The Town of Lake Lure called a "Reconvened Meeting" of the Town Council for 8:30 a.m. Friday, August 28. The published agenda had three lines: call to order, a closed session "in accordance with G.S. 143-318.11(a)(3) for Attorney Client Privilege or Legal Claims," and adjournment. Members of the public who came, including this reporter, left when the closed session started — because that's what a closed session means. Nobody outside the room knows what, if anything, the Council said when it came back out. We don't know that because we weren't there for it, not because anyone did anything wrong by excluding us from a lawfully closed session. What follows is what North Carolina law actually says about meetings like this one, and about the notice that preceded it.

This is a follow-up to our August 27 report, The Attorneys Are Talking, and our August 26 reports, Before the Public Spoke, the Town Did and Packed House, No Answers.

No vote then — and a vote is owed now

One clarification first, because it's easy to conflate two different votes in this story, and more than one reader has asked us to untangle them. A vote to recess a meeting to a later date is a procedural, housekeeping vote about when the Council reconvenes — it's the kind of vote Commissioner Jim Proctor says the Council took Wednesday to set up Friday's session, which we address in full below. It has no bearing on Lured Market, the boathouse, or the tendered lease terms. The vote this section is about is a different, substantive one: whether the Council has ever voted, or will ever vote, on the actual fate of the lease itself. Those are not the same vote. Wednesday's recess vote, even taken exactly as Proctor describes it, does nothing to satisfy the second one.

This is worth saying as plainly as the record allows. This outlet has reviewed every piece of correspondence in this dispute that has become public — the February 3, February 25, March 9, and April 2 letters, the June 1 breach-of-contract complaint, and the August 18 termination notice — and none of it references a Council vote, resolution, or recorded decision authorizing the termination of Lured Market's lease. Every substantive step was taken by Town Manager Olivia Stewman and Town Attorney Marty Benson, later joined by his partner Robert C. Carpenter. Paul Brock said as much himself from the crowd Wednesday: the Council, in his words, "effectively made a decision to force them out without a formal public vote." When this reporter asked the Council directly, from the floor, on August 26, whether the termination had ever actually been put to a vote, no one answered. That silence is not proof nothing happened behind the scenes. It is proof that if a vote happened, the Town has chosen, repeatedly and on the record, not to say so.

That history is about to matter again, in real time, and this is the part worth stating in the clearest terms this outlet can put on it. Second Mountain's attorneys have tendered terms for a revised lease, as this outlet reported August 27, and the Town's attorney has now met with the Council behind closed doors at least once since. Whatever the Council tells Benson in that room — hold firm, accept, counter — is not, and cannot become, a binding decision by virtue of being said in that room. North Carolina law draws this line sharply, and it isn't ambiguous. G.S. 143-318.10, the actual backbone of the state's open meetings law, defines an "official meeting" as any gathering of a majority of the body "for the purpose of conducting hearings, participating in deliberations, or voting upon or otherwise transacting the public business," and requires every official meeting to be open except for the narrow, specifically enumerated exceptions in G.S. 143-318.11 — one of which is exactly the attorney-consultation exception Friday's closed session cited. The Council can get privileged legal advice on strategy behind closed doors. It can tell its attorney what terms it would accept. What it cannot do is vote, bindingly, to accept a settlement, reinstate the lease, or drop the eviction while the doors are closed.

The University of North Carolina School of Government's own guidance on this exact question, citing the state Supreme Court's decision in Maready v. City of Winston-Salem, states it directly: a board may reach a "tentative consensus" in closed session and instruct a negotiator or an attorney accordingly, but that consensus has "no legally binding effect as to third parties," and board members "remain free to change their positions" when the matter comes back for an actual vote. Second Mountain's attorneys cannot bank a deal struck in a room with no public in it. Neither can the Brocks. Whatever ultimately happens to the tendered lease terms — accepted, rejected, countered, or something else entirely — has to be decided by the Council in open session, in front of whoever shows up, with a vote anyone can watch and count.

