Cleveland is hopping with this weekend's NCAA Women's Final Four and Monday's once in a lifetime eclipse.

A Cleveland City Council member says if the Browns want to move to Brook Park, they need to jump through a big hoop created by state lawmakers.

After Art Modell moved the team to Baltimore in 1995 and Mayor Justin Bibb declined to sign a gonzo cease fire resolution passed by Cleveland City Council.

Ideas is next.

Hello and welcome to IDEAS.

I'm Mike McIntyre.

Thanks for joining us.

It's going to be a busy downtown for the next several days in Cleveland as the NCAA women's final Four culminates in the championship Sunday.

The Cleveland International Film Festival has kicked off.

The Guardians home opener is Monday evening and just before that, the total solar eclipse could bring hundreds of thousands to Ohio.

A Cleveland City Council member says if the Browns want to leave downtown for Brook Park, they'll have to abide by a state law passed after the team was taken to Baltimore by art model in 1995.

The law is intended to make it hard to leave.

Akron will continue to look within its ranks for a new police chief, despite calls by black elected leaders to suspend the search pending an effort to widen the pool.

And Mayor Justin Bibb has declined to sign a cease fire resolution passed by Cleveland City Council.

Joining me for the roundtable from Ideastream Public Media, supervising producer of Newscast, Glenn Forbes and senior arts and culture reporter Kabir Bhatia from the USA Today Network, Ohio bureau political reporter Hayley Bumiller.

Let's get ready to roundtable.

Cleveland, Akron and Lorain are among many northeast Ohio cities in the path of totality for a rare total solar eclipse Monday.

The last time we had one in Ohio, 1806.

Projections put visitors coming to the city at about 140,000 on Monday.

Glenn, police are planning to be all hands on deck to keep traffic moving, keep things safe.

Yeah, absolutely.

The department canceling off days on Monday for officers.

They're planning on having 100 officers dedicated just to handling traffic.

And we'll get a little bit into that is expected to be, you know, the absolute worst right after the eclipse.

Mike, I think the amazing thing to me is if you lived in Cleveland in 2016 or if you covered the city in 2016, you thought that nothing could get bigger than that.

Right.

The Republican National Convention, the World Series, the NBA championship, all that stuff.

Right.

We're in a situation now where one weekend might overtake 2016 as one of the biggest in Cleveland.

And part of it is because all these organizations have embraced it.

Right.

Guardians were like, Hey, home opener on the solar eclipse.

That's great.

Cleveland International Film Festival.

And of course, the Women's NCAA tournament because of that embrace.

I mean, this is setting up to be obviously one of the biggest weekends the city has seen.

So a lot of the things that they're doing to prepare and that's the thing, sometimes you just have to be ready.

One of the things I thought was interesting, I raise my eyebrow a little bit when the police were saying, We're going to have tons of tow trucks ready, people.

You can't just park anywhere downtown.

There's going to be some restrictions.

Yeah.

12 tow trucks pretty much available at all times.

That's a big moneymaking opportunity for the tow truck companies as well.

Right.

But yeah, there's a finite amount, a finite amount of parking.

And, you know, I know here in our building I talked about, you know, monthlies only first come first serve good law.

Glad to be at work at 6:00 Monday morning things like, well, I'll be getting in with Amy Eddings on Monday morning.

But that's the crazy thing about it.

And you kind of think about this city and and what it can handle and the capacity for parking and things like that.

And it's going to be interesting.

We're going to fit in as many people as we can.

But yeah, tow trucks are going to be available.

So make sure that you're parking where you're allowed to park.

You know what I'd love to hear right now via email to send me an email.

Tell me what your plans are for the eclipse.

I know we've been talking about it forever.

It's funny because up until February there were still people that had no idea an eclipse was coming.

And then now I'm getting how much eclipse coverage can you possibly do?

Right?

Because it's, Oh, we've got more.

It's such a big deal and we do have more, but I'd love to know what you're doing, so send an email.

So I at Ideastream dot org tell me how you're going to be spending the day.

