Alex Fairly's Journey: From Hodgetown Hero to Nelson Nemesis

Alex Fairly/Screenshot from Inspire Amarillo

The year is 2017, and the ink is just drying on the lease between Elmore Sports Group and the City of Amarillo to bring a minor league baseball team to the Panhandle.

Alex Fairly, the president of the Fairly Group, is being hailed as one of the key players among a team of local leaders to have gotten the deal done. What started as one of the city’s most controversial projects surrounded by a number of questions regarding whether an MLB-affiliated minor league team would even play in Amarillo ended with cheers and celebration.

For his part, Fairly brokered a deal to charge the Elmore Group one of the highest rents in Texas League baseball in an effort to help the stadium pay for itself.

"It is the highest rent in the Texas League," Fairly told the Amarillo Globe-News in 2017. "I'm highly confident of that."

Mayor Ginger Nelson, who won her first term in office after a controversial stint as the chair of the Amarillo Economic Development Corporation board, was taking pride in the project’s finalization as the first big win of her campaign. And for Nelson’s part, while she knew she could utilize the ballpark as a political win on paper, also gave credit to the team — that included Fairly — for getting the project done.

"I'm very proud of our team and the effort that we've put in negotiating and working through the issues of this lease," Nelson told AGN in that same interview. "I'm very pleased we have the highest rent in the Texas League. We made a market deal and negotiated it thoroughly.”

Fast forward to 2023, and Fairly has become perhaps the biggest political nemesis of Nelson, who, for her part, has feuded with quite a few individuals in local politics over her six-year run in office. However, this rival is different, as he comes to the table with a thick wallet and is using his checkbook to fight back against the war chest funded by Nelson’s longtime backers.

So, what exactly turned Fairly into Nelson’s top nemesis? As it turns out, it was a process that was a long time coming.

In 2020, Fairly played a pivotal role in killing the Amarillo Civic Center bond proposal put forward by Nelson and her City Council. Nelson’s City Council had placed a massive bond item on the ballot that would include the Civic Center, and would provide funding to a number of downtown projects. For his part, Fairly was completely opposed to Nelson’s proposal, taking the side of the taxpayers.

According to Transparency USA, a company tied to Fairly put $100,000 into the campaign to defeat the proposition. And when it went down by a large margin in that November’s election, Fairly wasn’t shy about expressing his approval of the voters’ decision. Throughout that campaign, Fairly promised to put forward a plan for the Amarillo Civic Center that wouldn’t involve nearly as large of a property tax increase, at a fraction of the cost of the project put forward by the City Council.

Fairly made good on his promise, proposing “The Amarillo Plan” in December 2020, which was endorsed by former Amarillo Mayor Jerry Hodge. Fairly and Hodge put pressure on the Amarillo City Council to place the item on the ballot and said this was a plan that Amarillo voters across-the-board could support.

In response, after accusing voters of having voted “no” simply due to billboards and blasting Fairly and his supporters for turning the Civic Center election into a “negative campaign,” Nelson eventually said she would not place Fairly’s proposal for the Amarillo Civic Center on the ballot.

“The overwhelming message I received from numerous discussions with citizens was that the time was not right, and we needed to focus on the COVID-19 pandemic,” Nelson said in a statement. “We welcome citizen feedback on the Civic Center project, and when it’s appropriate, we’ll be more than happy to revisit the project and see what improvements and options we have.”

Responding to Nelson’s statement, Hodge accused the Mayor of being opposed to the plan due to her own political ambitions.

“The mayor I’ve met with several times, and she is totally opposed to it for political reasons,” Hodge said. “She’s getting political advice that you don’t want to run for office at the same time as a bond election. I understand where she’s coming from, but she’s getting bad political advice.”

After that, Nelson’s relationship with Fairly was somewhat quiet. Fairly supported Cole Stanley for Amarillo City Council Place 1 and, upon his election, Stanley would become a thorn in Nelson’s side. Still, the gloves were set to come off between Fairly and Nelson once more in 2021, when Nelson would attempt to move a massive debt issuance forward in an effort to fund the Amarillo Civic Center project without voter approval.

Following Nelson’s move to do the Civic Center project again — without Stanley’s vote in favor — Fairly filed a lawsuit seeking to stop the debt issuance. The lawsuit led to a highly-publicized lawsuit between the City of Amarillo and Fairly, which saw Fairly’s legal team prevail.

For her part, Nelson and the City of Amarillo would not concede the lawsuit, with the City of Amarillo filing an appeal. Meanwhile, Fairly became a widely-touted prospective contender for mayor after having struck such a pivotal blow against Nelson.

In a speech to Conservative Patriots 4 Texas in December, Fairly discussed his political philosophy, showcasing a strong conservatarian streak. Around that same time, Amarillo Matters PAC, which had been one of Nelson’s strongest backers each election cycle, attacked Fairly on Facebook.

“Fairly is attempting to discredit our organization and other voices he disagrees with,” the group said on social media. “We feel that runs counter to the values that make the Panhandle strong and bring people together.”

While he was undoubtedly the front-runner for a potential mayoral election campaign, Fairly took himself out of the running as a candidate in February. After Fairly’s announcement, Stanley announced his own campaign for mayor and was endorsed by Fairly.

Fairly has been a financial contributor to Stanley during the campaign, which Nelson seized on during a City Council meeting, attacking Stanley for his contributions from Fairly. At one point, Nelson even suggested the City Council could launch an investigation into Fairly’s contributions to Stanley during this group’s remaining weeks in office.

It has been a long time coming, but after having dealt the Mayor with two of her biggest political defeats, Fairly has positioned himself as one Nelson’s top nemeses — even after unifying Amarillo on one of the most controversial projects in the city’s history at the beginning of Nelson’s run in office.