Personality Profile Writing Sample
Jacksonville Business Journal
Bucking the trends: Developer puts up some fights
August, 2002
Hotel Developer Charles "Bucky" Clarkson spent eight days in the hospital in 1968 with a stab wound to the stomach. He refused to empty his pockets to muggers near Harlem. Although many would have given up the cash, Clarkson, who's six feet tall and often works out twice a day, took a swing at one thug before taking it in the gut. They ran empty handed.
"They did not get my $3.24," said Clarkson, president of Jacksonville-based Clarkson Co. who's known among Northeast Florida businessmen and politicos as a tough, sometimes explosive, negotiator. Clarkson is putting up a nearly two-decade fight to build a convention hotel near the Prime Osborn Convention Center Downtown. It's the latest and most high-profile in a lifetime of calculated business risks.
Clarkson first must convince the mayor his project is worth $25 million in city funds. Not an easy task, considering John Delaney has long dismissed the idea of making Jacksonville a major convention market. If his second development deal for the 4-acre property - in the LaVilla redevelopment area, bordered by Water, Bay, Jefferson and Lee streets - doesn't pan out, Clarkson risks a dent to his credibility in political and development circles. If he wins, he could win big. He envisions a bustling convention district lined with restaurants, retail and entertainment venues and the first validation of the Automated Skyway Express. He could earn "told-you-so" rights as a pioneer who reclaimed a forgotten area.
"The biggest risk you can take," said Clarkson, who graduated from Princeton University in 1967 with a bachelor's in history, "is taking no risk."
Clarkson's office features remnants of his family history, including a great uncle's Civil War diary and artifacts belonging to another ancestor, Andrew Byerly, a scout who assisted the English during the 18th century French and Indian raids. He earned a law degree from George Washington University in 1972. Although he had no aspirations for a legal career - "I didn't like the idea of getting paid by the hour" - he figured a knowledge of law would give him an edge in real estate.
Clarkson wasn't crazy about the idea of studying. Clarkson's wife Pat, at the time a fellow student at George Washington, recalled a presentation for which the rest of the class had studied all week. He was the first to step up to the podium.
"He had just gotten the book that afternoon," Pat Clarkson said. "He was leafing through the pages in a very casual, relaxed way. I thought, 'Oh my gosh, that is some brave guy.'"
Clarkson founded his company in Baltimore in 1976. It first specialized in buying and redeveloping foreclosed or distressed apartment complexes. Within a few years, it developed projects in Jacksonville, Orlando, Savannah, Birmingham and Houston.
"I was spending an awful lot of time traveling to this part of the world," Clarkson said. He moved the company to Jacksonville in 1978 and began to sell his apartments in the mid-1980s, a response to changes in tax laws. "Public policy favors for-sale housing," he said. "Interest rates went down, so people moved out. It's now a seller's market."
Today, the company manages affordable housing properties for nonprofit organizations, including the Jacksonville Housing Partnership, First Coast Housing and the Greater Miami Neighborhoods. But the majority of his business focuses on the hospitality industry - a switch that led to his most controversial business goal.
Ready to rumble
Clarkson began buying parcels of the 107,000-square-foot Downtown site in 1981 at $10 a square foot. In 1997, the land was valued at $50 a square foot. He secured a national partner, Bethesda, Md.-based Host Marriott, to develop a $64 million, 412-room convention hotel in February. Jacksonville's Renaissance Design Build also is in the mix with plans for entertainment aspects, including a House of Blues-style night club. The project would create 400 jobs and generate $120 million in tax revenues over the next 30 years, his figures show.
Delaney, however, balks at Clarkson's request for $20 million in public funds to acquire surrounding land and help build the project, plus $5 million to build a 500-space parking garage. Downtown needs to absorb the rooms it already has, he said, including the 977 rooms the Adam's Mark Hotel added last year, doubling Downtown's hotel room inventory.
Therein lies the crux of one of the loudest arguments to be heard from City Hall. Last month, Clarkson hit the city and the Jacksonville Economic Development Commission with a 90-day notification of a claim for defaulting on a 1997 agreement wherein city and JEDC officials signed off on $17.7 million in incentives for a project with Pittsburgh-based Interstate Hotels.
Before Clarkson could turn dirt, city officials announced plans to build the Adam's Mark near The Jacksonville Landing with $21 million in public incentives. Clarkson's investors pulled out, saying Downtown could absorb just one new hotel. He tells it this way: Delaney promised he'd help get the project done if Clarkson agreed not to sue. Clarkson kept his end of the bargain. Delaney reneged.
