As he has threatened to do since November, Charlotte attorney and developer Jerry Reese has filed a lawsuit challenging the legality of the plan to plop a $35 million minor league baseball stadium Uptown.
Details of the suit are sketchy, but recall that the county land involved in the project was purchased with bond money that seemed to explicitly rule out an baseball stadium for the site.
Once again, here is the exact language from the 2004 bond referendum:
Shall the order authorizing $69,000,000 of bonds secured by a pledged of faith and credit of the County of Mecklenburg to pay capital costs of providing park and recreation facilities (other than a stadium for professional baseball) including the acquisition and construction of new park and recreation facilities, the improvement and expansion of existing park and recreation facilities and the acquisition and installation of interests in real property required therefore, and a tax to be levied for the payment thereof, be approved?
The county seems to be trying to make a distinction that because Don Beaver and the Knights are paying for the stadium on land essentially gifted to them by the county, the prohibition on paying for the capital costs of a baseball stadium does not apply.
Nice try, but I really do not think that argument is gonna fly in a courtroom. Clearly the average voter reading that ballot is going to conclude that they are voting for a park and not a baseball stadium. And no where does the county ask for permission to give the very land in quesition to a baseball team. It would be perverse to hold that voters both very much wanted a park on the site and to give the land away for the precisely the professional baseball stadium the county could not itself build.
Then again, perverse has described this uptown baseball gambit from the start.
