Finally, Jerry Reese bows out

Charlotte and Mecklenburg County officials are surely celebrating today the end of Jerry Alan Reese's very long day in court. Moments ago, city attorney Bob Hagemann and county attorney Marvin Bethune announced that Reese, a Charlotte attorney, has agreed to drop an appeal of two lawsuits - his sixth and seventh - against the construction of an uptown baseball stadium. Reese also will withdraw an eighth lawsuit and promise not to file any others challenging the stadium.

The reason Reese is giving up? The city and county had asked Superior Court Judge W. David Lee for sanctions against Reese on the grounds that the sixth and seventh lawsuits were frivolous and "sought to relitigate issues that had already been decided by the court." Reese, by backing off, will avoid those sanctions.

Good. There once was a time when Reese asked legitimate questions to the courts about the city's and county's pursuit of minor league baseball in uptown. But when he didn't get the answers he wanted, he threw the equivalent of a legal tantrum, suing the city again and again until he had cost taxpayers more than $1.1 million.

Reese disagrees with this. He told me this afternoon that he would not file a frivolous lawsuit - "I pride myself on my professionalism" he said - and he has long contended he was suing Charlotte for the good of Charlotte.

City leaders, he believed, didn't think grandly enough about Charlotte's baseball and uptown possibilities. Reese, of course, had his own plan - a $4 billion project that included an uptown ballpark among dozens of acres of retail, offices and housing. He said he'd engaged in conversations with a Major League Baseball team, but he never was willing to provide convincing evidence that anyone in pro baseball had real interest in Charlotte.

The plan, however, was spectacular in its scope and detail. He rolled it out for me one day on a conference table at the Observer, then stepped back, beaming at it proudly. I thought then that he shared more with Charlotte leaders than they might want to admit. He believed his city should reach for bigger things. He thought self-doubt was unnecessarily holding us back.   

Reese still thinks so. "At the turn of this century, uptown Charlotte was poised to position itself as a major urban center," he said today. "That opportunity has passed as resources and opportunities have been wasted." He says he still believes in the concept of major league baseball in the Carolinas, and he continues to pursue that outside of Charlotte and Mecklenburg County. "I guess time will tell," he said.  


We've long celebrated that kind of thinking in Charlotte. Visionary, we called it, and in some ways, Jerry Reese might have been. But visions ultimately need a partner, and for whatever reason - politics, practicality, or Reese himself - he never was close to finding one here. It took him far too long, at a cost to him and the city, to realize it.  Peter St. Onge