"There is a huge dissatisfaction with the way the city is run," said Madans. "The arena was just the pushing over the edge."
Madans, 52, thinks it's time for a change. That's why the brash businessman is taking his second crack at the mayor's office, hoping to capitalize on the public's anger to snatch the mayor's office from McCrory, a 46-year-old Republican who has served four terms.
But for that to work, the public will have to remember two things -- McCrory's record and Madans' name. Madans is doing his best to remind them of both.
"How can you vote for somebody that's telling you that if I'm elected, if the Congress seat opens up, if the Senatorial seat opens, if they pick me as a governor's candidate, I'm going to run," Madans asks. "If your heart is to go elsewhere, you can't give 110 percent."
Madans, a Democrat, says that under McCrory's leadership things just aren't getting done.
"The aquarium issue should have been resolved," said Madans. "It should have been here. Minor league baseball should have been here already. You know it's strange that we would be talking about a billion dollars going into light rail when we don't have the density to even bring in major league baseball. There are certain things that don't match up. But if we spend time completing what needs to be completed, we will have a lot more time to spend on being proactive to things we need to be paying attention to in the future."
Madans may or may not have good points, but what he certainly doesn't have is a lot of time.
With just five weeks left to go in the race, Madans has a long way to go to beat McCrory. Along the streets and thoroughfares of Charlotte's opulent old money neighborhoods, McCrory's campaign signs litter the landscape. A few of Madans' campaign signs have popped up here and there, but with less than $10,000 in the bank -- McCrory has at least $260,000 -- Madans will have to find some way to reach a lot of people quickly to win the race.
In August, Madans told Creative Loafing he was working with a large team of hundreds of volunteers who would help him win the race by going door-to-door and talking with voters, the kind of personal touch McCrory's campaigns have usually lacked. He planned to win the race, he said, with a last-minute blitz in the last two or three weeks of the campaign, funded by the $70,000 he planned to raise. But two months later, most of the money hasn't materialized. Now Madans says he's going to lend his campaign money to bridge the gaps, never a good sign so close to the November election.
But if history is any indicator, the race isn't over yet.
The last time Madans ran for mayor of Charlotte, all hell broke loose in the final weeks of the campaign. It wasn't entirely his fault. Perhaps the biggest mistake Madans made in that 1989 race against then-Mayor Sue Myrick was honestly answering a question about whether he'd ever used drugs. He'd used cocaine and marijuana in college in the early 70s, he admitted after a news conference in which he unveiled a six-point anti-crime program that included strategies to combat illegal drugs.
Myrick, who was known for her anti-drug parades and for bulldozing drug houses, pounded Madans relentlessly on his former drug use and general immorality until Creative Loafing dug up and published court records documenting an extra-marital affair Myrick had in the early 70s. Madans used the affair to fire back until Myrick finally declared a ceasefire right before the election. By then, it was too late. A story on the sordid campaign ran nationally on the television show A Current Affair.
Myrick, a popular mayor before the race, won with only 47 percent of the vote. Madans got 15 percent, running behind Democrat Al Rousso, who had dropped out of the mayoral primary but took 38 percent of the vote as a write-in candidate.
So far, Madans and McCrory have refrained from personal attacks. But Madans, a successful businessman who has owned several companies, has been drawing comparisons between McCrory and himself.
Madans says McCrory's lack of business experience is hurting Charlotte. Before he was mayor, McCrory worked full time at a mid-level job at Duke Power. McCrory still retains that job and receives a paycheck from Duke, but isn't known to show up to work there often as his mayoral duties consume most of his time.
"I know how to make the deal, I know how to close the deal," said Madans. "I am a business man. So working with people up in Washington is just a matter of cooperation. It's just a matter of attitude. The mayor does not have it. He doesn't have the background to do it, he doesn't have the expertise to do it and everything he has shown during his tenure is proving that, that he's not one to hold people together, that he's not one to come up with the ideas and to push things forward. His ability to work with the state legislators in Raleigh is not good, either."
Since the beginning of his campaign, Madans has been pounding on McCrory for ignoring the outcome of the 2001 arena referendum, in which 57 percent of voters said "no" to building a new arena for an NBA team and funding several new cultural amenities. McCrory claims he and the city council didn't ignore the outcome of the referendum because the arena deal they approved less than a year later was different than the one the public rejected at the polls.
Whatever the case, the defeat of popular at-large city council member and arena-backer Lynn Wheeler in the September 23 primary may signal that the arena issue could be successfully used against McCrory with some voters in the general election.
"I think Madans has a chance for a strong showing if he can successfully tap into the sizable group of angry voters that feel that their opinions on a wide range of issues from the arena, taxation and rezoning type issues are being ignored by the mayor," says Democrat strategist Dan McCorkle. "The question is will the Pro-Castano-Dump-Wheeler faction of the Republican Party remain angry and motivated enough to increase their voter base and take a big generous bite out of Pat McCrory's rear end by voting for a Democrat just this once? In a low turnout municipal election, anything is possible."
UNCC professor Ted Arrington gives Madans little or no chance of defeating the popular mayor, even if he plays up the arena issue.
"If Madans gets 40 percent of the votes that's good," said Arrington. "If he gets 45 percent, that's excellent."
While Madans may have legitimate gripes about McCrory's performance, his explanation of how he would have brought the arena to town using only private money is sketchy at best. So are his plans to bring baseball and the aquarium to town using only private, corporate dollars.
Several of Madans' other campaign promises appear to have been hastily thought through as well.
"The first thing we will do is make it so there will never be another non-binding referendum," Madans says. But then he admits he hasn't researched exactly how he would do this or even whether it's legally possible to force a municipality to abide by the results of an advisory referendum.
"Traffic has been a problem here for years," Madans says. "The mayor needs to play an active part in addressing it. We're going to change the whole way the whole program is designed to decide where the roads are going to go."
But when asked what changes he'll make to "the program," Madans admits he's not familiar with how the city decides to build or maintain roads and that he'll have to first "examine the way the roads are put in and the way they are maintained."
Madans also says that because "light rail is going to be here and it is going to be expensive," the city will likely have to impose user fees or some other additional kind of tax on citizens to pay for it.
"Maybe you're going to have to spend $150 over and above here in town to have an auto license to raise additional funding," Madans says. But Madans was unable to explain why extra money for light rail is needed beyond the half-cent sales tax already dedicated to pay for it.
Madans' explanations of how he plans to boost small businesses were also a bit fuzzy. He says the city needs to provide "incentive dollars to assist small businessmen in obtaining loans almost like what's going on right now on the private sector partnership with the governments and the whitewater project."
But the city and its satellite agencies already have similar programs, some in partnership with local lending institutions, to provide loans to small businesses, a fact Madans seemed unaware of during our August interview.
Madans' plans to recruit and retain businesses had the same hollow ring to it.
"How would we do it?" Madans asks. "The big three corporations here are no longer local companies, they're global. They have wonderful economic development programs that can be tapped. I as the mayor would go and see what we could tap into, their economic development councils, their economic development programs because it's a huge benefit to them. I guarantee you if we had gone to Duke Power and the other two banks and said we want to put up a collective pool of $250 million to attract other businesses, someone would have done something," Madans says. "Instead, we get one arena."
Madans says he hasn't met with the executives of these companies to discuss his ideas.
Still Madans does offer an alternative to McCrory. Unlike McCrory, he supports extending domestic partner benefits to city employees. He believes the city should set a living wage for its employees and contractors. And he's been a vocal advocate for consolidating city and county government during this campaign.
Now all he needs is a miracle, or a voter backlash against McCrory that no one saw coming.