Court records reviewed directly by Lake Lure Insider show the Town of Lake Lure filed to evict Lured Market & Grill from the building it has leased for two years at 3:27 p.m. Monday, August 24 — hours before that night's public hearing, not after it. That's the same hearing where Mayor Carol Pritchett told the room the Lured Market dispute was off the agenda and would have to wait until Wednesday. By the time she said that, the Town's attorney had already asked a magistrate to put the Town back in possession of the building. Below: what the complaint and the lease attached to it say, what Lured Market's owners say happened that day, what else came out of a Tuesday-morning radio interview, and what the Town's own records show about the building it's using as an interim Town Hall.

This is a follow-up to our August 24 report, The Lease the Council Actually Approved, and our August 23 report, Inside the Fight Over Lake Lure's Best-Known Business. We weren't the only outlet in the room Monday night — Fox Carolina was also there, and Rutherford County journalist Annie Dance, who publishes the newsletter Cops & Congress, filmed the full meeting and has published her own detailed account. We draw on her reporting at several points below, credited throughout, and her full 73-minute video of Monday's meeting is worth watching directly if you want to see it for yourself.

Filed at 3:27 P.M. — Hours Before the Hearing, Not After

Lake Lure Insider has reviewed the complaint directly. The Town filed a summary ejectment action against Second Mountain, LLC — the company that operates Lured Market — in Rutherford District Court, Small Claims Division, case number 26CV001352-800. The complaint was electronically filed at 3:27 p.m. on Monday, August 24 — hours before that night's public hearing, not after it. It's set for a small-claims hearing at 10 a.m. on September 3.

The complaint is signed by Thomas M. Benson of Allen Stahl & Kilbourne, PLLC, the Asheville firm representing the Town; Robert C. Carpenter, also of that firm, is listed as counsel of record as well.

On the form, the Town checked the box stating Second Mountain "breached the condition of the lease described below for which re-entry is specified" — not the box for simple nonpayment with a 10-day grace period. The attached description of that breach, Exhibit A, cites Section 15.1(A) of the lease: an Event of Default occurs if rent goes unpaid for five days after its due date. August rent was due August 1; the complaint states the Town had received no payment as of August 6, more than five days later. Exhibit A states plainly: "Plaintiff has not accepted any payment of August 2026 rent from Defendant."

The complaint seeks possession of 2654 Memorial Highway, Suite A, plus $3,518 in back rent and legal expenses. That figure isn't a mystery once you read the lease, which is filed as Exhibit B to the complaint and which Lake Lure Insider has also reviewed: it's Second Mountain's $3,218 base rent for Suite A, plus a $300 amortized monthly payment toward a deck the Town built onto the property — both spelled out in Section 4 of the lease itself.

Per the complaint, the Town served Second Mountain with a written Notice of Lease Termination and Demand for Possession on August 18, delivered by email to Second Mountain's attorney, who accepted service on the company's behalf in place of the notice procedure the lease otherwise specifies. The termination took effect August 20, upon that acceptance.

Paul Brock's own account, given the next morning on WWNC's Latest Audio — in an interview with host Mark Starling — is consistent with this timeline, but adds the detail the complaint doesn't address: when he actually found out. "I got notice from my attorney last night after the meeting that they had filed for summary ejectment," he said — meaning his attorney reached him Monday evening, hours after the filing had already gone in that afternoon. Separately, Cara Brock told Starling that she had gone to pay August's rent and the Town would not accept it: "Cara went down and tendered the rent... and they refused to take it." The complaint's own language — that the Town "has not accepted any payment" — doesn't say whether a payment was ever offered and declined, or never offered at all. Lake Lure Insider has not seen correspondence establishing which, and is presenting the Brocks' account as their account, not as something the complaint confirms or denies.

This eviction case is separate from, and in addition to, Second Mountain, LLC d/b/a Lured Market & Grill v. Town of Lake Lure, the Superior Court lawsuit over the police boathouse clause that we reported in detail on August 23. Both cases are now pending at once.

A Hearing About the Comprehensive Plan, Until It Wasn't

Monday's meeting was formally a public hearing on the Town's comprehensive plan — not the Lured Market dispute. Before it started, Mayor Carol Pritchett moved to keep comment on the Lured Market situation off that agenda. Her own words, as captured on video and reported by Cops & Congress: "This is a special session meeting which is called for the specific and sole purpose of a public hearing which we are required to do for our comprehensive plan. So the only topics that can be addressed at this meeting are topics that have to do with the comprehensive plan."

