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.

A peek at the past shines a light on today

“Do School Changes Baffle You?”
– Charlotte News headline, 1960

Last month, as Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools officials had the last of their items moved out of the Education Center, an employee found some large binders in a trash bin. They didn’t look like they should be trash.

There were four in all, dark blue and dusty. They were filled with old newspaper clippings.

“I opened them and went ‘ohhhhhh,’?” said CMS spokeswoman LaTarzja Henry, who had the binders brought to a conference room at the Government Center. “I saw names like Garinger. I’d only known that name on a school.”

The clips begin in 1958, a year after Charlotte schools integrated. They end in 1964, four years after the city and county school systems consolidated. They include news stories and features, editorials and photos. They are charming and disturbing and maybe a little too recognizable, in that way history can be.

Charlotte was at the front end of a boom then, and the clips reflect a city growing like a gangly teen. “Suburban school trend already apparent in Charlotte,” said a prophetic headline to one 1959 article. Another, from 1963, examined a proposal to purchase 20 mobile classrooms for $100,000. It was, school officials stressed, a solution that was “temporary.”

There’s plenty more to make you smile. “Today’s kids mature faster,” said one earnest 1959 headline, while one photo, also from 1959, featured Superintendent Elmer H. Garinger’s secretary, Miss Jean Little, sitting tidily at her desk. “Beauty in Business,” read the photo’s headline, almost quaint in its political incorrectness.

Then there were the Observer articles about the N.C. Medical Society protesting what it saw as the promotion of socialism in school textbooks. The Medical Society, according to one clipping, believed the textbooks endorsed a philosophy that had Congress on the verge of legislation guaranteeing health care for all.

“Socialized medicine,” the group called it.

Recognize that? How about this big-type headline: “BOARD PONDERS BIGGER OPERATION, LESS CASH.” Or: “Your children will find classrooms more crowded.” Or this: “West Side of Charlotte Feeling Neglected.”

Those headlines topped budget-related stories that examined the debate over how much the city should spend on new schools, which neighborhoods should get them, and which were feeling like they weren’t getting much of anything.

And as now, it all was argued against the backdrop of class and race.

“School Board Hears Demand,” read one 1960 headline, which outlined student assignment friction between Charlotte’s blacks and whites. Since integration, blacks had been pushing for their children to attend better schools in white neighborhoods, even if it meant transporting students across assignment lines.

“I will exhaust every remedy to see that my son will receive a desegregated education,” said one mother, trying to get her son into a Dilworth school. It’s not hard to imagine those exact words, and that geography, in a story on this page today.

And yes, the issues then were triggered by different dynamics. Budget writers were deciding on which programs and services to add, not the cuts we’re facing now. Schools were moving away from segregation, not inching back toward it, as critics say CMS is now.

But pull the lens back, and we’re essentially asking the same questions of ourselves – questions about money and fairness, about balancing what’s best for our kids with what’s good for someone else’s.

And still, even now: How equal can we make separate? And is that the kind of equal we want?

Fifty years – and the answers still elude us.

The right to remain hateful

Not long ago, I thought it might be fun to write about spending some time moderating comments and complaints on our web site, charlotteobserver.com.

A few hours, maybe, or even a day – enough to offer a glimpse at how technology has made ugliness so very easy and accessible.

Then I decided I might also spend a day at Starbucks to reveal that some of us have caffeine issues. In other words: Duh. We know we’re ugly, and we know, too, that the problem is larger than technology. Keyboards and without keyboards, more of us seem emboldened to say out loud whatever noxious or hurtful notion crosses our minds.

This past week, the U.S. Supreme Court reminded us how frustrating, challenging and, ultimately, valuable that can be.

The Court ruled that Kansas preacher Fred Phelps and his hateful Westboro Baptist Church followers were constitutionally protected from punishment when they picketed outside the 2006 funeral of Matthew Snyder, a 20-year-old Marine killed in Iraq.