So the question this outlet is watching most closely isn't only whether Friday's 16-hour notice was defective. It's whether a Council that has never disclosed a public vote to end this lease is now willing to hold one, in the open, to save it — or whether this ends the way it began: a result the public learns about after the fact, with no vote anyone can point to.

Why this is almost certainly about Lured Market — but we can't prove that from the agenda itself

The agenda doesn't name a subject, and it isn't required to. G.S. 143-318.11(a)(3) lets a public body go into closed session "to consult with an attorney employed or retained by the public body in order to preserve the attorney-client privilege" or "to consider and give instructions to the attorney with respect to" a claim — and the statute doesn't require the posted notice to say which claim. Given the timing — two days after Wednesday's meeting, where Cara Brock held up a rent check and Commissioner Jim Proctor publicly floated dropping the boathouse claim in exchange for reinstating the lease, and one day after this outlet reported attorneys for both sides were tendering terms for a revised lease — the boathouse and eviction litigation is the obvious candidate. But "obvious" isn't "confirmed," and there's a second live possibility worth naming directly: this outlet has a pending public records request to the Town seeking Council communications and other documents related to this dispute, and a contested or unresolved records request is exactly the kind of thing a town attorney would want privileged room to discuss. The generic wording on the agenda can't rule either one out, and neither can we.

What "reconvened" actually means

The word has a real legal meaning, and Lake Lure's own Code of Ordinances gets there without needing to borrow from Robert's Rules of Order. Section 2-52 of the Code states plainly: "Any meeting of the council may be continued or adjourned from day to day, or for more than one day." That's the Town's own authority for exactly what a "reconvened" meeting is — a continuation of an earlier meeting, not a brand-new one. (Robert's Rules of Order, for what it's worth, calls the same concept an "adjourned meeting": an adjournment to a fixed time "closes the meeting, but not the session," and the next meeting is "an adjourned meeting of the same session." We found no evidence Lake Lure has formally adopted Robert's Rules as its parliamentary authority, so its own Code section is the more directly relevant citation here.)

The Town's regular Council meeting, per Code Section 2-50, is "the second Tuesday of each month at 5:00 p.m." Wednesday's August 26 Work Session and Action Meeting wasn't that — it was a separately called meeting, which Section 2-51 sends straight to "the procedures set out in the applicable general statutes." That statute is G.S. 143-318.12, and it's where the 48-hour question actually lives.

The 48-hour rule, and the one sentence that decides everything

G.S. 143-318.12(b) requires that for a specially called meeting, the Town "cause written notice of the meeting stating its purpose" to be posted and delivered to media and anyone who's filed a request, and that this notice "shall be posted and mailed, emailed, or delivered at least 48 hours before the time of the meeting." That's the rule.

But there's a carve-out immediately before it, in (b)(1), and it's the whole ballgame: "If a public body recesses a regular, special, or emergency meeting held pursuant to public notice given in compliance with this subsection, and the time and place at which the meeting is to be continued is announced in open session, no further notice shall be required."

Read those two provisions together and the question isn't really "was 16 hours enough." It's binary, and it turns on one fact: did the Council, out loud, on the record, in open session at Wednesday's meeting, recess that meeting and announce it would reconvene Friday at 8:30 a.m. for a closed session? If yes, the 48-hour clock never starts — the statute says so explicitly, and 16 hours' notice of the reconvening is entirely lawful regardless of how short it feels. If no — if Wednesday's meeting simply ended, and Friday's session got scheduled some other way, through staff or counsel rather than an announcement from the dais — then it doesn't qualify for the recess exception. It's a fresh specially-called meeting under (b)(2), the full 48 hours applies, and a 16-hour notice would be a plain, citable violation.

