Former Bellevue mayor to oversee Lincoln Square project
Now he's overseeing construction of a downtown Bellevue office-hotel-retail complex that could tip the scales at half a billion dollars.
"To do something of this scale is an opportunity of a lifetime," Smith said as he sat in a meeting room lined with sketches of two glistening high-rise towers.
Across the street is the reality: two concrete stubs left by the economic woes that stymied the previous owners of Lincoln Square, a testament to the perils of a such an undertaking.
Playing David to a Goliath is a familiar roll for Smith.
Five years after moving to town, he beat an established local lawyer in a 1993 race for the Bellevue City Council. At 28, he became the youngest councilman in the city's history. Two years later he became the city's youngest mayor. Along the way he built a housing-development company from scratch, turning it from an idea in 1989 to a business that had more than $40 million in sales by the time he left in 2001.
The skills that brought Smith success in business and politics will be tested on a building that has claimed several veterans of big commercial construction projects.
Kemper Freeman, whose Bellevue Square mall and Bellevue Place have made him a pre-eminent Eastside developer, bought Lincoln Square last week and named Smith, 37, the project's general manager.
Those who know Smith say it's by far the biggest thing he's tackled.
"It's a major step," said King County Councilman Rob McKenna, who guided Smith's first campaign for City Council. "The situation, with Kemper sort of making a deep reach and having Ron take over that project, is not unlike when I made a deep reach and chaired his campaign for city council. I saw something in him, and he proved me right."
Friends and former associates of Smith describe him as a quick study and skilled leader, who keeps his eye on a goal while marshaling others to execute the details. He also knows the inner workings of Bellevue city government, which could prove valuable because the city is the lead regulator of the development.
At 6-feet-4, with a swimmer's broad shoulders, Smith's looks and leadership once earned comparisons with Superman's alter-ego, Clark Kent. The night he was elected mayor, business partner Mike Nykriem gave him a T-shirt emblazoned with the Superman logo.
For 12 years, Smith and Nykriem co-owned the Kirkland Building Co., an Eastside homebuilder. Nykriem likened Smith's role to a movie producer while Nykriem played the director. Smith was the one with the vision, and his partner handled day-to-day details.
"Ron is a big-picture guy, and this job is going to be a great job for him," said Nykriem, who amicably ended his business relationship with Smith in 2001.
The two met in 1989 at a University of Washington real-estate development class. Nykriem was a guest lecturer and Smith was a student. Smith, recalled Nykriem, asked so many questions that he told Smith to meet him after class. If you really want to learn about this business, he recalled saying, come on a drive with me and see it for yourself. Within a year they were business partners.
For Lincoln Square, Freeman was undaunted by Smith's relative lack of experience with such a massive project. He has been a booster of Smith's since the first City Council campaign. Last year, Freeman recruited him for the board that is trying to build a performing-arts center near Bellevue Square. More than a year ago, Freeman said, he sensed that Lincoln Square could be put up for sale and talked with Smith about managing the project.
Freeman characterized his selection as intuition, buttressed by more than a decade of watching Smith rise through the local ranks.
"I realize it's not a big, sophisticated process, but I'm 100 percent comfortable with it, and I have 100 percent confidence in Ron Smith," Freeman said. "You'll see over time. It will be clear to everyone why we picked the guy."
On the City Council, Smith developed a reputation as a business-friendly conservative. Recruited to run by Chamber of Commerce leaders, he championed reducing business regulation and holding down property taxes. He left the council in 2000, before his second term ended, citing competing demands from work and family.
Around the same time, Smith left the home-building business and started a commercial real-estate investment company, Solstice Investments. That switch was partly a frustration with the economics of home-building and partly a desire to tackle bigger projects, Smith said.
But the investment venture bore little fruit. The company tried to redevelop a shopping center outside Sacramento, Calif., but couldn't find backers willing to put up cash to help finance the project, Smith said.
The Southern California native grew up immersed in real estate and construction. His father's family owned a major concrete construction company since 1928. His mother comes from several generations of real-estate investors. At 13 he started spending summers on construction sites, working for his father's company.
At Lincoln Square, Smith will monitor construction and revisions for buildings originally designed by people with a different vision for the project. He will oversee the effort to fill the buildings with residents, retail businesses and a hotel. They will need to convince potential tenants that the problems of previous owners are history.
In a shelf above his desk sit binders full of contracts with people who had expected to move into high-rise condos as soon as December. Those deals must be renegotiated. Nearby, a floor plan for the residential tower shows that a closet will block the view of the Cascade Mountains as someone enters a condo. The closet needs to be moved, Smith said.
Freeman has said the already-built parking garage must be retooled to work more efficiently. The two towers, once planned for simultaneous construction, now are scheduled to go up in phases. That means Smith could be managing a construction site, shopping mall and residential tower simultaneously.
Smith described his role as "the guy who closes his eyes at night thinking, 'How am I going to make Lincoln Square work?' "
He'll be backed by a team of people at Freeman's Kemper Development, a big change from his earlier ventures. Smith ran the investment company from his house. At the homebuilding company, Smith's work varied from negotiating with lenders to, on one occasion, cleaning sewage from backed-up pipes at a home they developed.
"The key there is that Kemper has a staff," said Gary Carpenter, executive vice president of U.S. operations for Bentall Capital, who oversaw development of the dual-office building project Summit in downtown Bellevue. "It may be a project that Ron has never done before, but he's well-supported there."
Construction is slated to resume early next year, with the mall and residential tower finished by fall 2005. Freeman has not announced a specific timeline for the office tower. Smith, just three weeks into his new job, said they are pushing to move fast enough to meet the goals.
"We're already behind the eight ball," Smith said. "And it will be that way the whole time."
Warren Cornwall: 206-464-2311 or wcornwall@seattletimes.com