Update at 12:10 p.m. — Commissioner David Piepmeyer said he plans to recuse himself from the revocation hearing.
“[T]he county is obligated to enforce compliance to all SUP conditions and county ordinances (this is not the only enforcement action going on in the county presently),” Piepmeyer said in an email. “Unfortunately, the county enforcement is currently complaint driven which can certainly lead to problems between neighbors. Clearly the county does not want to end up at this stage of the process but it has been almost a year since these [notice of violations] were sent to the Hampstead Marina owners (which should be more than enough time to resolve these violations).
[T]he conditions of this SUP were in place and agreed to by the Hampstead Marina owners long before I became an elected county commissioner. Certainly the owners should understand the conditions they signed up for and be willing to fully comply with all these conditions as long as they continue to run a business in a residential zoned neighborhood.”
HAMPSTEAD — Pender County commissioners will consider revoking a special use permit (SUP) for Hampstead Marina following code enforcement violations related to improper outside lighting, damaged fencing, and erosion to the property.
Each violation resulted from failures to meet conditions tied to its SUP permit, received in 2004, which allowed for the expansion of an existing marina, according to a staff report from the Pender County Planning Department.
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“If revoked, they would not have the proper approval to operate as the expanded marina in which they were granted with the original special use permit,” Planning Director Kyle Breuer said in an email Monday.
The property is owned by Wooten Holding Company, represented by Henry and Joyce Wooten. A public hearing is set for next Monday in front of county commissioners who will consider revocation of the permit.
“Following a received complaint regarding the status of the property in relation to the Special Use Permit, Code Enforcement opened an investigation on the property to document its current status,” according to the report.
An attorney for the Wooten family said the complaint came from the property directly to the south of the marina, which is owned by Commissioner David Piepmeyer.
The property lies in a Residential Performance district, intended to allow various residential land uses while limiting commercial activities. A special use permit allows a property to be used in a manner that deviates from its zoning classification.
The Wooten family received a first violation notice in November 2018, several months after Hurricane Florence struck the region and caused widespread flooding along the coast. A final notice of violation was issued in March 2019, followed by a request for a court-ordered compliance submitted in August and a notice in October that the county would move forward in the revocation process.
“We have sufficient documented evidence that the property was and still is in violation of the Special Use Permit,” Code Enforcement Officer Charlie Ring wrote to county attorney Trey Thurman in the August request for a court-ordered compliance. “At this point, we feel that the Planning Staff has exhausted all efforts to obtain compliance at this site.”
Deficiencies on the property included a failure to comply with lighting standards and erosion standards set forth in the conditions tied to the special use permit, according to a letter sent to the Wooten family in August.
The complaint of one citizen
Samuel Franck, an attorney from Ward and Smith who is representing the Wooten family in the matter, wrote to the county’s inspections office in November, calling the enforcement action “egregious and arbitrary.” He said his client received the first violation in November 2018 “without any dialogue whatsoever with the land owner,” after Hurricane Florence inflicted significant erosion damage to the property.
“It quickly became apparent that the County issued this Notice of alleged violations in response to the complaint of one citizen, a home owner who has owned the property immediately next door to the subject property since the SUP for this site was established over fifteen years ago,” Franck wrote on behalf of his clients.
Franck said the neighboring landowner took issue with two overhead floodlights that had been on the property prior to the 2004 SUP approval, and were oriented toward his property.
[Editor’s note: According to Piepmeyer, the lights were replaced after Florence and were excessively bright. He said they also illuminated a 360-degree field of vision, causing his front and back yard to be affected by the light. ]
According to county land records, Piepmeyer bought the adjacent property in 2002, several years before Hampstead Marina received its special use permit.
By the time of publication, Piepmeyer did not respond to multiple emails and phone calls on Monday asking if he would recuse himself from the hearing.
Franck said the Wooten family successfully persuaded Duke Energy, who owns and maintains the floodlights, to replace the light fixture in order to reduce its glare rating from a 3 to a 1 (on a scale of 0-5).
Not enough
According to Franck, plans to stabilize and restore the surface of the site to its condition prior to Florence were viewed as insufficient by the county, who then called for the installation of gravel on high-traffic areas. A revised stabilization plan was submitted with his November letter, and Franck said his client could complete the work within a month.
The corrective steps his client was offering was not an admission of wrongdoing but of “cooperative citizenship,” Franck wrote in the letter, and that his client held productive dialogue to address the county’s concerns before the final notice of violation and subsequent revocation notice.
“[W]hile you continue to communicate intention to enforce this selective, arbitrary, time-barred allegation, at the entirely unnecessary expense of the County, we have no choice but to take action to defend the same,” Franck said.
But according to the planning staff report, code enforcement officers “attempted to work with the property owner to develop a plan of action for compliance” before issuing the violation after observing that the property remained in violation.
One of the main concerns that was not addressed, according to the report, was erosion from vehicle and boat traffic, causing “sediment transfer from rain events which were being carried over to the adjacent property to the south.”
Although fencing had been adequately repaired and modifications to the floodlights were deemed sufficient, planning staff still held concerns with plans submitted to stabilize the surfacing of the site and contain vehicular and trailer usage, according to the report.
The public hearing will be held during the monthly commissioners’ meeting, scheduled for Monday, December 2 at 4 p.m. at the Pender County Public Assembly Room at 805 S. Walker Street in Burgaw.
Mark Darrough can be reached at Mark@Localvoicemedia.com or (970) 413-3815