It didn't hold. The room was packed well beyond capacity, with constituents flowing out into the surrounding hallways and watching from windows — well past what a routine planning hearing draws — and Fox Carolina described supporters as having "packed a public hearing Monday night to voice concerns."

Lake Lure Insider was in the room. Extra police and fire personnel were visibly on hand, more than is typical for a planning hearing, and moved closer to the front as the first speaker, Hilary Yoxall, began talking about Lured Market over the mayor's attempt to stop her. She didn't stop. "I am asking a logistical question that deserves to be answered, and I deserve to be heard," she said, according to Cops & Congress's video. Pritchett's response: "We are not going to address that tonight. I invite you to come Wednesday morning to the working meeting and we'll have a public comment session on that subject."

Hilary Yoxall, Grace Foods, and the Hub That Wasn't the Town's

Yoxall is the founder and director of Grace Foods Co-Op, a real, currently operating food-relief organization — that much Lake Lure Insider confirmed independently at gracefoodsnc.org. According to Yoxall and to what Lake Lure Insider has been told locally, Grace Foods took root at Lured Market & Grill in the aftermath of Hurricane Helene, when the market became a hub where volunteers fed and supplied a neighborhood that had lost power, water, and road access.

Fox Carolina's reporting backs up the shape of that account, even without naming Grace Foods. Resident Carol Pennell told the outlet:

"They used their place as the hub to serve free food to people in the neighborhood. It's emotional. Why pick on the heart of the comeback of Lake Lure?"

Restaurant co-owner Cara Brock made a related point about the comprehensive plan the hearing was nominally about:

"When we talk about rebuilding and a comprehensive plan for making Lake Lure great again, taking away one of the only businesses that has survived and is even open in that area, it just doesn't make any sense. It's devastating. Some kind of compromise has to happen."

One more thing belongs in this section, and we're stating carefully what is and isn't confirmed. Through the months of Helene recovery, Lake Lure Insider did not see the mayor visit the hub at Lured Market — that's our own observation, not a documented fact, and we can't prove a negative. Separately, market staff have told us they don't recall the mayor visiting since the storm either. Neither of those is a records-based finding, and we welcome a correction from the Town if either is wrong.

What Paul and Cara Brock Told WWNC's Mark Starling

Tuesday morning, Paul and Cara Brock sat down in studio with Mark Starling on News Radio 570 WWNC. You can listen to the full interview at iHeart; Lake Lure Insider worked from a transcript of it. Some of it fills in the timeline; some of it is the Brocks' own account of conversations that happened behind closed doors, which we're presenting as their account — not as established fact.

The timeline. The lease was signed roughly two years ago — 29 days before Hurricane Helene — with two five-year terms and an automatic rollover option, ten years total. The business itself has operated in Lake Lure for eight years, first from the building now occupied by the grill across the street. After Helene, the market became a relief hub for about two months: no power for roughly three weeks, product losses Brock put at $60,000, and — before that — three inches of mud in the grill that had to be cleaned out.

The alleged "fail sooner" comment. Brock says that when he went to Town Hall around December 2025 to ask about deferring rent (the Town had already informally deferred it for the first three months after the storm), he was told in a meeting with a commissioner, the mayor, the town manager, and the town attorney that the Town wanted the building back. Brock's account, on the air: "One of the things that was said was, we think you're going to fail, and we need you to fail sooner rather than later." Asked who said it, Brock named Commissioner David DiOrio. This is Paul Brock's own recollection of a private conversation, not a public statement or a document Lake Lure Insider has reviewed, and we're marking it clearly as his allegation. DiOrio has not been asked for comment by Lake Lure Insider on this specific claim.

The late-rent count. Brock says the business was late on rent four times in two years — a figure that matches what Lake Lure Insider reported on August 23 from the Town's own counsel, who put it at "at least four occasions" in an April 2 letter. Brock adds detail: one of the four was a lost check the Town didn't credit for about three weeks. That count conflicts with a claim Commissioner Jim Proctor has made publicly — first in the Facebook comment we reported on August 24, and repeated in an August 24 Cops & Congress piece — that the Market was "more than five days late with rent payments 10 times." Both figures are now on the record from named sources; we're not able to adjudicate between them from what we've reviewed.