The protected speech that day included a sign that read “Thank God for Dead Soldiers.” Another said: “God Hates Fags,” although Snyder wasn’t gay.

It is vile speech. Cruel speech. You can choose your own damning adjective. And what makes the ruling more difficult is that the Court is demanding that we take this speech seriously. Why?

Because it’s a part, however crude, of “matters of public import,” as Chief Justice John Roberts wrote.

(It might make you smile, however, that Westboro owes some thanks to none other than Hustler Magazine, whose cases the Ccourt cited as precedent in the protections offered to outrageous speech. Strange bedfellows, indeed.)

It’s elementary, really, when you step back and strip away emotion. But that’s a difficult thing to do with hate speech, because words that intend to hurt usually do.

Even the court, with its 8-1 verdict, had some struggles with this. In a passionate dissent, Justice Samuel Alito wrote that the Westboro picketers inflicted severe pain, intentionally. At what point, Alito asks, does public debate become a form of assault?

It is a struggle we face with our own public debates, from anonymous commenters to one very public elected official.

Back in January, county commissioner Bill James called homosexuals “sexual predators” in an e-mail to his colleagues and in subsequent communications on his web site. His fellow commissioners responded with a resolution pledging support for tolerance – a weak gesture, I wrote then, when they could have confronted James about the dangers that come with wrongly demonizing a whole population.

Now James is predictably back at it – again calling homosexuals “sexual predators” in recent e-mails dealing with men having sex in areas of a Mecklenburg park. While it’s a given that public sex should be prosecuted, James had no evidence that anyone in the park was preying on children. Their behavior was enough, he said.

Just to be clear, he said: “Homosexuals are sexual predators at their core.”

There’s no need, again, to cite all the research that overwhelmingly debunks that premise. And we can take solace that time is pushing James further to the fringe of the conversation on gays and lesbians. Yes, many among us continue to struggle with homosexuality, its morality, its place among the institutions we grew up honoring – but fewer believe that gays are evil at their core.

That’s what the Supreme Court reminded us this past week – that speech evolves, that debate evolves, and that evolution comes not from eliminating the most offensive parts of the conversation, but by confronting them and using them to help frame what we think.

It’s not easy to do. Not when the words are painful, or ugly, and not when they can bring harm – or invite it. And so we struggle each day with what gets condemned and what gets allowed. And we know, deep down, that while it might be more satisfying to reach for our “delete” buttons, it’s more valuable to at least consider “reply.”

A hitchhiker's guide to life's detours

She was probably quite a sight that morning, an 81-year-old woman in her dressiest slacks and bright blue suede blazer, standing on the side of Monroe Road during rush hour – with her thumb out.

Anita Brisbin’s car had a flat tire, and she had a job interview in Cotswold. It was between 8 and 9 a.m. on a Monday, so hundreds of cars passed her heading north toward uptown, green light wave after green light wave, with no one stopping.

Then one woman did.

On Thursday, Anita sat at her kitchen table, with the woman’s business card in one hand, her phone in another. “I’m sure she’ll remember me,” she said.

It would be hard not to. Give Anita Brisbin 15 minutes – about the time it takes to get from Monroe Road to Cotswold – and she’ll guide you enthusiastically through her story. She’s a Staten Island native of French-Canadian ancestry. She's lived in several places before coming to Charlotte 30 years ago with a husband, Robert, who’d had a stroke. He has since died, and her mother, Evelyn Gianna, now 103, is in an assisted living home.

Anita, who was a Realtor for years, has spent her savings on her husband’s and mother’s care. Along with Social Security payments, she needed some extra money. That’s what put her on Monroe Road that Monday.

She had heard the new PetSmart in Cotswold was hiring and decided to give it a try. Her friends raised wary eyebrows at the idea, fretting that maybe this isn’t what you do at her age.

Anita’s response: “People should not be afraid to tackle the world.”

Of course, sometimes the world tackles you, which is what happened on the drive to PetSmart. Anita heard a funny noise, and that became a loud noise, so she pulled off Monroe and saw her tire was shredded. For some of us, that might have been it for the job interview, but Anita doesn’t like to let life decide how life will go. She locked the car and, for the first time in her life: “Put my thumb out.”