Career planning has been going on for months.

In fact, we found out in the Sound of Ideas Community tour Monday that the folks at the Great Lakes Science Center have been planning for years, like literally since the 2017 eclipse have been planning for that.

Some of the things for individuals to do.

First of all, when you're looking in Eclipse, you use the right glasses.

All of those kinds of things.

But you got to fill up your gas tank before you hit the road because you could get stuck.

You don't want to get stuck.

I mean, there's people out there who remember the blizzard of 78.

A lot of cars got strange because they hadn't filled up beforehand and other blizzards since then.

So you don't want the same thing to happen now.

71, 75, 77.

They're all going to be jam packed with people either coming north or maybe trying to get away from the eclipse.

I don't know.

But they said do not do not go out there without a full tank of gas because it's going to be a parking lot for big chunks of the day.

And you don't want to be stuck there without any gas.

Your car runs out of gas and you have to go off to the side of the road and you know, it will not be on the highway, will be or the roadways at all will be school busses.

Most schools are closed.

No schools are closed.

There's a few that are still in session, I guess, but maybe parents will keep their kids home.

I don't know.

But in general, yeah, they've called it off because the best time, the prime time for viewing the eclipse is going to be right when school would have been getting out.

And I've got little kids.

I don't want them looking out the bus window and trying to see it without the glasses.

I've got older kids.

I don't want them driving and trying to look up at it because and that's a double hazard.

So in both cases, I think there's a lot of school districts who said, forget it, we're going to call it off.

Go experience this with your families like you should or with your friends.

It's a once in a lifetime thing.

You have older kids, little kid.

You have endless kids, basically.

Now, don't say endless.

I just have kids.

And it's it's over.

I bought a TV for the bedroom.

We're done.

All right.

That stopped the show right there.

Sorry to have to transition from that to Hayley, but Hayley Columbus is outside the path of totality.

The expectation is that people will drive north.

ODOT is saying that traffic is going to start building early by mid-morning on Monday.

But there are those in Columbus, though it's it's not quite the same.

But I wonder if a number of folks are planning stuff right there and being in place.

Yeah.

So the kind of nice thing about Columbus and I speak as someone who's going to be taking advantage of this is that we don't have to go too far north to get into peak totality.

I'm going to be driving in about an hour and I think we'll have like 3 minutes of totality.

But there are still a lot of events going on.

And the Columbus area, our science museum here, I is planning a bunch of stuff, not only at the museum in Columbus, but other locations.

Dublin, Ohio, I believe is in totality for a little bit.

So I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of folks in Columbus, you know, make the 15 minute drive over there to the suburbs to check things out.

Won't be in totality as long as some of the places up north.

But a decent option where you're not on the road too much.

Right?

Good point.

So the weather is the wild card.

I know I wrote a column about this in our newsletter yesterday.

No one wants to talk about the weather.

When I brought the question up at the community tour, people groaned and said, you know, how do you have to bring out?

Well, it's Cleveland.

That's why forecast isn't looking terrible.

It looks like it could be clear skies, something like 30% cloudy that day.

But my point when I wrote this thing the other day is no matter what it is, we're having a party anyway.

Let's just have some fun.

Yeah, we're going to have the party anyway.

And it's funny that you bring that up because it is April in Cleveland, and when it's guardians, you know, baseball opening day, you always think of when we've had blizzards on opening day go out again, we've had snow outs on opening day, things like that.

So, you know, if you grew up in northeast Ohio, you always are kind of a bit pessimistic about the weather.

I'm surprised you got the groans, but maybe not because people don't necessarily want to be reminded of the fact that it could be an issue.

What you know, they're saying clouds, you know, could roll in, but also potentially, you know, partial sunshine.

Bottom line, it is Cleveland.

We're not going to know until we get there.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I was asking folks at that community, too, are some of the experts and Destinee Thomas who's with she's an astronomer with the Museum of Natural History.

She said that she and her coworkers were thinking about doing like the opposite of a rain dance, like a Lego cloud should go away.

Dance?

