Uptown's villain: Should he be out of the game?

The most reviled man in uptown arrives just in time for the special meeting of the Mecklenburg Board of County Commissioners. He slides into the second row of public seating, hardly noticed by the commissioners and others who will soon speak of him, although not by name.

It’s Tuesday afternoon, and the board is here for a presentation called “Urban Parks and AAA Baseball.” It’s a pep rally of sorts, new life for an old idea – bringing minor league baseball to an uptown stadium.

Five years ago, the board approved a land deal that would make that idea happen, a complicated swap of property vetted and approved by city and county officials, as well as the Charlotte-Mecklenburg school board.

Then one man, Jerry Reese, delayed it all.

“I’ve never seen anything like it in all my time serving in public,” says Dumont Clarke, a five-term commissioner.

“One individual, through abuse of process,” said Michael Smith, president of Charlotte Center City Partners.

Privately, officials are less careful with their words, including the former City Council member who recently asked me: “Is he crazy?”

No, says Reese.

But he is the most formidable kind of foe – a man with a calling and a law degree.

He is 59 years old, a Charlotte commercial real estate attorney. He is motivated, both philosophically and financially, to want something different for Charlotte than minor league baseball. He is driven, he says, by a belief that Charlotte should think bigger – a perspective this city has long embraced.

And yet, fingers point his way at the YMCA. People at his Myers Park church have been less than friendly. “It hasn’t been fun to be ostracized,” he says. “None of this is easy.”

But he believes he’s right.

And he’s not going away.

Dreams and lawsuits

“A smart lawyer,” Dumont Clarke says about Jerry Reese, although not by name. The board meeting is more than an hour old. The commissioners have heard from the Knights, who still covet an uptown address. But it’s not close to happening, and Clarke is trying to explain why, diplomatically.

Tim Newman, CEO of the Charlotte Regional Visitors Authority, put it this way later: “The one thing I hear people say more than anything is ‘That son of a gun kept us from building a minor league baseball stadium when we could have got it done.’ ”

Except they don’t say “son of a gun.”

The battle began in 2006, when Reese unveiled a site development plan that he said could bring a major league baseball team to Second Ward, on the southeast edge of uptown. Specifically, that team was the Florida Marlins, who had contacted him and expressed an interest in being someplace other than Florida.

Reese, a Catawba County native and UNC Chapel Hill law grad, had been part of Charlotte’s public conversation once before, when he proposed in 2002 an arena on top of an expanded Convention Center. That idea went nowhere, and Charlotte officials were similarly cool to his Second Ward plan.

Charlotte, they said, wasn’t ready for major league baseball, so they turned to another ballpark idea – a privately built stadium that would house the Knights. A spurned Reese did what lawyers do – he sued. Five times.

And he lost. Five times.

But the lawsuits held up stadium progress enough for the recession to deliver a gut punch to any hopes the Knights had of selling luxury suites and sponsorship for a $50-$60 million stadium.

“I’ve saved the city from a major mistake,” says Reese.

That error, he believes, is not thinking grandly. “Demographically, economically, we’re a major city,” he says. “We have a man’s body but an adolescent mind.”

Reese still has an alternative – a $4 billion plan called Brooklyn Renaissance that boasts 100-plus acres of retail, office, housing and a major league baseball stadium.

“I think he’s a visionary,” says Duncan Morton, a Charlotte surgeon and former Reese client. “There are visionaries who are made fun of, criticized, ridiculed – and lo and behold some of them turn out to be right.”

For the plan to happen, however, the city and county would have to sell Reese land in Second Ward, a prospect that’s hard to imagine given how folks in power feel about him at the moment. Reese shoos that notion away. “Frankly, I don’t feel that I’ve burned that many bridges,” he says, and he points to the visitor’s authority as a relationship he’s kept “cordial.”

True, says Newman: “My rule is to always have an open ear to things – no matter how preposterous they sound – if they are well-meaning. I felt Jerry was well-meaning.”

Correcting an error?

At Tuesday’s county commissioners’ meeting, speakers also mention Reese in the past tense. His five lawsuits are dead. The uptown parks and baseball live on, so long as the board extends a lease agreement that would allow the Knights time to put financing and plans together. Commissioners, who must decide before the fall, seem to favor the idea.

If it happens? “I will challenge the resolution extending the lease,” Reese says later.

Challenge it how?

“Sue them.”

That would add to the $750,000, not to mention his time, that Reese estimates he’s spent on this issue. He insists he’s not litigious, but that the courts are the only way he can correct a public error. That’s what he saw again at the meeting. “That was a conversation that should go on in Greensboro, not a major city,” he says.

It’s an attitude long celebrated here – that Charlotte should strive to be better than it is, better than our sibling cities, and that to do so we have to push on past others’ reluctance.

But sometimes, we also admire someone who realizes when he’s reached his final out.