“It’s coming down!” Assistant County Attorney Sean Moylan said of the Old Dixie Motel as an excavator was chomping through the walls of the old structure today.
What used to be the Country Hearth Inn, what rapidly became an eyesore after it closed in 2008, then a battleground between Flagler County government and two sets of owners, was being demolished today.
“We decided to go ahead and demolish the building and proceed with other plans,” said Flagler Beach attorney Dennis Bayer, who just this month started representing the hotel-property owners in one of the two legal cases they were battling. Bayer had been representing them in a case before a special magistrate. That one was triggered after the county filed a demolition order over a year ago, which the owners contested. The magistrate gave the owners until May to show that they were refurbishing the property, or else he would grant the order to demolish.
Less than two months before that deadline was to run out, the have decided to take demolish on their own. The case in Circuit Court is somewhat different. It hinges of details of the dispute between the county and the owners. But now that the building will be demolished, that case, too, will be reduced to two items: the roughly $100,000 in attorneys’ fees the county is seeking, and the $115,000 in fines the owners owe the court, to be paid to the Clerk of Court, resulting from their defiance of a previous court order.
For almost four years, the owners–who acquired the property in May 2021–have been promising through proxies that they were absolutely certain to refurbish the hotel and turn it into what they were to call the Hotel Henry, with a steak house and other amenities. Their proxies showed vague plans to the County Commission, and insisted that they were working toward those plans. The owners had in fact demolished parts of the building and conducted some roof repairs. But nothing more substantial was done there for more than a year. All the action was in court and in front of a special magistrate.
Last week the owners directed their proxies in Flagler County to pull the demolition permit for the property at 2251 South Old Dixie Highway.
“We’ve been wanting to have that structure demolished for a long time, so it was welcome news when they told us last week they were getting a demo permit,” Moylan said. “So we welcome it, and happy to see it finally happening.” He noted: “The land will probably be worth more without that dilapidated building sitting on it.” The Flagler County Property Appraiser had the 73,000 square foot building, 34,000 of it covered, valued at just $70,000, and the land valued at $175,000. In 2009, the year after it closed, the building was valued at $2.6 million. The original building was built in 1973.
Bayer said the property’s development team will be meeting to decide what to do next. “Something will definitely be constructed there. It’ll have to go through the normal development process with the county though,” Bayer said. He did not know at this point what would be built. “We just decided it’d be better to try afresh than to try to rehabilitate the old building.”
Bayer and Moylan agree that the demolition makes the case before the magistrate judge moot–or it will make it moot once the demolition is completed, once the debris has been removed, and once the demolition order is closed out.
The Circuit Court case will remain, especially since Bayer filed a motion for a rehearing after a judge signed the order of final judgment in the county’s favor on March 25. But that order directed the owners to pay the county a $250,000 bond that the county could then use to demolish the property, if it came to that. The owners have pre-empted the county on that, too.
That leaves the fines and attorneys’ fees.
Beyond that, “if the building is gone and they pay the attorneys’ fees, we’re done, we move on with our lives,” Moylan said.
To Jane Gentile-Youd, the Plantation Bay resident and former candidate for County Commission who has made the demolition of the old motel her leading cause for the last few years–at times at the expense of her health–she heralded the news of the excavator’s maws crunching at the walls with a pair of emails and pictures. Subject line: “POS. bye bye.”
Can I really throw out 14 years of emails, photos, agendas and thousands of pages of ‘expensive, over $40,000, useless never went anywhere’ court pleadings?” Gentile-Youd wrote in an email. “Just because Rome was destroyed in one single day is no reason to be so disgusted at the same time.” She thanked Bo Snowden, the county’s chief building official, for “taking the bull by the bulldozer” and wondered what will be built there. ” Park? Shopping Center? No crazy surprises please. We have had far more than our fair share.”
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