Delaney is willing to consider a revamped project. "But it has to be the right development," he said, noting the 1997 deal fell through on Clarkson's end and had nothing to do with the city.
"There's no doubt he felt he was left out and probably was," former Mayor Jake Godbold said. "No doubt [Clarkson's] hotel would have went had they not gone with the Adam's Mark."
No room for the inn
Clarkson's persistence leaves area developers shaking their heads.
There's "no question" Clarkson is taking a risk, said Jack Demetree, chairman of Demetree Bros., a Southside development firm. "He's willing to stick his money where his mouth is and take a chance on a project that you can't be sure will go through."
Clarkson hopes to open the hotel in time for the 2005 Super Bowl. He's betting on figures from the New York-based NFL that show 70 percent of executives say they would consider holding a convention or meeting in a host city following a positive Super Bowl experience. But a 6 percent drop in occupancy rates across Duval County over the past years suggests the new hotel would struggle once Super Bowl fans head home.
"Downtown ... is off at a greater level [than the rest of the county] due to the addition of the Adam's Mark into the marketplace," said Kitty Ratcliffe, president of the Jacksonville and the Beaches Convention and Visitors Bureau.
"The Super Bowl is one week," said Frank Pearce, co-owner of Pearce & Associates, a Southside executive search firm, and a long-time Clarkson friend. "Empty rooms are year-round. [City officials] don't want another 500-or 800-room hotel in Jacksonville."
Mayoral candidate and former JEDC Executive Director Mike Weinstein encouraged Clarkson to consider other uses, including an office complex.
"It's not attached to the convention center, so it loses the image of being a convention center hotel," Weinstein said. "And it's eight or nine blocks away from the center of commerce Downtown."
Clarkson's highly publicized brawl with Delaney could come back to bite both men, much like Hollywood's "difficult actor" scenarios.
"Those two guys just have a special thing going," Godbold said. "Bucky'll boil up on you before you know it, but there's the other side of it. He's a very honest and fair person. And a very generous person as far as community is concerned."
Godbold has never negotiated a deal with Clarkson. Weinstein has.
"I would not characterize it as the easiest negotiation process I've ever been in," he said of the 1997 deal. "He's very emotional, very engaged and very committed to trying to reach the outcome."
Even Pearce once hung up on him three times in a 15-minute period.
"Jacksonville is a better place because Bucky Clarkson lives here and does business here," Pearce said. "But I didn't say he was easy to deal with. Everybody would be more supportive of Bucky if, at one time or another, he hadn't just about exploded with everybody."
Delaney's labeling Clarkson a "bully" upsets his wife, an attorney who represents domestic violence victims pro bono. "I was disappointed that he got into name calling when the whole issue was about economic development," Pat Clarkson said. "It was not very mayoral of him. Bucky is a really smart, tough businessman. John can characterize him any way he wants."
She admits her husband's temper can flare; however, "it's because he cares so much about the things he spends his time and efforts on," she said.
Clarkson's spunk began early on, said older brother Larry Clarkson. They are two of four siblings. "That's what caused him to be a risk taker. He was trying to keep up with his older siblings."
Larry gave Bucky his nickname at age 3. "He didn't like Chucky, so I started through the alphabet and, luckily, we stopped at Bucky."
Friends and foes alike say Clarkson has a soft spot for civil service - one that nearly cost him his life during the 1960s when he worked with New York's Neighborhood Youth Corps. It gave financial grants to low-income children who enrolled in the program. Believing too many kids were showing up once a month to collect checks and otherwise abandoning the program, Clarkson came up with the idea of holding check recipients accountable. The organization began to base the dollars granted on participation days.
"The first day I handed out a check, my life was threatened," Clarkson said.
"You'll find that his financial support of community institutions and undertakings has been quite significant," said Preston Haskell, president of The Haskell Co., a design/build firm with national headquarters in Riverside. "He's usually done it quietly, without a lot of fan fare."
Clarkson considers himself a family man. His eldest son, Capt. Thomas Clarkson, 29, is an F18 pilot in the U.S. Marine Corps and recently returned from a tour in Afghanistan.
"In [Bucky's] view, a risk taker is someone like our son, who lands jets on an aircraft carrier," Pat Clarkson said. The couple's daughter, Blair, 27, is a guidance counselor and middle school teacher at the International School in Palo Alto, Calif. Youngest son, John, 20, is studying history and Spanish at Vanderbilt University in Nashville.
"For all his difficult ways, he's a good man," Pearce said of Clarkson. "But he makes us all crazy."
