If you’re new to Charlotte, you might wonder why the city manager is huddling with the NBA in arena negotiations so secret that city leaders won’t even tell the media where they’re taking place. Why not send an experienced business executive to do it? And why must it be done in secret? The answers lie in a rich Charlotte history of arena negotiations dating back to 1996. In that span of time, at least half a dozen negotiating catastrophes between the team, the league, the city and its leaders have left the arena question unresolved.”There was no logical other person than her to do it,” said city council member Don Lochman.
What he should have said was that there was no logical person left to do it because it’s already been tried every conceivable way but this one, and with just about everyone but Syfert officially in the lead. In fact, it could be said that Syfert has gained a considerable amount of experience by watching everyone around her fail at what she’s about to undertake.
“I don’t know anyone on city staff with more experience,” said council member James Mitchell. “She’s the most qualified, point blank.”
In this round, Syfert will lead negotiations but will be joined at the negotiating table as schedules permit by investment banker Nelson Schwab and, depending on which city staff member you listen to, by Wachovia executive Mac Everett. She’ll also have paid advice from national arena consultant Craig Skiem and former Hornets general manager Carl Scheer. At her side will be City Budget Director Curt Walton, City Attorney Mac McCarley and Charlotte Coliseum Managing Director Mike Crum. Hopefully, this will be in a large room.
The arena negotiation strategy has come full circle since the mid-1990s, when Charlotte voters freaked out over the closed-door nature of the meetings between the Hornets and a Syfert-appointed committee of all the right names in local business at the time. Up until that point, most big issues in Charlotte were settled behind closed doors by the “right people,” who then gave elected officials their marching orders. Back then, the real meat of the negotiations took place between then-NationsBank execs and the Hornets. In fact, at one time, team owner George Shinn and the bankers were so cozy, bank VP Ed Brown had agreed to speak for Shinn to the council and the media. The council found out what would be expected of them and the taxpayers through media leaks and, eventually, a presentation on the proposed $500 million arena and downtown development deal at the end of the process.
But Charlotte was growing, becoming more cosmopolitan — for Charlotte — and before uptown leaders knew it, the serfs had organized a pro-referendum campaign and peppered the landscape with “Scream Referendum!” signs. The serfs had never acted this way before, and it seemed to disturb even Hornets owner George Shinn. In the midst of the heated public brawl, Shinn withdrew his proposal for a new arena, saying wanted a better lease deal that essentially gave him more of the profits generated by the arena. So the council voted to send Syfert to negotiate it, and she did.
By 1998, Shinn had again decided that yes, he did in fact need a new uptown arena to compete in the NBA. Still stung from the public backlash that followed the 1996 talks, the city tried a hybrid, public-input negotiating process in which Hornets reps attended meetings of a New Arena Committee appointed by council. The citizens’ committee, which eventually produced a 200-page report which is now gathering dust somewhere, was eventually dubbed “dysfunctional” by an Observer headline writer. The committee met for almost a year, and everything went fine until it voted to approve a 70/30 cost sharing deal in which the Hornets were to pay the larger part. Hornets leaders, who at the time were only willing to pay half the cost of the arena, publicly chafed at the proposal and the whole thing kind of faded from public view.
Along the way, though, Syfert has always had her arms in the huddle. City staff stuck to the New Arena Committee meetings like glue, “guiding” their outcomes as much as possible. Syfert was also the one who came forward with proposals like using the hotel-motel tax and a ticket tax to pay for the arena. And it’s well known by those who’ve covered nearly seven years of arena negotiations that city staff and those council members they chose to keep in the loop often guided ongoing arena talks, which were never official negotiations, in the late 1990s.
By 1999, Ray Wooldridge had bought a share of the team and taken over the negotiations. It was never really clear whom, if anyone, Wooldridge was negotiating with. Wooldridge met with all the right names, ran up council member Lynn Wheeler’s cell phone bill, shot faxes to city staff and leaked juicy tidbits to the public through the media.
Then he’d stand up the council, radically alter the parameters of the deal and threaten staff and council that the negotiation deadline on the team’s lease on the coliseum was running out. By the time he left town after the arena referendum failed, everyone looked stupid, including Wooldridge, who’d run an effective blocking strategy on the city through the media.
So we’ve come full circle, back to the days when things were decided swiftly and in secret in the back room of the country club. But sending the city manager to preside over the tea party holds several distinct advantages. Since she was appointed by the council, which was elected by the people, she’s accountable to the council, and ultimately to the people. But because Syfert and her staff aren’t elected, North Carolina open meetings laws doesn’t apply to them, so as long as council members don’t participate in the negotiation meetings, the media can’t force their way into them.
Which means no more groveling in public by city leaders.
But will the city get the best deal? By negotiating directly with the NBA, rather than with at least three potential ownership groups that have come forward, it would seem that the city has less leverage. Could a better deal be put together if the city had played the ownership groups against each other? So far, only Lochman has publicly broached that topic, one about which no one else on council seems to have much concern.
And so far, Mayor Pat McCrory has been the only one to definitively address it. At a council meeting last week, McCrory explained that since NBA leaders essentially outranked individual ownership groups, the city was really going directly to the top, rather than wading around in the middle, so it made sense to do it that way.
But because talks are secret, how that will play out in the negotiating room, no one outside its locked doors will ever know.
This article appears in Jul 31 – Aug 6, 2002.
