Following a closed session meeting Monday night, the Mathews County Board of Supervisors voted to hold a public hearing on a proposed contract to lease the Seabreeze Restaurant on Gwynn’s Island, a county-owned property, to Mac Casale, owner of the White Dog Bistro in downtown Mathews.

The board voted by a 4-1 margin to proceed with the public hearing, with Charles Ingram casting the lone opposition vote. The hearing is scheduled for 7 p.m. Tuesday, June 28, in the historic courthouse on Court Street.

Casale has proposed paying the yearly rent of $8,100 upfront rather than monthly; offering a raw bar, a live crab tank, and $5 breakfasts; possibly adding a bait shop and sandwiches-to-go in the future, as well as investing more than $100,000 to elevate the building to create outdoor dining space underneath.

A second proposal by Gary Ward, who owns Olivia’s on Main in Gloucester, was submitted at the last minute and was incomplete, said Mathews County Administrator Mindy Conner. “That left the board with one complete proposal,” Conner added.

The property is currently under lease to Gary Galluzzi of Mathews and New Jersey until June 30, but he did not submit a proposal. Galluzzi expressed disappointment on Tuesday that the county had decided to issue a request for proposals. He said he had taken over the lease of longtime Seabreeze owner/operators Ralph and Mary Valdrighi in 2013 with the expectation of operating the business for the remaining 2½ years of their five-year lease, plus the additional five years allowed under the renewal terms of the contract.

In an April 29 e-mail he wrote to Conner, Galluzzi said that he had forgotten about the requirement that he must notify the county four months in advance in order to take advantage of the renewal option and that he had only been reminded when he saw an article about the upcoming Request For Proposals in the Gazette-Journal. He apologized for the oversight and asked that the county renew the lease even though the deadline had passed.

However, Conner told him in a return e-mail that same day that the board had voted unanimously the day before to issue the RFP. She told him that she would send him a copy of the revised lease once the county attorney had a chance to review it.

On May 12, Galluzzi e-mailed Conner once again to ask if he was in default on his lease because he had missed his deadline to notify the county about his desire to renew. He asked if there was an appeals process and whether he would be unable to operate the restaurant for a period of time after June 30 or whether he could lease the property on a month-to-month basis into August “if you all at town have not made a decision on your RFP.”

Galluzzi said he was concerned about his employees and that he understood he had made mistakes, but that he didn’t understand why he was being “held to a standard that any mistake is unacceptable.” He asked that Conner help clear up his confusion in the matter.

Conner responded in an e-mail dated May 18, telling Galluzzi that, while he was not in default on his lease, it had been a number of years since the lease had been advertised, and that doing so was “an exercise in transparency and open government in which publicly owned assets are made available on a competitive basis to the private sector.”

She attached a copy of the revised lease and told him that the board would make a decision on June 6 about whatever proposals they received. She said a public hearing on entering into the new lease was scheduled for June 28, and she attached a copy of the request for proposals, which contained a deadline for submissions of Friday, June 3.

Asked why he had not submitted a proposal for the lease, Galluzzi said it was because he felt that he had five years guaranteed to him under his current lease and that “I’m not going to beg for something that was already mine.” He said that his failure to notify the county four months in advance was a technicality that could have been remedied by the county administrator, and he likened his situation to leasing a car for 10 years only to be told after five years that he would have to renegotiate the terms of the lease. The former tenants weren’t required to do anything like that during the 34 years they were in business, said Galluzzi, and “if it was good enough for the old owners, it should be good enough for me.

“Why couldn’t the county administrator say ‘You’re coming up on your lease agreement and we haven’t heard from you?’” said Galluzzi.

Conner said in a telephone interview Tuesday that she could not anticipate whether a tenant had read and understood their lease and that it was up to Galluzzi to notify her office about his intent to renew. But once he let her know he wanted to retain the lease, she had made sure he knew the deadline for him to submit a proposal. Asked why the county couldn’t approve Galluzzi’s request to renew the lease after the four-month-in-advance deadline, Conner said that the lease is a legal document and “we either go by it or we don’t … We can’t just make it up on the fly.”

There was no intent on the county’s part to force Galluzzi out of the lease, Conner said.

“If he had exercised his renewal option, that would have been it,” she said. “He also had the option to present a proposal, and, as the current leaseholder, he had a distinct advantage.”

Casale had expressed an interest in leasing the property at the time that Calluzzi entered into his agreement with the Valdrighis, said Conner, but that had no impact on the county’s decision. However, the fact is that lease had not been put out for bids in quite a long time, she said, and “the local government has a responsibility to make it competitive.”

Conner said that the public hearing on June 28 will not be a referendum on what kind of restaurant people want. It will simply be a hearing to determine if the property should once again be leased for that purpose.

“The board determines which proposal serves the highest and best use of the property,” she said. “The question is ‘Do we have a lease?’ not ‘Who do we give the lease to?’”