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| Feature |
Urban Champions
Elizabeth Harris and Emily DeNitto
05/01/2007
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Controversy dogged the campaign, as residents worried over what
the measure might mean for their tax bills. On Election Day, a reporter asked
Ann about poll results showing a significant number of voters opposed to the
initiative. She admitted that she was frustrated that people "don’t get it"—an
off-the-cuff response she now regrets. One of the opponent groups accused the
Goodnights of having a vested interest in the proposal because, as Cary
landowners, they stood to benefit from regional growth. These criticisms do not
seem to faze Ann. "Their argument was so far-fetched; it didn’t hold water, it
didn’t add up, it wasn’t consistent," she says. "They were just
panicking—throwing anything they could into the mix to keep voters confused and
doubtful."
In February, local residents learned that a company backed by
Jim plans to sell 108 acres to the school board at a 168 percent profit. Jim,
who had no knowledge of the deal, according to his business associates, has
since told his representatives to return any of his profit to taxpayers.
Four years ago, the Goodnights began crusading for
infrastructure of a different nature when they decided that Wake County needed a
four-star hotel for its steady stream of visitors. They reasoned that such a
hotel would also enhance the city’s social and cultural life while creating new
jobs. Though they had no experience in the industry, they called senior
executives at the Four Seasons and Ritz-Carlton with their proposal. Jim pointed
out that many companies were expanding in the area. The rebuff they received
came as something of a shock. "I remember the Four Seasons head guy told me,
‘You know, if we got a hotel down there and assigned our managers to it, they
would think they had been demoted,’" Ann says.
Rather than scrap the plan, the Goodnights chose to build the
hotel themselves. They used the Four Seasons in San Francisco as a model and set
aside land on the SAS campus. First they picked a site that abutted a
residential area, but the adjacent community was no less opposed than the hotel
chains had been. So they moved their hotel a mile away, to a spot that Ann says
she now likes better. In January, they opened the 150-room Umstead Hotel. No one
is yet willing to predict the plan’s commercial success or whether the
Goodnights’ estimation of their area’s demand for a four-star hotel and spa is
accurate—let alone their promises of local economic growth.
Ann’s latest philanthropic and educational effort is an
outreach program at the North Carolina Museum of Art, also in Cary, of which she
is a board member. The Goodnights had previously contributed $1 million to
create a park next to the museum where an abandoned juvenile detention center
stood. Now she plans to bring schoolchildren to enjoy the facilities and learn
about art. Because of the core-subject demands of end-of-grade testing and No
Child Left Behind, classes such as art have suffered, Ann says, who wants the
education program at the museum to be a national model.
Ann has also been busily denying recent rumors that her
ambitions for Cary extend to running for mayor. "That makes the hair on my arms
stand up," she has said. "There is absolutely no truth in this world that I
would do that."
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