That’s when the cars passed her. And passed her. “I was getting annoyed,” she said, back at her kitchen table, but then noted: “I think they were startled. You should have seen me.” And she tilted her head back and laughed.

Which brings up one more thing you should know about Anita Brisbin: She laughs. A lot. She’s had cancer and a mastectomy, and she’s spent her savings on care for her husband and mother. “You can’t go through what I’ve gone through without a sense of humor,” she said.

So she laughs at having to look for a job at her age, and she laughs at walking up Monroe Road in rush hour traffic. And instead of dwelling on all those cars that passed her, she makes a big deal out of the one that didn’t.

“That’s who I am,” she said.

Maybe it’s how you hit 81 without slowing down.

Finally, a sedan stopped, and the woman inside asked if Anita needed help. She drove Anita straight to the PetSmart – and in time for the interview – and wished her luck . She also gave her a company business card and wrote “Nancy” on it, but Anita misplaced it and didn’t remember the business – until the card turned up on Wednesday.

On Thursday morning, Anita dialed the number and explained her story to the voice that answered. A few minutes later, Nancy Hartsell called back. Yes, she said, she remembered Anita.

She explained that she was driving to work near uptown at Hovis Radiator Co. when she passed Anita. Nancy, who is 57, thought about what she hoped someone would do if it were her mother on the side of the road. So she stopped to see if this woman needed any help. “That was really nice,” Anita said.

And: “Thank you.”

And also: “I got the job.”

So the two talked about that and pets and when Nancy might come to visit her there. “Saturdays and Sundays,” Anita told her. Another story to tell, perhaps. Another reason to laugh.

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.”

Prepare, Charlotte, to be toasted - and roasted

To: Residents of Charlotte and Mecklenburg County

On behalf of our fellow journalists, we’d like to apologize in advance for the less-than-thoughtful analysis and reporting on Charlotte that may be conducted before and during the 2012 Democratic National Convention.

It’s a bit of a tradition in journalism for writers and commentators to reflect upon the shortcomings of the cities that host big and important events. The practice goes back at least 30 years: When Detroit was awarded the Republican convention in 1980, Time Mmagazine dismissed the city as “Cleveland without the glitter.”

We’re not proud of that – although it was a pretty good line.

But what we’re trying to say is: Prepare to be trashed, Charlotte.

We know some of you fret about things like this, that our city historically cares a great deal what others are saying about us. Even in our best moments, we tend to want to make sure people are applauding for the right reasons. On Tuesday, when Michelle Obama announced Charlotte’s selection in an e-mail to supporters, the line that got the most attention was one that noted the Queen City’s “great barbecue.” This prompted convulsions of self-examination across the city, including from our mayor, about whether our barbecue was, in fact, great – or if it should be something that defines us.

The answer: It’s not great, but 95 percent of visitors won’t know the difference. And even if it were great, critics from Dallas and Kansas City would harrumph at it.

Because journalists can sometimes be, well, a little snooty.

Really, it’s true.

This is especially so with national media, who tend to take offense when big events require them to be in cities not named New York or Los Angeles. That may be doubly so when those cities are in the South. At the 1996 Olympic Summer Games, for example, writers spent two weeks being horrified that Atlanta was representing our country to a global audience.

“A city with no charm, no grace and no ambience,” said the San Francisco Examiner’s John Crumpacker, who added delicately: “I’ll miss Atlanta like a boil on the butt.”

Atlanta, of course, did its part to live down to the criticism. Transportation was a disaster, and volunteers were ill-prepared. “The Redneck Olympics,” people called it, which was only slightly worse than “The Glitch Games,” which is what the BBC called Vancouver’s 2010 Winter Games after organizational mishaps that included buses not being able to make it up the hills to ski events.

To be fair, regular folks seemed to have a fine time at those events – at least the Atlanta Games, which I attended.