The mediation. Brock and Cara Brock describe a full day of mediation in which, by their account, the Town rejected every compromise offered, including a commitment on a crosswalk safety issue the state DOT had flagged. Proctor's own account of the same mediation, from his August 24 Facebook post: "The town went to mediation and all the town wanted was for the lease to be honored and for the Market not to trespass onto the police boathouse... after seven hours of mediation I was surprised that the Market would not agree." The two accounts describe the same meeting very differently; neither is a transcript, and mediation communications are confidential by statute, which is part of why the public is hearing dueling summaries rather than a record.

The boathouse. Brock calls the boathouse dispute "a red herring" — his position is that the store and the boathouse are legally bundled into one lease and one set of premises, so the store itself, not just the boathouse, is now at risk.

What's at stake. Brock put the number at 35 employees at the market alone, plus more than 50 small vendors who sell products there. Asked what happens if the Town prevails, Brock said he doesn't believe the business would rebuild a third time: "I think this would be the end."

What Does the Town Want With the Old ABC Building?

Asked directly at Monday's hearing what the Town intends to do with the building, Mayor Pritchett said: "We have absolutely no plans for that building whatsoever. It is not our intent, and it was not our intent as we formed the comprehensive plan to make other plans for that building." Lake Lure Insider has not seen a document that contradicts that statement.

There's a plausible reason the Town might want the building back, and now we have the numbers to make the case with, straight from the Town's own meeting summaries. Town Hall and the Police Department were flooded out of their original building during Hurricane Helene and have been operating, on a month-to-month lease, out of The Landings, at 920 Buffalo Creek Road — since July 1, 2025. The cost, according to the Town's own June 2025 special-meeting summary, is $15,000 a month, which includes utilities and taxes. The Town says it expects to justify roughly $10,000 of that through FEMA reimbursement, leaving a net local cost of about $5,000 a month — which the summary describes as "about the same rent that is being paid for the space at the Arcade Building," the Town's prior interim location. The Town's own announcement of the move describes The Landings as "an interim space until more permanent decisions are made regarding the Town Hall facility."

None of that says the old ABC store is the intended long-term solution — the Town has said the opposite, on the record. But a Town on a month-to-month lease for its displaced Town Hall, holding the deed to a vacant-if-it-evicts building a short walk from where its staff used to work — The Landings is about 15 minutes away by way of Rumbling Bald Road — is a plausible enough theory that it deserves to be said out loud, clearly labeled as a theory and not a fact.

Separately, Pritchett acknowledged Monday that the Lured Market dispute has its own dollar figure attached to it for the Town's budget: "We have a tenant now who has signed a contract to pay that amount, okay? It is our hope that we will not be put in a position where we don't have that money." The amount referenced was approximately $4,000 a month — which lines up with the base monthly rent for 2654 Memorial Highway that Lake Lure Insider reported directly from the lease in our August 23 report. That figure is separate from, and much smaller than, what the Town itself pays at The Landings.

Paul Brock: "We Need New Leadership"

Paul Brock, Lured Market's co-owner, used part of his three minutes Monday night to thank the supporters who turned out and to call for new leadership on the Town Council: "We need a vibrant town center. We needed one before the storm, and nothing was happening." He urged the crowd to come back Wednesday and suggested the Council hold off on adopting the comprehensive plan until after the general election.

That call lands in a real election cycle. Of the five-member Council — Mayor Carol Pritchett, Mayor Pro Tem David DiOrio, and Commissioners Patrick Bryant, Jim Proctor, and Scott Doster — Commissioner Jim Proctor is up for election this cycle, and Mayor Pro Tem David DiOrio is not seeking another term. Lake Lure Insider's founder heard both discussed at Monday's meeting and in Tuesday's radio interview; we have not independently confirmed the filing status of either race against the county Board of Elections and will update this if it changes.

For the record: after our August 24 report was shared in a local Facebook group, Proctor responded there directly, pointing to an early comment in that thread ("Lake Lure Insider is not a neutral bystander in this story") as, in his words, saying "it all." He's right that we're not neutral — we've said so in every one of these pieces, including this one. Proctor has also posted a fuller public defense of the Town's position, saying the Town "has always wanted nothing but success for Lured Market" and "does not seek and has never sought to drive Lured Market out of business," and that the Market "stopped paying rent after Helene without first communicating with the town." We stand by our own reporting, which is checked against the Town's own primary-source documents, and we're including Proctor's fuller account here in the interest of showing his side alongside the Brocks'.

