SOUTHPORT — More details have emerged on a Southport alleyway dispute since Monday, when the Southport Board of Aldermen unanimously voted to request its former mayor, Joe Pat Hatem, withdraw his claim of ownership. Now, Hatem and other aldermen are alleging the vote was influenced by incorrect information and political motives pushed by Mayor Rich Alt.
READ MORE: ‘Political fireball’: Southport enters legal battle with former mayor over alleyway ownership
“He saw something he thought he could use to harm his opponent,” Hatem said in a phone call with Port City Daily Friday. “That’s how he is, that’s what he does.”
As previously reported by Port City Daily, the Southport Board of Aldermen voted to direct its hired attorney to engage with Hatem, former mayor of Southport and current candidate, and his wife Anita Hatem on a declaration of withdrawal they filed in 2020.
The document notes the Hatems are withdrawing a city-owned alley into which their house at 109 E. Owens St. encroaches, blocking the alley’s path. Under North Carolina law, citizens can withdraw public land if public use and maintenance of the property has been abandoned for a period more than 15 years. The document does not include evidence of the abandonment, but Hatem noted the house has sat in the alleyway since it was built around 100 years ago.
The aldermen voted 5-0 earlier this week to send a letter to the Hatems, asking them to remove their declaration of withdrawal. The city’s position, as informed by an attorney they hired, is that the Hatems didn’t have standing to file the declaration and the city has never relinquished ownership of the alley.
Port City Daily reached out to Hatem multiple times — via email and phone calls — for the initial article but he did not respond. However, Hatem took to social media Thursday to condemn the reporting, despite acknowledging PCD provided an opportunity to share his perspective. He claimed he “declined to comment” though Hatem did not respond at all to PCD.
On Friday, Hatem explained he didn’t want to get involved in the narrative Alt created until he had all the facts.
Hatem, along with Alderman Robert Carroll — who is also running for reelection — are claiming the vote was influenced by political motives of Alt, Hatem’s competitor. They challenge the timeline and description of the alley’s usage Alt provided to PCD and claim he is weaponizing taxpayer dollars to enter into a legal struggle with his opponent.
“There’s too many assumptions made by the mayor that aren’t validated because he didn’t want to do the research — he wanted to point the finger,” Caroll said to PCD Thursday.
Hatem told PCD he didn’t notify the city of the declaration of withdrawal because he thought of it as a document to clear the title, not an affront to city property. He said the withdrawal wasn’t his idea, but rather a mechanism proposed by his attorney and the attorney of former property owner, Tommy Harrelson, also the former secretary of the North Carolina Department of Transportation. Harrelson has defended the house sale on social media.
“Being mayor, I said: ‘Well, I’m not going to ask the board of aldermen to abandon an alley on a piece of property that I own while I’m mayor,’” Hatem told PCD. “The alley is not there. It hasn’t been there for over 90, probably 100 or more years. So there really was no urgency to do that because there was no right.”
In Port City Daily’s Tuesday reporting, Alt claimed the declaration of withdrawal and the issue over the alleyway was brought to his attention four weeks ago. That would be around the time of the board’s Sept. 11 meeting. During it, two citizens spoke on the alleyway issue and the board’s agenda included a broad discussion on alleyways.
However, Alt admitted Friday in a second interview with PCD he knew about the alleyway issue before: “I became aware of it on Aug. 14.”
According to Alt, he informed the city manager and city attorney the next day and had an email to prove it, though he wouldn’t provide it. However, text messages from both staff members, provided by Carroll, show the city attorney, Brady Herman, saying planning staff informed him of the situation on Aug. 27 and the city manager, Noah Saldo, said he knew “a few weeks prior” to the Sept. 11 meeting.
Saldo said in the text John Langley, owner of the Southport Sourdough, Bakery and Fresh Market who spoke at the Sept. 11 meeting, requested a meeting with him and planning staff.
“He basically wanted us to do something about the alleyway as he claimed he could no longer access it,” Saldo texted Carroll Tuesday.
Port City Daily attempted to reach Langley through the bakery’s contact information but did not get a response by press.
Alt claims it was Langley who first brought the declaration of withdrawal to his attention, after Anita Hatem allegedly went to the bakery’s business to tell him to stop trespassing. According to Joe Pat Hatem, the bakery’s workers were using his private property, not the alley, to access the business.