The fact nobody outside Town Hall can answer

Update: This was the part we said we couldn't know when this piece first published, and it's partly resolved now. Commissioner Jim Proctor, commenting directly on this piece, wrote: "The town council openly voted to recess Wednesday's meeting to 8:30 today." Taken at face value, that doesn't just clear the bar G.S. 143-318.12(b)(1) sets — it clears it by more than the statute requires. The recess exception only requires that the continuation be "announced in open session"; an actual recorded vote is stronger evidence of that than an announcement alone would be. If Proctor's account holds up, the 48-hour clock in (b)(2) never applied to Friday's meeting at all, and 16 hours' notice was entirely lawful.

We're treating this the way we've treated Proctor's other on-record statements about this dispute in previous reporting: as a named, sitting commissioner's own account, offered publicly and attributably, and not yet checked against a recording or the Town's own minutes, which still haven't been published for any Council meeting since July 27. We have no reason to doubt it, and it's the most direct, specific answer anyone has given to the question this piece raised. We'll correct this again if minutes surface that read differently.

What's still genuinely unknown is the other half of the question. By this reporter's own account, and consistent with what everyone else in the room did: the public left Friday's meeting the moment the Council announced it was going into closed session, because members of the public have no legal right to be in a properly closed session — that part is completely normal and not itself a problem. But it means nobody who was there for the public portion knows whether the Council said anything when it came back into open session before adjourning Friday, or whether it simply adjourned straight out of closed session with nothing said publicly at all. That part hasn't changed, and we'd still like to hear from anyone who knows.

If it wasn't announced — what you'd actually sue for (it isn't money)

This is worth spelling out plainly, because "sue the Town" tends to conjure a payday, and North Carolina's Open Meetings Act doesn't work that way. There is no damages remedy in this statute — no compensatory damages, no punitive damages, nothing paid to the person who sues. What exists instead:

An injunction. G.S. 143-318.16 lets "any person" — with no requirement to show "special damage different from that suffered by the public at large" — go to court for an order stopping "threatened violations," "the recurrence of past violations," or "continuing violations." This is forward-looking: it stops the Town from doing it again, not compensate anyone for the one time.

A declaratory judgment voiding the specific action. G.S. 143-318.16A lets any person ask a court to declare that a specific action "was taken, considered, discussed, or deliberated" in violation of the law, and to have that action "declared null and void" — but only if filed "within 45 days following the initial disclosure of the action." This is the remedy that could, in theory, unwind something the Council did in an improperly noticed meeting.

Attorneys' fees — and this is the part with real teeth. G.S. 143-318.16B lets a court award the prevailing party "a reasonable attorney's fee," taxed against the Town as costs. It goes further: a judge can order that fee paid personally by "any individual member or members of the public body found by the court to have knowingly or intentionally committed the violation" — with one significant exception. "No order against any individual member shall issue in any case where the public body or that individual member seeks the advice of an attorney, and such advice is followed." In plain terms: an individual Council member who does exactly what Marty Benson tells them is personally shielded from paying anything out of pocket, even if the advice turns out to be wrong. The Town's own insurance or budget, not any Commissioner's wallet, is where a fee award would actually land in the ordinary case.

The trap in the 45-day clock — and why it fits Friday better than the original termination

Here's the wrinkle worth sitting with. The voidance remedy in 143-318.16A only gives you 45 days, and the clock starts at "the initial disclosure of the action." That works cleanly for something like Friday's meeting: it's a specific, dated event, and if the notice turns out to have been defective, the clock is easy to identify.

It works much less cleanly for the question raised above — whether the Council ever voted, anywhere, to authorize terminating Lured Market's lease in the first place. If that decision was never disclosed as a Council action at all, there's a real argument the 45-day clock never started, because there was no "disclosure of the action" to start it. But that cuts both ways: it also means there may be no specific meeting to point a court at and ask it to void, because the entire premise of this outlet's reporting is that no meeting ever produced a recorded decision on the termination. That's a different, harder legal problem than a defective notice — more a question of whether the Town Manager and Town Attorney had the standing authority to run this process without ever bringing it to Council in a recorded way. It's exactly why the vote the Council may still owe the public — on whatever happens with the tendered lease terms — matters more than relitigating the one that may never have happened.