Yeah.

My my grandma used to go outside and move the clouds away with her hands and we were going to have a pool party or whatever, and they listened.

The guys would listen.

No.

Yeah.

Listen to Grandma.

I'm.

I'm looking at the hour by hour thing.

As of now, it actually looks like it's going to be the high temperatures about 60, right?

When the eclipse is hitting and it says it'll be sunny a little.

All right.

I like that.

Well, won't be sunny for 3 minutes and 50 seconds.

No, it'll be the opposite of exactly the glasses I mentioned earlier.

You've got to get the right kind of glasses.

You know, don't look at the sun without them.

At the moment of totality.

You can take them off for that 3 minutes of 50 seconds and see that wonder.

But as soon as it starts to get light again, you've got to put the glasses on.

But there are some concerns about making sure you have first of all, you can have expired glasses and make sure that you're one of the ways to test them as you put them on.

And if you can't see anything, if you're indoors, you shouldn't see a thing unless there's a light directly in front of you.

If you go outdoors, you shouldn't see the trees or the or the grass.

They need to be almost opaque.

But, Glenn, there have been some complaints from the Ohio attorney general's office or that they've received that there are potentially phony glasses being sold.

I used to work for a guy who would say Americans are the greatest scam artists on planet Earth.

And I know that guy.

He didn't.

And, you know, I don't know how much he knew about scam artists around the world, but his point was Americans would take advantage of just about any situation, you know, in an attempt to make money.

And I think, you know, that's what we're seeing here.

That's what we've seen here a lot.

But in this case, yeah, the complaint was filed last month about fake glasses being sold on Amazon.

The listing stated that they were, quote, Nassar approved.

Now Nassar says we don't endorse glasses.

And in fact there's a solar eclipse task force of the American Astronomical Society.

They said these are fakes, but they do offer a list of approved glasses vendors online.

So fear not.

If you go to the American Astronomical Society website, you can find approved glasses.

But yeah, they still remain for sale at that point.

But the attorney general's office says Amazon actually the complaint that Amazon needs to respect the public health and remove any questionable items or their fake claims and the attorney general saying, hey, you see anything like this?

Give the office a call and we'll look into it.

Got David in Twinsburg letting us know that he's going to walk out on his west facing deck with his spouse special glasses and eclipse beer courtesy of Market Garden and Heinen's.

That's his plan for for the eclipse.

And Susan is hopefully going to be able to get out of a doctor's office in time to see the eclipse and manner, nothing else, because she doesn't want to be involved in all the crowds.

So interesting.

We'll be talking we have live coverage actually, of the eclipse.

Glenn is going to be helming that on Monday.

But we'll also have NPR coverage starting at two 2 to 4:00.

And you can listen to that community tour I've been talking about Monday morning at 9 a.m. That's where we're going to be airing it on the radio.

One thing, though, that we didn't address in that discussion, but I'd love to talk about now is what gives with Lorain County.

So the path of totality is a wide swath that includes Cleveland and Akron, right?

As Hayley said, it's just, you know, she drives an hour and she's going to be from Columbus into the path.

And yet Lorain County has a billboard up trying to lure people from northeast Ohio, from from Cuyahoga County, essentially saying the only place where you're going to have totality is Lorain County.

This is not true.

No, it's I mean, they'll be several places where you have totality.

They will definitely be in the path of the full four minute prime viewing time.

You know, there's parts on the fringes that are not real close to here, but parts of the fringes that are going to be what it's like 30 seconds, 10 seconds, something.

But Lorain County put up billboards saying that they're the only place to do that.

And they seem to be fine with putting that information out there.

They're thrilled.

Don't you live in Lorain County?

No, I do not know.

Okay.

So the marketing people, they're thrilled about this.

They feel any any news is good news about them.

Yeah, it was interesting.

Yeah.

They said, well, at least people are talking about it.

And too bad.

Basically we don't market Cuyahoga County.

We're marketing Lorain County.

So you should have done your own marketing on that.

But.

Right.

But it's just not correct.

