You gotta admire Charlotte attorney and developer Jerry Reese’s dogged efforts — detailed in this week’s Rhino Times — to stop Mecklenburg County from spending millions to subsidize the Charlotte Knights with an Uptown baseball stadium. But events elsewhere have taken Reese’s preferred alternative off the table.
Local government officials in Miami last night voted to approve a $525 million plan to build a new 37,000-seat stadium for the Florida Marlins. The Marlins had been Reese’s target as part of a dream to bring major league baseball to Charlotte. That dream was always dicey, given both the enormous cost and the difficulty in selling a full home slate of games to our relatively small metro footprint.
Now Reese is left to fight on against the $42 million handout to the Knights on the grounds that local bond money cannot legally be spent to help bring the project into being.