Where the public records angle fits — and where it doesn't

If Friday's closed session did touch on this outlet's pending records request, that's a separate law entirely, with its own separate remedy. The Public Records Act, G.S. 132-9, lets someone denied access "apply to the appropriate division of the General Court of Justice for an order compelling disclosure or copying," and a requester who "substantially prevails" can recover "reasonable attorneys' fees." Like the Open Meetings Act, there's no damages remedy here either — the fix is getting the documents, and getting your legal costs covered if you had to go to court for them. Fees aren't available against the Town if it acted "in reasonable reliance on" a court decision or written Attorney General opinion, and a court can flip the fee award onto a requester if it finds the lawsuit itself was "frivolous" or filed "in bad faith." Neither of those exceptions has any obvious application here — we're describing the general shape of the law, not suggesting either side is close to invoking them.

What we're not saying

We're not saying the Town violated the 48-hour rule — and based on Commissioner Proctor's account above, it looks like it didn't. We're holding off on closing the book entirely only because we haven't independently checked that account against a recording or minutes yet. What we are saying clearly, because it's the point several readers pressed us on directly: the recess vote Proctor describes, even taken exactly as he describes it, is a procedural vote about when the Council reconvenes. It is not a vote on Lured Market's lease, the boathouse, or the tendered settlement terms, and it does nothing to satisfy the separate, substantive vote described in "No vote then — and a vote is owed now" above — the one the Council has never disclosed taking, and the one North Carolina law says it cannot skip before any deal on this dispute becomes binding. If you were at Wednesday's meeting and stayed past public comment, or if you have audio or video covering either meeting's actual close, we'd still like to hear from you — particularly about how Friday's session ended, which nobody's account has covered yet.

Sourcing Note

The Friday, August 28 agenda was read directly from the Town's own posted PDF; the three agenda lines quoted above are verbatim. G.S. 143-318.10 (the general open meetings requirement), 143-318.12 (public notice), 143-318.16 (injunctive relief), 143-318.16A (declaratory judgment/voidance), and 143-318.16B (attorneys' fees) were read in full from the North Carolina General Assembly's own published statute text, not a secondary summary, and every quotation from them here is verbatim. The characterization of Maready v. City of Winston-Salem and the "tentative consensus" standard is drawn from the UNC School of Government's Coates' Canons local government law blog, a widely cited authority on North Carolina municipal law, not from this outlet's own reading of the case. G.S. 132-9 (Public Records Act remedies) was likewise read directly. Sections 2-50 through 2-52 of the Lake Lure Code of Ordinances were read directly from the Town's published Code. The Robert's Rules of Order language on adjourned meetings is quoted from the public-domain 1915 Robert's Rules of Order Revised text; we did not locate a Lake Lure-specific Rules of Procedure document adopting Robert's Rules as the Council's parliamentary authority, and are not asserting one doesn't exist — only that we didn't find one.

The account of who was present and when the public left both Wednesday's and Friday's meetings is this reporter's own, and is stated as an account of what one person observed, not a comprehensive record of everyone in the room. The characterization of Wednesday's meeting proceedings, including what was and wasn't said as attendees left, is necessarily incomplete for the reasons described above. Commissioner Jim Proctor's statement that the Council voted in open session to recess Wednesday's meeting to Friday is drawn from his own comment on this piece, posted publicly under his name; consistent with how this outlet has sourced his prior on-record statements about this dispute, it has not been independently confirmed against a recording or the Town's own minutes, which have not been published for any Council meeting since July 27. The Town of Lake Lure and Town Attorney Marty Benson had not been reached for comment on any question raised in this piece at the time of publication or this update. This piece will be updated again if and when they respond, or if minutes are published that confirm or contradict Proctor's account.

Last updated: 2026-08-28