Well, they I mean, I guess if you're looking at from a marketing standpoint, there was like ABC, say now is the time, ABC is the place.

Well, ABC wasn't the only channel on the air, but it was kind of implied by the slogan.

And I think people took that as, okay, this is, you know, advertising hype.

I think best case I would that's the face I would put on it for Lorain.

But technically, no, they are not the only place that you can see it.

Cuyahoga Summit, lots of other spots around here.

You might need special shades to view the bright star of women's college basketball this weekend.

Caitlin Clark and her Iowa Hawkeyes are here for the NCAA Women's Final Four.

It was really cool reading and listening to Gabriel Kramer story, Glenn, where all these folks are in town and they're like, Hey, man, we're having a great time.

Like it's Midwest nice and Cleveland.

Food is good, right?

Weather's a little cold.

And I'm like, That was yesterday.

And you thought that was cold?

Just wait, wait, wait.

5 minutes.

Right?

Exactly.

No, I mean, it's great.

And you would imagine that David Gilbert and the Greater Cleveland Sports Commission, destination Cleveland, the tourism bureau here, they've got to be absolutely thrilled, of course, that I was here with with Caitlin Clark, who has kind of I wouldn't say revolutionized the game, but certainly brought a lot of attention to women's basketball.

I think they're only possible regret was when the brackets first came out and Iowa and LSU with Angel Rice and their coach Kim Mulkey and all that were in the same region.

So they couldn't have both of those teams here.

But they did get Iowa and Caitlin Clark.

They got traditional power, UConn, their star, Paige Beckers, their legendary coach, Geno Auriemma, undefeated South Carolina with their famous coach, Dawn Staley.

And then you've got kind of not necessarily a Cinderella, but North Carolina state here as well.

So a great scenario for the city of Cleveland to have those, you know, programs, coaches and players of that caliber Here in Cleveland, you mentioned their famous coach, Don Staley, or Geno Auriemma, because you know who that is.

But I think most people have no idea who these people are until now, because college basketball, women's college basketball is stepping off at this point.

I think it's a lot of the Caitlin Clark Angel Reese thing.

But but people are paying attention just just as they're coming to Cleveland.

Interestingly, throughout the nineties and most of the 2000 college women's college basketball came down to two teams, Tennessee and UConn.

And Geno Auriemma was there with, you know, names like Rebecca Lobo and Diana Taurasi.

And if you're a sports fan, you know, you've heard those names as being Pat Summitt.

Pat Summitt, who was the who is the coach at Tennessee.

Right.

And so for a long time, it was kind of those two teams, pretty much only in women's college basketball.

Now it's expanded out a little bit.

But again, you do have that traditional power and that that longtime coach Geno Auriemma being here with another star.

Paige Becker So yeah, now when you you get that kind of familiarity, the ratings are through the roof for women's college basketball.

The ticket prices are through the roof for Rocket Mortgage Fieldhouse.

And this Final Four, you know, demand is unlike anything we've seen in women's college basketball before.

Last week we discussed the Browns owners Jimmy and Dee Haslam floating the idea of building a new domed stadium in Brook Park.

Cleveland council member Brian Casey this week raised the model law as an option for the city to make it harder for such a move to happen.

Gwen The model law is pretty succinct.

In fact, I looked at it has a lot of punctuation, but it's one sentence.

What does it do?

Yeah.

So basically it says that any team that receives taxpayer support and plays most of their home games, you know, in the city proper, you have to do several things.

First, you have to provide six months notice that you intend to move out of the city, and then you have to give the city or people who reside in that area a chance to buy the team.

Now, Brian Casey made it clear the council member over there said, we're not saying that Jimi has them.

You know, the Haslam's need to sell the team.

We're we're not saying that at all.

What we're saying is they need to follow the process.

So another way that they would be able to move is the mayor and city council willingly sign off on moving the team.

So this potentially could be interesting as far as like, you know, is there going to be some sort of settlement?

You know, what's going to happen here?

But but I got to tell you, Mike, you know, the Browns moved to Baltimore in 1995.

