Mathews supervisors came out of a nearly two-hour closed session Thursday night and voted 4-0, with supervisor Tim Doss recusing himself, to quash a requirement that former county building official Jamie Wilks appear before the board and testify regarding the Hole in the Wall Waterfront Grill.
The action came about after Cortland Putbrese of the law firm Dunlap, Bennett and Ludwig, which was hired by the board last year to represent the county in the civil case against Hole in the Wall, was granted a court-ordered subpoena requiring that Wilks make an appearance before the board at the Feb. 15 board meeting.
Under that subpoena, Wilks would also have been required to produce documents involving the construction, inspections and permitting that occurred during the restaurant’s renovations and elevation.
Supervisor Tom Bowen, who made the motion to quash the matter, explained on Thursday that the reason he did so was that requiring Wilks to appear before the board was an inappropriate attempt to make “an end run around the BZA appeal.” Rather than summon Wilks before the board to discuss the affidavit he signed in the case of the Mathews Board of Supervisors v. Mathews County Board of Zoning Appeals, the proper thing to do is to take a deposition in the civil case, said Bowen.
In addition, Bowen said, Wilks is a former employee of the county, and “if he did something wrong, it’s in the light of a personnel issue,” and the board shouldn’t be “grilling him in a public meeting.”
“Everything that Cortland wanted to do can be done through the BZA hearing,” said Bowen. “We shouldn’t bring it into the board of supervisors meeting and make a spectacle out of it. It’s just a terrible way to treat a former county employee.”
Supervisor Mike Walls initially raised objections to nonsuiting the case, but County Attorney Andrea Erard explained that it was better to nonsuit the case “if we want to have it refiled.”
The previous board of supervisors, which had appointed supervisors Dave Jones and Walls to serve as a committee of two to deal with alleged improper construction and safety issues at Hole in the Wall, had asked the Virginia State Police to investigate the disappearance of documents related to Hole in the Wall’s renovations and elevation.
State police officers originally came to Bowen, the former commonwealth’s attorney, to discuss the results of their investigation. However, when Bowen became a candidate for the board of supervisors, he said he requested that the matter be turned over to a special prosecutor, and Middlesex Commonwealth’s Attorney Mike Hurd was assigned the case. Bowen said it will be up to Hurd to ultimately decide whether charges should be filed regarding the missing documents.
The case of Mathews County Board of Supervisors v Mathews County Board of Zoning Appeals is set to be heard at 2:30 p.m. on Friday, Feb. 23, in Mathews County Circuit Court.
Mac Casale comments
In a related matter, the board allowed Mac Casale, co-owner of Hole in the Wall Waterfront Grill, to make a statement to the board regarding his business. He was allotted 10 minutes for his statement.
Contrary to rumors, Casale asserted that Hole in the Wall “has never cost the county or the taxpayers anything. He said that he had spent $211,000 in capital improvements to the structure, which was formerly the Seabreeze Restaurant, and that averaging that investment plus his monthly rent out over 15 years came to nearly $2,000 a month. In 2023, Casale continued, the restaurant paid Mathews County $80,006.40 in rent, food taxes and fees.
“Now does that sound like a business that is not paying their fair share?” he said.
The county has spent over $300,000 in legal and engineering fees over the past two years “to try and get me evicted from Hole in the Wall,” said Casale.
“If anyone has had their hand in the pocket of the taxpayers,” he said, “it’s been the previous board of supervisors.”
Casale said that his business had followed all the steps the county set forth, passed all the inspections, and had been issued a certificate of occupancy, only for the county to come back five years later “to randomly check to see if they could find something wrong.” He said the county was holding him to code standards that weren’t in effect at the time the work on the restaurant was done and were judging the job “after five years of wear and tear later.”
While he admitted that the restaurant was built differently than the original engineering specifications, Casale said it was because changes were made by him and the building official “due to normal workarounds that are encountered during construction.”
“But none of those changes made the building less safe,” he said.