A special magistrate gave the owners of the neglected Old Dixie hotel five months to secure four permits from Flagler County or face demolition of the property. The decision by the magistrate, Sean McDermott, amounts to a further life extension for the hotel property, yet again frustrating the county’s attempts since last March to demolish a building it considers to be a nuisance and a danger to public health.
“It is unsafe by definition of our code,” Robert Snowden, Flagler County’s building official, told the magistrate at a Jan. 15 hearing. “It’s broken glass, there’s guard rails missing, there’s dilapidated concrete, there’s a fence that’s not maintained. Sometimes it’s up, sometimes it’s down. It’s an abandoned building. It’s been abandoned for a long time. Since the last time we came here, there’s been zero stuff. They have been doing stuff behind the scenes with, with getting their approvals, but there’s no urgency to get this permit up and going.”
McDermott upheld the county’s findings that the building is dangerous and kept the county’s demolition order active, but suspended (or abated), pending the hotel owners making good on their pledge to move forward with permits and rehabilitation of the building–something they have been promising for almost four years, since they bought the building in May 2021 on a raft of pledges to fix it, turn it into a sparkling new hotel with a steak house, and put up a performance bond.
Aside from removing debris, filling up a pool, demolishing a segment of the building and fencing the property, they have fulfilled none of those pledges. To a passer-by, the L-shaped two-story building today looks like same ruin it’s been since the property stopped being the Country Hearth Inn in 2010. The county has been battling the owners in circuit court in the related matter of the $250,000 performance bond, which Circuit Judge Chris France ordered the owners to pay last June. They have not done so, claiming poverty. (They faced a $1,000-a-day fine as a consequence.) The claim of poverty is at odds with statements by the owners’ representatives in front of the special magistrate, where they have spoken of taking out substantial loans in preparation for the rehabilitation of the hotel.
McDermott ordered the owners to secure a land-development permit, a building permit, and two fire-safety related permits from Flagler County government by mid-June or face demolition. Assistant County Attorney Sarah Spector had asked for a shorter timeline. Denis Bayer, the attorney representing the hotel owners, asked for five months. The hearing was the second before McDermott in six months, when the owners had first appealed the county’s demolition order. Last week’s hearing was largely a repeat of the June 2024 hearing, with the harder deadline the central difference. (See: “In Blow to Flagler, Special Magistrate Rejects Demolition of Old Dixie Motel Even as He Finds It ‘Dangerous’.”)
For all the county’s descriptions of the building as a hazard, McDermott was not ready to let the demolition proceed this time anymore than he was in June. “It’s an extraordinary remedy that local governments do have the authority to seek, if they meet the burden, because it’s seeking to stop a public health and safety violation,” McDermott said. But “it’s a high threshold.” He had used similar words in June.
But he told the assistant county attorney that the demolition order will be “self-executing,” in her words, if the permits are not secured by the deadline. “The demolition order would still be in play. I’m just affirming your order here, so there’s no more further avenues for appeal to come back,” McDermott said. “That is the consequences, as articulated in Flagler County’s order for the failure to comply with abatement, which includes demolition, would go into effect.”
Video: The full hearing
The hearing was contentious–mostly in substance rather than in tone: the attorneys know and respect each other even as the issue has them at loggerheads. Bayer argued that the county’s order is “premature,” and that the owners have been working “diligently” to move the project forward.
Spector disputed the claim. “These property owners are not authentic and have not demonstrated ability to actually make the repairs,” she said. She cited as one example the $250,000 cash bond due on Aug. 20, 2021, with the work on the hotel to have been done by June 3, 2021. None of it was done. Last November in the court case, the court found the owners in civil contempt. Bayer objected to the mingling of the court case with matters before the special magistrate, saying it has “no relevance whatsoever to the issues being presented” at the hearing.
Spector continued presenting evidence of further pledges and timelines the owners submitted that were not fulfilled beyond a site plan approval that was obtained from the county’s planning board late last year. Site plan approval is “far short of getting any building permits,” she said. In sum, the owners had not met their own deadlines, and what documents they did submit has been sloppy.
“The submittal that came in was lacking just about everything,” Snowden testified. “It didn’t even get past the front counter.” The submittal was just for the hotel rooms–no lobby, no public bathrooms that are required, among other requirements. “There’s just a lot of stuff that’s missing on this plan, and that’s where we stand today.” Bayer asked Snowden if the work had included a $200,000 roof repair. Snowden called it a “$100,000 repair.”
“Why they’re inflating the price of the roof, it’s not clear to us. They’re doing the same thing with demolition,” Spector said. “So it’s not clear what they’re trying to do here, but it is showing that they don’t have a true intent here–I don’t know if it’s before the court that they’re not reporting things correctly or to us, but I did want to point out that discrepancy.”
Spector noted the owners’ previous claims that they had secured funds through Bank of America. “Unfortunately, what they presented was not signed,” she said. Rather, she showed a document submitted by the owners to the court that showed they had $109 in the bank. “Which is very troubling to the county, because if they can’t afford $250,000 or $1,000 per day, how are they going to do $5 million worth of work?”
McDermott, however, was less interested in the finances than he was in the consequences of letting demolition go forward. “Whether they have money and resources, that provides some context,” the magistrate said. “But the primary concern of the county is making it safe, protecting the public health, safety and welfare?” He asked what it would take to make it safe. The county said it gave the owners two options: to knock it down, or to secure the permits and do the repairs. Meanwhile, the building “is not fit for human occupancy, which is 100 percent what we have here, because it’s a shell of a building,” Spector said.
“Pretty much every month since the last hearing, we’ve sent them everything with permitting,” Bayer said. Kim Buck, the civil engineer for the hotel project, testified that any timelines submitted to the county were estimates. She said some of the delays were caused by changes required by the planning board, while a submittal to the St. Johns Water Management District for a review of wetlands on the site could not be done by the district until Jan. 9. She cited other delays that were out of the owners’ control. McDermott was dubious about the water management district review. Why is that a requirement for making a building safe?” he asked.
When Bayer questioned Adam Mengel, the county’s planning director, Mengel acknowledged that there have been what Bayer described as “a lack of communication or radio silence on our part.”
“Is it unusual for the county to still request demolition, even though the property owner is processing through the county and state permitting processes?” Bayer asked Mengel.
“I would say that that that is unusual. This may be the only instance of that that I recall,” Mengel said, though he then described it as “unusual circumstances” prompted by a three-year delay in timelines.
Old Dixie Motel Appeal
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