They didn't move to Brook Park.

If the Browns had moved to Brook Park in 1995, we would not be having this discussion right now.

Good point.

So it's kind of one of those things where it was a well-intentioned law, but this inaction of it seems to be outside of the spirit of the law.

It's to the letter of the law, but not necessarily the spirit of the law when we're talking about moving a team, you know, ten, 15 minutes towards the Cleveland Airport.

Hayley, the law has only been invoked once, and that was to keep the Columbus crew in that city.

And at that point, by the way, they weren't like looking to move to Gahanna or something.

They were looking to move to Austin.

Haslam's were key to that outcome.

Yeah.

So that even that process even got to the point where the Austin City Council was involved and approving funding.

But there was a community effort in Columbus to keep it from happening.

There was a lawsuit from Ohio attorney then Ohio Attorney General Mike DeWine, invoking this law.

And ultimately because the law requires local buyers to have a chance to buy the team.

The Haslam's were able to step in and make that happen.

And now we have what I think is an awesome stadium in Columbus and an awesome team.

Yes, reigning champions.

Here's a question from Darrell.

He says, Does the defeat of the Jackson County, Missouri, tax to fund the Kansas City Royals new stadium, an Arrowhead stadium for the Chiefs to fund renovations for that?

Does it signal trouble for a massive tax issue for a new stadium here or even for a renovation?

So that gives you the skinny on that with a big tax issue.

And it was a resounding no thanks.

Even though they've got two World Series, a World championship Super Bowl winning team.

No, they just said no to that.

They said it was by a big margin.

As you said, both in the city proper and the surrounding suburbs.

And the Browns do not have a Super Bowl.

Last I checked, whereas the Chiefs do.

So the fact that it didn't work so well there and I don't know, but specific economics of Kansas City, but I don't know that it's in as bad of shape as Cleveland might be.

So the fact it didn't work there, I'm not sure it would work here.

I have several thoughts on this and I will keep them short for that's for the benefit of everyone.

Excuse me.

The benefit of everyone listening.

First of all, national pundits are looking at this Kansas City vote and saying this could be a turning of the tide, especially because of the things we've been talking about with, you know, this is a Super Bowl champion team, the famous Kansas City Chiefs and yet this is getting defeated, 58%.

Are taxpayers starting to maybe wise up a little bit and saying, look, these owners are making billions and billions and billions of dollars.

We they don't need our help to build the stadium.

Secondly, I would say, you know, the Cleveland Cavaliers several years ago when it came to the renovation of Rocket Mortgage Fieldhouse, did not want that to go to the ballot.

And they struck a deal in order to keep it off the ballot.

Anything other than a renewal of the current syntax is probably not going to go on the ballot.

I don't think these sports teams necessarily want something to go on to the ballot.

Progressive field renovations did not go on the ballot.

So some sort of deal here is probably going to be made avoiding a popular vote at the polls to try to get public financing for these projects.

But we'll get again, is is there a common public good of having these teams and owning these stadiums, or should the billionaires pay for it than their own darn selves?

And that's the debate we're going to continue to have.

It's always a debate.

And as these stadiums cost more and more, we're talking at least $2 billion for a dome franchise.

A values billion for a renovation, billion for a renovation.

The franchise value keeps going up and up.

The TV deals keep going up and up.

Every the owners are certainly getting richer and richer and people in the neighborhoods and, you know, even residents out in northeast Ohio are saying, gee, I'm not getting that much more money.

I'm not that much richer than I was, you know, five, ten years ago.

Cleveland Mayor Justin Bieber has returned City Council's Gaza cease fire resolution without signing it.

Council passed the resolution last week.

Kabeer.

What, if any, reason did Bibb give for declining to add his signature?

Okay.

I just want to preface this.

This is I'm quoting the mayor.

This is not me speaking.

I am just reporting the news.

But Mayor Bibb, he released a lengthy statement essentially saying that that there needs to be changes on both.

I'm summarizing this since I don't want to read the entire statement.