Ahead of his time
Clarkson doesn't consider himself a "gun-slinging, hip-shooter" risk taker.
"Bill Gates ... bet the ranch over and over again on Microsoft," said Clarkson, a believer in diversifying investments. "It paid off. That's a big risk."
Clarkson's name is attached to 30 companies, including Enterprise North Florida, an emerging technologies incubator. His risks are far from impulsive, colleagues said.
"I always begin with trying to analyze the worst case scenario," Clarkson said. "Once I'm satisfied with that answer, it's a calculated risk ... with a worst case that I know I can live with that limits my exposure."
Clarkson sees an advantage in doing things the hard way.
"We are working hard on niche areas," he said. Namely high-barrier areas that are difficult to acquire and permit.
Examples include a former apartment complex Clarkson converted into a Residence Inn in Coconut Grove, and a hotel deal pending in Ybor City.
"We've had to go through an elaborate approval process that's lasted well over a year," Clarkson said. He expects to ink an agreement with Ybor officials next week but nixed a deal for a Deerwood Hampton Hotel project in September, saying it was just too easy.
"There was too much potential for competitors to come in," he said. "So your pricing power goes down. We want to do areas where it's very difficult to do a deal."
Clarkson also continued to invest in emerging high-tech companies as others fled the market following the dot-com bust.
"Fifty years from now," said Mark Rubin, president of Jacksonville's Visagent, an online grocery broker, "Bucky will be considered a founding father in helping to establish the infrastructure that helped to facilitate the growth of emerging technology companies in Jacksonville."
Clarkson invested in Visagent and serves on its board of directors.
Clarkson has a track record for pushing projects that are struggling short-term but eventually could pay off, developers said. The Jacksonville Landing and the Skyway are examples.
"He does think further ahead ... than most people," Demetree said. After all, even New York's subway system met with initial resistance.
The Skyway records an average 3,000 riders a week, said Jacksonville Transportation Authority officials. A 1991 study projected nearly 3,900 a week, based on plans to open the full system in 1993, which didn't happen until 2000.
Ridership fluctuates with conventions and events Downtown. Projections were based on plans for intensified convention marketing efforts and development of the Downtown core, JTA spokeswoman Marci Larson said.
"The people mover was built for the future and the future's still coming," Pearce said. "There'll be a time when that thing is used."
Clarkson - an executive of The Rouse Co., the Landing's Columbia, Md.-based parent, from 1969 to 1973 - played a key role in luring the project Downtown. It marked Rouse's first festival mall venture in a market with fewer than 2 million residents. At the time, Jacksonville listed just more than 600,000 residents.
"Rouse felt we didn't have the critical mass and were probably right," Pearce said. "But it is a real coup for Jacksonville."
Today, however, Rouse executives are considering selling the Landing.
"To make it happen, you've got to have Downtown living and you've got to have tourists," Godbold said. "We haven't had the flow of either one. We're now beginning to get Downtown living. Eventually, that thing is going to work."
Both projects illustrate Clarkson's tendency to look ahead - sometimes far ahead, colleagues said. Projects such as the Landing, the Skyway and Clarkson's convention hotel "would pay off in the long haul," Demetree said. "You, as a businessman, have to analyze if you want to carry it for the long haul and if it's worth the risk."
That knowledge comes in part from Clarkson's travels. He draws on Japan's commitment to quality, Paris' appreciation of historic buildings, Hong Kong's energetic markets, Italy's design and art and Europe's mass transit systems, he said.
Clarkson's ability to "look beyond the cloud or the mist to the sunshine" helped Jacksonville's Intelligenxia win international recognition at last year's conference of Santa Clara, Calif.-based The Indus Entrepreneurs, said founder and Chief Technology Officer Ren Mohan.
Indus boasts more than 6,000 members in 29 chapters worldwide representing software and information technologies, biotech, financial services and other industries. The annual conference is designed to showcase emerging technologies and products from around the globe.
"We went there based on his insistence," Mohan said. "Guess what - we won the best software of the showcase award. We were competing against predominantly Silicon Valley companies ... and here we are, a no-name company out of the East Coast. It was a great achievement for us."
The company lacked the nerve to try without the encouragement of Clarkson, who serves on its board, Mohan said. "He just doesn't take risks indiscriminately. Some people can visualize what is going to happen. People that do it very well, using their experience and intelligence, are the people who are successful. That's what Mr. Clarkson is."
* Florida Press Association Award Winner.
© 2002 American City Business Journals Inc.
Reach Devan Stuart at 904.742.7011
