 billion in direct spending and 983 jobs over 30 years, as well as 885 new residential units, 20 percent of which must be “affordable.”

Fischer, who represents the top business leaders in Columbus in all sorts of issues related to business and community development, said he has never been involved in one with as many moving parts — or one moving at such a rapid pace.

“We always accepted the challenge,” Fischer said. “No other city has done what we’ll do in six weeks. Most others take 16 months.

“We’ve had 42 people working around the clock for weeks on this,” he said. “We are bound and determined to meet the MLS deadline. There is enormous trust among us; the unilateral intent is to trust one another.”

That’s doing it the Columbus Way.

Alan D. Miller is editor of The Dispatch. amiller@dispatch.com @dispatcheditor