Got it.

But yeah, that was essentially the reason he gave was that he feels there's there's things on both sides it need to be done.

And so he by not signing it, it was essentially putting it into effect.

But he didn't have to sign it or decline it and into effect really, it's a resolution.

So it's not like in effect, it actually enacts something.

I think what the mayor said was in the resolution, nor neither that one nor the U.N. one reflected fully his view.

Right.

That.

Yeah.

And then he gave some of his views, which I was surprised he did, but he gave his views in the statement, which you can find online on our Web site.

All right.

Akron Mayor Sharma's malik said this week the city is moving ahead with an internal police department search for a new chief.

Despite calls to pause the effort and widen the scope.

the group elected black officials of Summit County has implored the mayor to widen the pool for the sake of diversity.

But he says the city charter doesn't allow it and the city can't wait for voters to approve a charter change.

The black elected officials group was not satisfied with his response.

In fact, Kabiru, they said he's not listening to our concerns.

They don't feel he's listening where as he's saying, look, legally, this is what needs to be done, has to be done.

This is the process.

And I'm not going to let this wait several months.

I want to want to get this over, not over with, but I want to get this process moving sooner than later.

We can't wait that long in the name of public safety.

Tabitha Galinsky, who is the former state rep and now Summit County clerk of courts.

And a part of this group, said the mayor ignored their concerns and that he has the authority to appoint a she chief.

She said it's not a promotion, it's an appointment of a chief.

Right.

So there's differences of opinion about that, that legal ruling.

And there have been since the last few police chiefs which were under previous mayors, did not were not subject or well, rather, it seems as though the city may not have observed this law, this statute the same way that it's being interpreted now.

So Galinsky has a good point that, you know, this has happened in the past he's not listening because we can do this and as you said, difference of opinion.

But the mayor is sticking to his guns on this with the legal expertise he's gotten.

The black elected officials group will hold a forum with the NAACP and the freedom BLOCK in that community.

They've invited the mayor to come and hear the concerns.

So obviously, that's not the last we've heard of that story.

Notre Dame College's national rugby team has found a new home.

Men's and women's players will transfer to Walsh University in North Canton, which currently has no rugby program.

Coach Jason Fox says that the whole program is picking up stakes and moving to North Canton, including the supporters, the alumni, all of that stuff.

Kabeer Walsh University doesn't have a rugby program, so ready, made, ready, made.

They're importing one and they're going to build a rugby pitch and they're going to bring them all.

It's sort of the reverse of when we were talking earlier the Browns leaving for Baltimore, where all the history and everything stayed here.

Well, this would be as if when they had gone over there, they took all the history and everything with them.

So same principle where it's going to be moving from one nice university.

Those both campuses look very, you know, not rustic, what's the word?

There's a lot of trees, you know, bucolic, bucolic Thank you.

Walsh University's larger I believe that physically but other than that yeah very similar so it's going to be a nice place for this rugby team.

It's one of those things that made me go, Ha!

Glenn When I heard that Notre Dame well, when I learned that they did it, but like I was like, wait, they're that good at rugby, that they're the national champion.

And it said D1.

And I said, Wait a minute, that can't be because that's where all the big stars and basketball playing.

When we talk about NCAA Division one, the Women's Final Four, but in rugby, they're in the top college division, they are D1 rugby and it's like it's it's easy to kind of overlook that or forget.

I think I knew that at one point.

But yeah, I was reminded throughout this process that they are one of the top rugby teams in the country.

So really over the top this year, right?

Yeah, really, it really would have been rugby, you really would have been a shame if they had to shut that whole thing down.

But opportunity for Walsh and a great opportunity for the for the players formally at Notre Dame College.

Monday on the Sound of Ideas on 80 97w KSU, we'll bring you our community tour discussion about the total solar eclipse.

We had great experts and excellent audience questions as we taped the show from the Discovery stage at the Great Lakes Science Center.

I'm Mike McIntyre.

Thank you so much for watching.

And stay safe.

Wear your approved eclipse glasses.