So maybe Lynn Wheeler was right after all...

About a dozen years ago, Lynn Wheeler was among a small group of leaders who tried to woo the Republican National Committee into awarding Charlotte the 2000 GOP convention.

We came close that time – making the RNC short list but losing to Philly. Officials thought we were a little thin on hotel rooms then, and although they liked our coliseum, they weren’t so hot about it being located miles from our downtown.

Wheeler, then a city councilwoman and chair of the economic development committee, saw that deficiency, too. So she led an effort to get an arena, along with other projects, uptown. Then she angered voters who rejected that referendum package by leading a successful City Council arena vote a year later.

She lost her political career because of it.

But she was right.

“I feel a little validated,” says Wheeler, sitting on her living room couch just outside uptown, which is still buzzing with the news of the Democratic National Convention coming here next year. It’s a big deal – a $150- million to $260 million impact, say studies of 2008 convention cities Minneapolis-St. Paul and Denver – and it comes at a time any city could use that kind of jolt.

And it doesn’t happen, this convention nod, without an uptown arena.

“I knew it was the right thing to do,” Wheeler says.

She is a public relations consultant now, but she’s still as connected as anyone else in Charlotte. She’s on the phone each day with power players – and she sells that access, that ability to make things happen. It’s what she liked best about her 14 years on the council and time as mayor pro tem.

She doesn’t miss, however, waking up on Sunday morning to read the paper and, as she says, “see how many ways people could creatively call me a b-i-t...”

Yeah, we remember.

It’s a reminder that the arena wasn’t the sole blow that knocked Wheeler out of politics. She was, a decade ago, as overexposed in Charlotte as someone could be in the old media age. She wasn’t just Lynn Wheeler, Mayor Pro Tem, but Lynn Wheeler, Mayor Pro Tem and former debutante and willing subject of media stories that called her “coquettish” and touched on fashion and hair and once, yes, her bedroom.

Then there was the political mishandling of the arena. It began, she says now, when council members decided to let voters weigh in on a referendum in 2001 that proposed raising taxes to build the arena and several other projects. “We could’ve voted it on our own,” she says, “but we were all chicken, and I was one of them.”

When voters shook their heads at the referendum, Wheeler led the charge the next year for a new plan that included only the arena. This one was different, she says even now, and she’s correct: The new plan said the arena would be paid with a hotel-motel tax, not any taxes on residents, which was the main beef of arena opponents the first time around.

But Wheeler lost that narrative, and when the council approved the arena on its own, she finished last in the next Republican primary. A half-hearted comeback bid in 2005 did no better.

And the arena? It’s done what Wheeler and others predicted it would. It’s brought money from events such as the annual CIAA tournament to Charlotte. It’s been a contributing catalyst for new uptown development that includes the EpiCentre and Daniel Levine’s First Ward project. That development has expanded the property tax base, which benefits not only uptown. “It ripples out through the whole community,” she says.

That was, by the way, another narrative that arena proponents lost a decade ago, the one about uptown growth helping the rest of Charlotte. It’s a tug we come back to often – not just uptown vs. everyone else, but about how and if we want to grow.

Sometimes we don’t make the best choices – the NASCAR Hall of Fame says hello – and some people, for sure, will never be sold on the arena being one of the good ones.

But the woman who sold it the hardest – and maybe lost the most?

“I don’t regret it,” says Lynn Wheeler now. “Not one second.”