Cleveland Picks Consulting Team To Analyze Economics of Closing, Redeveloping Burke Lakefront Airport

CLEVELAND, Ohio — Clevelanders have been debating for decades about whether to close Burke Lakefront Airport and redevelop its 445 acres as a park or an expansion of downtown.

Fulfilling a pledge he made during his 2021 campaign, Mayor Justin Bibb is now positioning the city to give that question a serious look.

The administration announced Monday it is recommending a team led by Econsult Solutions of Philadelphia to perform a four-month, $115,000 study on the potential of repurposing Burke.

Jeff Epstein, the city’s chief of integrated development, said Monday the administration will seek authority from City Council to proceed with the study, which could start as soon as May.

Versed in the economics of airports and waterfronts, and in local planning issues, the team includes Washington, D.C.-based Riddle Inc., a woman-owned real estate and economic development marketing firm; and Cleveland-based Robert P. Madison International, Inc., the largest Black female-owned architecture firm in Ohio.

Epstein called the study an “order of magnitude’' analysis aimed at comparing the airport’s economic impact with other potential uses of its land including as a park or a dense urban development.

The study isn’t designed to settle longstanding questions about the contents of the landfill beneath the runways at Burke, which is said to include everything from construction and demolition debris to trash, washing machines, and car chassis.

Subsurface conditions could determine what’s buildable, and where, but Epstein said, “we are intentionally not trying to get too far in the weeds with the specifics of what may be feasible exactly where.’’

Instead, he said, the “goal is to arm the administration and the mayor with some defensible analyses based on the best assumptions we can make now about conditions of the land and the market without spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on due diligence.”

The new study is a companion effort to a separate analysis of Burke launched by the city in 2021 that was expanded in 2022 to look at the aviation and regulatory implications of closing Burke. The city is preparing the analysis for inclusion in a document called an Airport Layout Plan, required by the Federal Aviation Administration.

Bonnie Teeuwen, the city’s chief operating officer, said the findings of the Burke aviation and regulatory study, now in draft form, will be presented to the FAA for its comments later this year, and will likely be completed around the same time as the economic analysis.

“No decision has been made one way or another whether we’re closing Burke,’' Teeuwen said. “We just want to make sure we have all of our data up to date so we can make an informed decision. Both of these documents will help with this decision.”

The Burke studies are part of the city’s latest efforts to figure out how to capitalize on its proximity to Lake Erie.

After more than a century in which the city viewed the lake as an open sewer and as a route for industrial shipping, it now sees the lake as a key to revitalization and redevelopment.

A flurry of new projects and plans are underway, including a study of how the city could better connect downtown to the lakefront by extending a “land bridge” across the Ohio 2 Shoreway from the Huntington Convention Center of Cleveland to North Coast Harbor attractions including the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

The downtown project and others “are all part of a broader strategy of how we can leverage our waterfronts for the economic benefit of city and region, and how we think about creating more equitable access,’’ Epstein said.

The city’s 2004 Waterfront District Plan, completed under former mayor Jane Campbell, called for keeping Burke while encouraging development around its edges.

In his four terms as mayor, from 2005 to 2021, Frank Jackson opposed any notion of redeveloping Burke, although he said he’d consider allowing new development around it.

In 2020, a Chicago developer proposed building an outlet mall on the city’s municipal parking lots south of the airport and the Shoreway, but that idea fizzled.

Although numerous businesses – including hospitals, sports teams, law offices, and others – use Burke, air traffic has declined dramatically over the past 20 years, cleveland.com and The Plain Dealer reported last year. The 40,000-plus landings and takeoffs in 2021 represented a nearly 60% drop from those in 2000.

The Econsult study will quantify the direct, indirect, and induced economic activity created by the airport including employment and related taxes; airport traffic, taxes, and fees; parking and associated taxes; special event fees, taxes, employment, and attendance; and how much activity would shift to other airports in the region if Burke were closed.

The study will also estimate a range of possibilities for the land at Burke including turning it into a park or a high-density urban development that would unfold over 10 to 20 years.

The study will look at how removing the airport would also remove height restrictions and limitations on land use on nearby parcels, including prohibitions on housing.

The team will analyze development trends in and around downtown, and at issues including road access.

Considerations might include whether new roads could be extended across the lakefront Shoreway to better connect the Burke to acreage in the city’s Campus District, south of the highway. Another consideration is whether long-term plans by the Ohio Department of Transportation to smooth “Dead Man’s” curve on Interstate 90 would affect access to the Burke area.

“If there are planning gestures or connections that could radically change the model in terms of the potential impact, those are things we would seek to understand and incorporate into the economic impact model that might shape future planning exercises,’’ Epstein said.

Examining potential alternative uses for the airport land will help the city shape other planning efforts in downtown, the Campus District, the St. Clair-Superior neighborhood, the Gordon Park area, and East Side areas near the lakefront, Epstein said.

“The mayor is following through on what he said he was going to do,’’ Epstein said. “He’s trying to collect objective data to make a data driven-decision.’’

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