But journalists can sometimes be, well, a little picky.

No, seriously.

You might see this in more subtle ways in the next 18 months. Writers will note how Charlotte has made some great strides toward being a city like theirs, or they’ll rave about how Charlotte has two or three restaurants they’d go to back home – if, you know, all the good ones back home had a two-hour wait.

Or, there’s a possibility that our city won’t be julienned at all, as happened with Denver, which was widely praised during the 2008 Democratic National Convention. Coincidentally, Denver and DNC officials arranged for free neck, shoulder and finger massages all week in the media room.

In the end, though, Charlotte is burdened with the easy targets of geography and history, which will prove too tempting for some to pass up. Because as all of us know, it’s easier to poke than praise. (We’re looking at you, commenters.)

So again, Charlotte: We’re sorry, in advance. We hope you focus instead on the compliments that surely will come more frequently. And if that’s too difficult to do, there’s always another option:

Imagine how bad they’d rip Raleigh.

Can Charlotte live up to its moment on stage?

It was two sentences, sent to an e-mail list of Democratic officials and supporters.

“Charlotte is a city marked by its southern charm, warm hospitality, and an ‘up by the bootstraps’ mentality that has propelled the city forward…” wrote Michelle Obama Tuesday morning, announcing that Charlotte was getting the 2012 Democratic Convention.

“Vibrant, diverse, and full of opportunity, the Queen City is home to innovative, hardworking folks with big hearts and open minds,” she said.

Two sentences, probably typed by a speechwriter.

But it felt good, no?

Today, the home team gets a big win and some good headlines. The Hotels are booking, and the city is buzzing, and hardly anyone is groaning about politics or costs or that doozy of a commute the first week of September 2012.

Tomorrow, everyone starts looking at us more closely.

You know that moment after you finally get that promotion, or you land that job you bad wanted? Not the fist-in-the-air moment, but the one right after, when you think: “Holy (insert word here), now I have to do it.”

Well, now we have to do it.

This is the stage Charlotte has longed for – bigger than a golf championship or basketball tournament. The world will be pulling into our driveway for a week in 2012, and it’ll be reporting on everything it sees.

A lot of it will be big-picture stuff – how this once-formidable banking city is searching, and perhaps struggling, for a new vision. Or how this New South city is dealing with the seeming resegregation of its schools. Conservatives will wonder aloud how that Democratic leadership thing is working out for us. It won’t always be comfortable.

There also will be plenty of small-picture stuff, and in some ways, it’ll be just as important. Bloggers and critics will dissect our restaurants and public transportation and nightlife and traffic, and much of it will be done in the context of geography and stereotype. We’ll either be a Southern city that’s grown up, or a Southern town not ready for the big time, y’all.

We’ve had some good practice – the 1994 NCAA Final Four and, more recently, the ACC Basketball Tournament and the annual CIAA Tournament. But DNC 2012 will dwarf those, in size and scope. Some numbers to digest: The NCAA gave out about 1,700 media credentials for its men’s Final Four in 2010. Total media for the 2008 DNC: 15,000.

“This is a huge step,” said Michael Smith, president of Charlotte Center City Partners, which is responsible for planning and promoting uptown’s evolution. Smith is confident, of course, because leaders have spent decades preparing for this kind of moment, investing in hospitality assets and infrastructure. “It is a natural next step,” he said. “It’s part of our progression as a city.”

It seems a long while since we’ve thought of Charlotte that way. The economy has beaten us down and taken one of our bank headquarters, and like in other cities, our home values have plummeted and our schools are in crisis. Just this Monday, a sad parade of economists spoke at the annual City Council retreat, warning that it will be years before Charlotte climbs back to 2007 job levels.

But today, instead of wondering how we’ll recapture our swagger, we’ve had it handed to us – in the form of a test.

An “up by the bootstraps” mentality. Vibrant, diverse and full of opportunity.

Two sentences, sent to the world. Not something that overcomes our challenges, but a reminder that we’ve long been a place that meets them.