Carroll claims Alt asked Langley and the other public commenter, Paul Winter, to bring up the issue on Sept. 11. He said Winter is brother-in-law to Paul Gross, who is also running for the board aldermen and is part of the Common Sense Coalition with Alt.
The mayor denies he asked either man to speak and denies withholding information from the aldermen.
“There’s some kind of conspiracy theory that I held this for some period of time to drag it out, so it’s later in the campaign, and that is absolutely incorrect,” Alt said.
Alt said the time between him being informed of the declaration and the aldermen learning more at the Sept. 11 closed session meeting was to allow the city attorney to look into the matter.
“We had not released the information to anybody because we’re not in the business of tarnishing somebody’s reputation,” Alt said.
The board of aldermen chose to hire another attorney to handle the issue at the Sept. 11 meeting. Carroll said he and Alderman Karen Mosteller thought the board would research attorneys and come back with a recommendation, though an attorney was hired soon after.
“Think of the taxpayer dollars that are being spent on attorneys for something that’s really quite simple and could have been handled with a phone call,” Hatem said Friday.
Port City Daily asked the city for the amount they’ve been billed for the attorney, but a spokesperson said they had not yet received an invoice. A question about the attorney’s hourly rate was unanswered by press.
Both Hatem and Alt told Port City Daily they blamed the other for blowing a simple matter out of proportion — for Hatem it was being blindsided by the Sept. 11 comments, for Alt it was being blindsided by the filing of the declaration of withdrawal. Both said the matter could have been resolved through conversation, though neither initiated it.
Hatem said he has a handwritten document showing the house at 109 E. Owens St. was built in the city’s alley around 100 years ago. Hatem’s argument is that, per the state law, the alley has been blocked by the house and, thus, not been for public use for more than 15 years, justifying the declaration of withdrawal.
Carroll, a real estate agent, noted in a city as old as Southport, instances of old houses encroaching onto city property are common.
“There are hundreds of examples of this in Southport, thousands of examples in Brunswick County,” Carroll said.
It is entirely possible, Carroll added, that the first homeowner at 109 E. Owens St. didn’t follow the proper procedure, if there even was one, to encroach on city land. Port City Daily asked the city if an easement, variance or permit was ever issued for the house to encroach into the alleyway; no response was given by press.
If the city never tried to address the house’s alley encroachment before now, the question is over the current homeowners’ responsibility to fix the encroachment.
Technically, the city could find the current owner responsible for removing the encroachment, particularly if the owner knew about it before purchase. But the legal defense of estoppel, essentially going back on an implied allowance, could be raised if the city implied the encroachment was allowed and is now reneging on that understanding.
A determination along these lines would likely need to be found in court. According to Carroll, that’s where Alt wanted to take them.
During closed session Monday, Alt’s suggestion was to file an injunction against the Hatems, Carroll said.
“I said: ‘What would you propose they do?’ He said:‘I want them to take the porch off,’” Carroll recalled from the conversation.
PCD asked Alt about this; the mayor declined to comment because of it being in closed session and not intended to be discussed in the open.
Carroll said cooler heads prevailed — as Alt yelled at the aldermen during Monday’s closed session according to multiple sources — and instead the aldermen chose to send a letter to the Hatems requesting their compliance instead.
Alt claimed Friday he wants to find a resolution outside of court, but noted Hatem was the one that initiated the legal process when he filed the declaration of withdrawal.
“If I wanted to do something like that, I would go out to the city and say: ‘Listen, what I would like to do is, because my part of my house is sitting on part of this alleyway, just move the alleyway 10 feet in the other direction,’” Alt said.
The mayor worried about the precedent that would be set if a court ruled in favor of Hatem. He questioned how the city would be able to prove any of its property was not abandoned, so as to avoid declarations of withdrawals from other residents who coveted city-owned property.
“[For example] we have a piece of property that had trees on it and we hadn’t cleared it yet, just a piece of property sitting there — did we abandon it?” Alt said.
Hatem has not yet received the letter voted on by the aldermen on Monday. He said he wasn’t sure how he will respond.
Port City Daily asked for his thoughts on Alt’s suggestion to relinquish land elsewhere on the property for an alleyway.
“That doesn’t sound like a very good option to me … the simplest thing would be for the city to abandon the alley,” Hatem said.
Reach journalist Brenna Flanagan at brenna@localdailymedia.com.
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