Attorney Jerry Reese is not ready to forfeit in his fight against minor league baseball

In his fight against bringing the Charlotte Knights minor league baseball team to the city, Jerry Reese has struck out – many times.

And he might strike out even more. Still, that doesn’t matter to him.

It also doesn’t matter that he’s earned enemies – one online commenter called him the “grim reaper of Uptown” – and been criticized in an editorial in The Charlotte Observer.

It doesn’t matter that this month the City Council, over his objections, agreed to give roughly $8 million to fund construction of a 3rd Ward stadium for the Knights.

It doesn’t even matter that he’s spent nearly $1 million over about a dozen years filing lawsuits that have yet to block the Knights from relocating from Fort Mill, S.C., to Charlotte.

For Reese, a lawyer who said he specializes in commercial real estate, it’s a battle that someone has to wage. If he’s the only guy waging it, that’s fine by him.

“I’ve told everyone I was going to keep doing this as long as I had a dollar in my pocket and I could still breathe,” Reese said recently, just three days after the council approved the $8 million for the stadium – and delivered another setback to Reese.

Despite the losses, the 60-year-old Reese says he’s undeterred in his quest to stop the stadium from being built.

He thinks the city should be aiming for a major league baseball team, that a minor league team would be saying to the world that Charlotte, in essence, is a minor league city.

The gold standard

After losing five lawsuits in a legal fight that’s been going on for 11 years and cost him $750,000 so far, Reese, rather than walk away, said he’s planning on bringing out bigger guns. After the City Council vote, he announced that he has begun hunting for a high-powered law firm to take up his case, ending years of representing himself.

“Bringing minor league baseball to Uptown will identify Charlotte as a minor league city for a long time,” Reese said. “Do we really want to be identified with cities such as Norfolk, Va., Toledo, Ohio, and Rochester, N.Y.? Major league baseball is the gold standard of professional sports.”

City boosters, though, apparently don’t share Reese’s vision for major league baseball. In April, Charlotte Chamber of Commerce President Bob Morgan and Chairman Frank Emory, in a letter to the City Council, threw their support behind spending millions in taxpayer money on a stadium for the Knights. And Charlotte Center City Partners, which promotes economic development in Uptown, has also endorsed the stadium, agreeing to contribute $725,000 to build it. (Center City Partners declined to comment for this story.)

Reese claims there’s an opportunity for Charlotte to snag a major league baseball team.

“It’s a combination of things – a perfect storm – that have come together right now,” he said. “There are at least two major league baseball teams that could move to this city right now.”

He points to the attendance of the Cincinnati Reds, whose namesake city had, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, a population in 2010 of 296,943. Charlotte’s 2010 population was 731,424.

Attendance at all Reds games – home and away – totaled 2.2 million last year, versus Carolina Panthers attendance of 1.09 million.

According to Reese, the Charlotte area has more people than all but 15 major league baseball cities.

But when asked to provide team names or more details on what he apparently knows about the potential for Charlotte to lure a major league team, Reese clams up.

It’s also unclear whether Reese could pull off his grand vision for his Brooklyn Renaissance Project, an Uptown revitalization plan that would include a new convention center, a large urban mall, bars, restaurants, hotels and, of course, a major league baseball stadium.

“The Brooklyn Renaissance Project was to be the Champs-Elysees of Charlotte,” he said. “I would say that 2.5 million (annually) would be a modest estimate on the number of people we could attract.

“To me, it’s a calling. Everything I have done in life has prepared me to do this project.”

That project, named after a historically black 2nd Ward neighborhood, remains nothing more than a dream. Reese said he has had plans drawn up for the project, but that’s about as far along as it is.

Seven lawsuits, eighth on the way

While there’s no certainty over whether Reese’s own project will see the light of day, he said there is only a 50 percent chance that the Knights stadium will be built. The team has presented a financing plan for the project, on which construction is scheduled to begin by October. The stadium is expected to be open by April 2014.

“If they’re hell-bent on getting a minor league stadium uptown, and it somehow gets built, then I’m going to work to get a major league stadium here somewhere in the suburbs or somewhere else in the state,” Reese said.

Two other Reese lawsuits to keep the Knights out of Charlotte are pending, and he plans to file another one by the end of this month. In that suit, if all goes according to plan, a big-name law firm – possibly one from outside the Charlotte area, he said – would represent him, which he says will give him a better chance of presenting his case to a judge.

In a June 7 letter to City Attorney Robert Hagemann, Reese laid out what he plans to include in his eighth lawsuit against the city. Reese, in the letter, said he doesn’t think it’s legal for stadium funding to come from the city’s occupancy tax or municipal service tax.

To Reese, his suits, which have clogged up the court system and cost taxpayer dollars, are for a good cause. And if his other suits are tossed out, he’ll file more, he said.

City Councilwoman Claire Fallon said she doesn’t know Reese, although she’s seen him appear before the council.

“He’s relentless,” she said. “My hat is off to him. I think any citizen that fights for their cause is to be admired.”

Although he still appears ardent, Reese admits that his fight has taken its toll. “It’s been really draining,” he said. “It hurts to get criticized by all these people, but, when you look at the context of it, you know that they just really don’t know what they’re talking about.

“But if you have a true calling to do something, you wake up every morning and ask what can you do to keep moving this forward. And that’s what I do, so I kind of have a renewed energy every day.

“I knew going into this that there would be some degree of criticism and opposition. You have to develop a thick skin and keep your eye on the prize.”