Port of Cleveland to offer Georges $360,000 for contested corner above Irishtown Bend

The Cleveland-Cuyahoga County Port Authority will offer $360,000 to buy an Ohio City corner that is the final piece of property required for a major hillside stabilization project.

The port’s board of directors voted Thursday, Jan. 13, to authorize the overture to Tony and Bobby George, the father-and-son developer pair that owns the 0.41-acre site at West 25th Street and Detroit Avenue. Based on a recent appraisal, the offer is an early step in what could be an eminent domain fight — a battle over the taking of private property for public purposes.

The offer will start a roughly 30-day clock for the Georges. If they turn it down or don’t respond, the port will take its case to Cuyahoga County Probate Court, where the agency is likely to pursue swift control of the property based on concerns about the safety of the slope above Irishtown Bend.

In September, the port’s board signaled its intentions by authorizing the agency to hire an appraiser to value the property. At the time, Tony George told Crain’s to expect pushback. In late October, he and his son filed a lawsuit in a bid to ward off the eminent domain process.

That lawsuit is pending in Cuyahoga County Common Pleas Court. The port and partner groups involved with the hillside project have asked Judge David T. Matia to dismiss the case.

George did not attend Thursday’s meeting. Reached by phone afterward, he declined to comment.

In previous interviews and court filings, he’s argued that the corner — which includes a high-profile billboard on the roof of a long-vacant building — is a prime development site. And he’s challenged the port’s assertions that the hillside is in danger of imminent collapse.

“Plaintiff intends to proceed with its plans to develop the property,” attorneys for the Georges’ Mortgage Investment Group LLC wrote in their October complaint filed against the port, the city, Ohio City Inc., LAND Studio and an affiliate of West Creek Conservancy.

That public-private partnership has been working for more than a decade to find a fix for the slope, which looms over the Cuyahoga River shipping channel. They’ve amassed funding for the $45 million stabilization project, which will involve extensive regrading of the hillside and installation of bulkheads at the water’s edge. They aim to start construction this year.

The cleared land eventually will become a 23-acre riverfront park.

But the corner parcel, which the Georges purchased in 2018, stands in the way of those plans. Osborn Engineering and MCRE, two consultants working with the port, say that property must be cleared, excavated and reconfigured to take weight off the top of the slope.

Preserving the building would add $4.9 million to the cost of the stabilization work by forcing construction of a mid-slope retaining wall to meet minimum safety standards, Osborn wrote in a technical memorandum last year.

Ed Rybka, Cleveland’s former chief of regional development, attempted to work with Tony George last year to find a resolution outside of a courtroom. But the parties, who talked about land swaps and replacement sites for the billboard, never reached an agreement.

The Georges have not firmly stated an asking price for the corner, though Tony George mentioned a $4.5 million figure during an interview in September. Property records list a 2018 purchase price of $248,300 for the parcel — but that does not account for the billboard.

Records from the Cuyahoga County Board of Revision, which adjudicates disputes over property values, show that the Georges and the Cleveland Metropolitan School District agreed in September 2020 to set the market value of the land and building at $350,000 for the 2018 tax year. That settlement ended an argument over what the real estate was worth.

A purchase agreement in the board of revision’s files reveals that the Georges actually paid $1.1 million for the property. But they assigned $851,800 of that price to the billboard.

The port’s $360,000 offer also excludes the value of the billboard, which is being treated as personal property — not real estate. That means the sign won’t be part of an eminent domain case if the agency and the Georges fail to reach an agreement.

The billboard still must be addressed, though, through separate negotiations that might involve a replacement sign at the edge of the future Irishtown Bend park or an alternative billboard site. The city, which regulates billboards, would have to play a role in those discussions.

The Thursday board resolution makes it clear that the agency will pursue what’s known as a “quick take” — a method that would let the port take possession of the corner and start site work before the court reaches a verdict about what the Georges are owed. That method is used for road projects, but Ohio law also permits such speedy takings in emergency situations.

“Public exigency, imperatively requiring the immediate seizure of the property exists,” reads part of the resolution, “and such property is needed to avoid the potential permanent and/or temporary loss, damage or impairment to the navigational shipping channel that is used for interstate commerce and transportation, with the same transportation attributes as a traditional roadway.”

In the October lawsuit, attorneys for the Georges assert that the port and its partners should have acted sooner on shoreline stabilization and utility fixes and now have an obligation to shore up the corner, even if that means installing a mid-slope retaining wall. They accuse the group of overstating the risk to the hillside and orchestrating a smear campaign against the family.

“Instead of fixing property defendants control … defendants have collectively chosen to invent a rationale for taking plaintiff’s property,” the complaint reads.

The port, in response, has called the lawsuit premature and the claims unfounded.

“Plaintiff and its owners, Tony and Bobby George, are willing to risk public safety and potentially devastating economic impact to the city in order to attempt to leverage a windfall payment for their own benefit,” the agency’s lawyers wrote in a November motion to dismiss.

Other project partners similarly have asked Matia to toss out the case.