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Silhouettes profiles Ron Christaldi

Ron Christaldi


This article originally appeared in the May 11, 2018 edition of La Gaceta
By: Tiffany Razzano

As a law student at Florida State University, Ronald Christaldi was “blessed” to be recruited as a clerk for Tampa’s de la Parte and Gilbert P.A. He was even more “fortunate” when the firm hired him a year later, in 1996, as a new attorney.
Lou de la Parte, along with his son, David de la Parte, who had taken over the firm by that point, were local icons, idealized both as attorneys and as community leaders. By the time Christaldi joined de la Parte and Gilbert, Lou had mostly stepped back from his role with the firm as he focused on health issues. Still, the company culture was steeped in Lou’s beliefs, which his son upheld.
“There was this tradition there, a sense of responsibility to the community,” Christaldi said. The firm stressed “community involvement, being politically engaged and helping to shore good government” through their work as well as in their personal lives.
He worked for the firm for 12 years with David serving as a mentor for him as he carved out his career. “[David] was the best mentor anybody could hope for,” Christaldi said.
Because of David’s encouragement, he became involved with numerous community and business organizations, serving in leadership roles at many of them. “It’s one thing that David also mentored me on,” he said. “If you’re going to do something, don’t do things just to build your resume; do things you believe in, and if you do them, do them full throttle.”
This reinforced what he learned as a young age: as an attorney, he could help people in need.
As a fifth-grader growing up in south New Jersey, Christaldi was selected for a special program for academically gifted students. During one lesson, their teachers secretly organized a lesson about the legal system for these students.
“In class, they pretended they had a fender bender outside and began to fake argue in front of us without us realizing it wasn’t real,” he said.
One teacher then pulled out a fake gun and shot the other. “They wouldn’t do this in a classroom today,” he said.
Christaldi was selected as the defense attorney in the ensuing mock trial. He was so excited about this role that his mother took him to meet with a local public defender in Camden, New Jersey, who advised that he claim “temporary insanity” for his client, who made a bad decision “in the heat of the moment.”
The mock judge and jurors ruled in his favor – the only ruling that sided with the defense in similar mock trials at other local schools. “I got that defense verdict and I knew that day that I wanted to be a lawyer,” he said. “I didn’t have any true conception of what being a lawyer was, but it became my passion. Really, I loved that feeling of helping someone who otherwise couldn’t help themselves.”
He went on to earn his undergraduate degree at New College of Florida in Sarasota, and then earned his masters and law degree from Florida State University.
He hit the ground running with de la Parte and Gilbert P.A. In 2007, he joined Shumaker, Loop & Kendrick, LLP, where he serves as partner, management committee member, healthcare co-administrator and president/CEO of Shumaker Advisors Florida, LLC.
The entire time, Christaldi’s work with the community has been just important to him as his work as an attorney.
He’s served in leadership roles at a number of organizations including The Spring of Tampa Bay, where he served on the board of directors from 2009 to 2014 and was vice chair. For him, “protecting and providing support and a way out for some of the most vulnerable individuals in our society” was important.
He’s also worked with the Lions Eye Institute, Tampa Theatre’s Facility Master Plan Task Force, a variety of local and national bas asssociations, Tampa Bay Businesses for Culture and the Arts and Youth Environmental Services.
The role that prepared him for his current community passion – bringing the Tampa Bay Rays to Ybor City – was his work with the Greater Tampa Chamber of Commerce Board of Directors.
In this capacity, serving as chair at one point, he focused on the economic impact of sports, particularly the Rays, on the Tampa Bay area. He toured other cities, checking out their transportation and stadiums, and how they used baseball to revitalize neighborhoods.
Last year, as the Rays began to explore their options for a new stadium, Christaldi and Chuck Sykes, also a former chamber chair, began discussing how they could keep the stadium in the Tampa Bay region. They created Tampa Bay Rays 2020, a non-profit organization that encourages community support of bringing the Rays to Ybor City.
Earlier this year, the Rays unveiled a new 14-acre site in Ybor City bound by Channelside Drive, 4th Avenue, 15th Street and Adamo Drive.
Bringing the stadium to Ybor City is “a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity,” Christaldi said.
Relocating the baseball team to Ybor City will add to the area’s sense of community, he said. “What sports does for a community is bring people together. It gives kids role models, people a sense of place, gives them something to rally behind, and builds that sense of what it means to be Tampa Bay and what it means to be a community.”
It’s also a business opportunity for the region, he said. “It gives great exposure to the community,” he said. Often, when you poll visitors about the Tampa Bay area, the beaches and weathers stand out at the top of the list. “We’re in a very competitive global environment,” he said. “We’ve got to be in a place where people to need to think about us more than just a beach place if our children are going to have a future here and we’re going to bring jobs here.”
Sports franchise “are economic engines,” he said. They drive the local economy through hotel stays, restaurant visits and other tourism opportunities, and eventually trickle into “spin-off type of activity.”
Through their non-profit, he and Sykes created the Rays 100, a group of business leaders who support the team’s move to Ybor City. They held the launch for this group last month. Those involved spread the word about the new stadium to their own social, civic and business circles.
The new stadium will “be full circle” for “the buildout and redevelopment of downtown and Ybor City,” Christaldi said.
He considers many of the new spaces in and around downtown Tampa: from the Armature Works in Tampa Heights to Jeff Vinik’s investment in Channelside to the outer portions of Ybor City. “Now all of a sudden you’ve got this ring around this core of downtown that is walkable and has a lot of things going on,” he said.
While there “is always a naysayer here and there,” he’s confident that this is the right plan for Ybor City and the Rays. “People are skeptical, which is different from being negative,” he said. “People were skeptical about getting the Rays here in the first place or the [Tampa Bay] Lightning or building an aquarium or an airport, but the community really pulled together and made it happen. I see the fundamental pieces of this falling into line.”

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