Is it really a Tampa political event if The Weave isn’t there?
They call him The Weave.
Ron Weaver, a Harvard-educated Tampa real estate lawyer, is everywhere. There he is seated front and center behind the public lectern at Tampa City Council and Hillsborough County Commission meetings, waiting for his chance to speak to elected officials. (Or in the old days, to sing to them. More on that later.)
At muckety-muck weddings, funerals, galas, landmark openings, important retirements, he’s there, weaving his way through the crowd to shake hands, speak to people and remember what they last talked about — details he’s recorded on a million index cards over the years.
Million is not much of an exaggeration. His Christmas card list hit 1,600.
At the who’s-who opening of historic Goody Goody restaurant in Hyde Park in 2016, he stepped inside dressed in his neat suit, stopped at tables where notables brushed away Cuban toast crumbs to shake hands, circled the room, then made a smooth exit. Classic Weave. Someone who didn’t know better might have thought he was the owner.
At events, sometimes he pays for his dinner but slips out after cocktails to get to the next happening.
“I weave in and out of the back so I don’t offend anybody’s rubber chicken,” Weaver recently said. Such gatherings are important, he said, so “when it’s time to decide whether to go to one Christmas party or five, I usually go to five.”
Not that he’s all about the party.
In his five decades in Tampa, Weaver, of the Stearns Weaver Miller firm, has become a respected player in the land-use world. He’s had a hand in the acquisition and development of more than $6 billion in Florida properties, including 100,000 homes and 15 million square feet of retail space. He’s spoken about land-use issues across the country and advocated locally for what he calls the “courage” to fund transportation. A group called Real Estate Lives, which he founded after the Great Recession of 2008, has helped thousands who were out of work.
At 74, he retires at year’s end.
“As long as I’ve been around and active in public service and politics, there has always been Ron Weaver,” said former Tampa Mayor Bob Buckhorn. “He is a uniquely Tampa figure.”
“It’s a certain Ron Weaver handshake — he keeps his arm close to his body and the hand is extended, ‘Good morning, good to see you, how are you,’ very pleasant,” said Tampa City Council chairperson Guido Maniscalco. “He’s everywhere, he knows pretty much everyone. He’s very much Tampa.”
Raised in a North Carolina farming town, Weaver talks about watching an old-school barn-raising with all the neighbors pitching in. When he was being interviewed by law firms for jobs, Tampa felt like a town getting going — “like a city at 10 a.m. in its day,” he said.
To his eye, the infamous Hillsborough County Commission bribery scandal of the 1970s and ’80s changed the days of “the old aw-shucks zoning applications with good old boys” to a more sophisticated and transparent system. He wasn’t involved in the cases in the scandal, but calls came in after three commissioners were indicted, he said.
“Suddenly my phone started ringing off the hook on land use and zoning and growth management,” he said.
His father had to drop out of school in the eighth grade to support his family, he said. When Weaver was 4, his dad was working selling seed when he taught his son to go up to a farmer customer, say he was Ronnie Weaver and shake hands.
“I’ve been doing that ever since, meeting people and being glad to meet people as my dad encouraged me,” he said.
Longtime locals remember stories, like back when Tampa City Council chambers had thick blue drapes near the speaker’s lectern to block the sunlight. Weaver was making an impassioned argument when his arms got tangled in the curtains.
“I literally made myself a straitjacket. I couldn’t move my arms,” he said. But he proceeded apace while disentangling himself and, according to witnesses, finished his speech just as his three minutes were up.
About the singing: At government meetings from 1994 to 2008, Weaver would sometimes turn a presentation into a sort of a capella rock opera. Think Meatloaf’s “I’d Do Anything for Love (But I Won’t Do That),” except with lyrics about how the government would do anything to take your property.
“It got them to wake up,” he said. Half his friends thought it was great. The rest told him it was tacky.
When he gives frequent talks to groups like Leadership Tampa Bay, he tells them: “Be audacious and do what you fear.” That comes from ninth grade, when he was supposed to sing “We Three Kings” but forgot the words. It made him afraid of a microphone, he said.
“But now I love it,” he said. “I got the courage to speak up again and I’ve been doing it ever since. Don’t fear you’ll forget the words.”
Weaver is especially known for his recall of details about people. “I could have had a conversation (with him) five years ago, and he remembers,” Maniscalco said.
Weaver said he learned about the power of index cards at a seminar for young lawyers encouraging them to write on them every night. His cards contain anything from interesting details he learned about someone — the subject of their doctoral thesis, maybe — to points of the law to someone who just moved to town and is looking for the best dog groomer.
“Whatever people were interested in, I wrote down on one of those million 3-by-5 cards,” he said.
Gregory Morgan, broker associate with Smith & Associates Real Estate, said on the few nights he attends two events, he sees Weaver at both and later hears he went to three more. Walk up when Weaver is talking with someone and you’ll be introduced with details.
“And then he’s gone and you’ve met someone,” Morgan said. “He’s absolutely the best networker I’ve ever met. He’s almost like the pied piper — he has an ability to pull people together.”
Weaver arrived here to a sleepier downtown.
“I probably only expected half of this,” he said of the city’s recent boom. “I did not expect the magnificence of Water Street. It’s amazing to see the way we’ve become a world-class city and one of Time magazine’s best places.”
In retirement, he will no doubt network, and travel with his wife, Jackie, and also continue teaching on very varied subjects — diversity, Tampa’s history, women transforming the town, Vladimir Putin.
“He’s just become part of the fabric of Tampa,” said Buckhorn. “One of the colorful, likable, endearing characters of Tampa life.”