The Petition, By the Numbers

As of this morning, the petition asking the Town to reinstate Lured Market's lease and put the decision to an open Council vote has 231 signatures. Of those, 109 — about 47% — listed Lake Lure as their city (one more signer wrote in "Charlotte & Lake Lure," which we're not counting toward that figure).

Measured against the Town's own 2020 Census population of 1,365, those 109 Lake Lure signers work out to roughly 1 in 13 town residents, or about 8% of the entire population — children and all. That's a floor, not a ceiling: the Census figure counts everyone, including people too young to sign anything, and the city field on the petition is self-reported and unverified against actual town limits. Treat 8% as a rough, conservative read on how much of the town has weighed in through this one channel — not a precise vote count.

Sourcing Note

The account of Monday's hearing — the attempt to keep Lured Market off the agenda, the size of the crowd relative to past meetings, the presence of extra police and fire personnel, and Hilary Yoxall being interrupted and continuing to speak — is Lake Lure Insider's own eyewitness account; our founder attended the meeting in person. The observation that the mayor was not seen at the Lured Market relief hub during Helene recovery is likewise our own observation, not a documented fact, and is stated as such; the additional claim that market staff say the same is relayed secondhand and not independently verified.

Fox Carolina's August 25 report is quoted for its interviews with residents Cara Brock and Carol Pennell; those quotations are reproduced here from that report and were not independently re-confirmed with the speakers by Lake Lure Insider.

Direct quotations from Mayor Carol Pritchett are drawn from Cops & Congress's reporting and video of Monday's meeting, written and filmed by journalist Annie Dance. We are attributing those quotes to her reporting rather than claiming them as our own, and encourage readers to watch her full video directly.

The details of the eviction filing — the case number, the exact filing time, the hearing date, the legal ground checked, the rent figures, and the dates in the Town's termination notice — are drawn from Lake Lure Insider's own direct review of the complaint and the lease filed as an exhibit to it. Cops & Congress was first to report that the Town had filed this case, and her account of it matches what the complaint itself says, with one exception: her report identified the Town's attorney as "Marty Benson," while the complaint we reviewed is signed by Thomas M. Benson of Allen Stahl & Kilbourne, PLLC. We don't know whether that's a nickname or a transcription difference, and are using the name as it appears on the filed document.

The Paul and Cara Brock quotes in the "What Paul and Cara Brock Told WWNC's Mark Starling" section are drawn from a transcript of their August 25 interview on News Radio 570 WWNC's Latest Audio, provided to Lake Lure Insider; we have not independently verified every detail in that transcript against the original audio. The claim that Commissioner David DiOrio told Paul Brock the Town wanted the business to "fail sooner rather than later" is Paul Brock's own account of a private conversation, is not corroborated by any document or public statement Lake Lure Insider has reviewed, and is presented here explicitly as an allegation. Commissioner Jim Proctor's quotes defending the Town's position are drawn from his own public Facebook posts, under his own name, as reported both directly to Lake Lure Insider and via Cops & Congress; this report has not independently authenticated those posts.

Hilary Yoxall's role as founder and director of Grace Foods Co-Op was independently confirmed against the organization's own website. The specific claim that Grace Foods began operating out of Lured Market during Helene recovery is reported here as Yoxall's and the community's account; Lake Lure Insider did not locate an independent, dated record establishing exactly when or where Grace Foods began operating.

The Town Council roster and the Landings relocation details, including the $15,000 monthly cost, the FEMA offset figure, the July 1, 2025 start date, and the address, are drawn directly from the Town's own published meeting summaries, linked above. The Lake Lure population figure (1,365) is the Town's own cited figure from the 2020 Census. The petition's total signature count (231) and the Lake Lure-specific breakdown (109 signers listing Lake Lure as their city) were pulled directly from the site's own signature database at the time of publication and will change as more people sign. The status of Commissioner Jim Proctor's and Mayor Pro Tem David DiOrio's 2026 candidacies is reported as discussed at Monday's meeting and in Tuesday's radio interview; it has not been independently confirmed against county Board of Elections filings.

Last updated: 2026-08-25