Analysis for Lake Lure Insider. Paul Brock told this outlet on the morning of September 8, 2026 that Second Mountain intended to present the proposal below to the Town Council that evening and release it to the public at the same time — and he did. This outlet was not in the room; the account of the meeting itself below was relayed by attendees who assist Lake Lure Insider's coverage, and it has not been checked against the Town's own minutes or a recording, which the Town has not yet published. The proposal's terms are reproduced as supplied to this outlet; they have not yet been independently confirmed by the Town, and this piece will be updated with any Town response. The math and characterizations that follow are this outlet's own, and nothing here is legal or financial advice; anyone with money or property on the line in this dispute should talk to a licensed North Carolina attorney or accountant. The Town of Lake Lure and Town Attorney Marty Benson were not reached for comment before publication.

Second Mountain, LLC — the entity behind Lured Market & Grill — put a specific, numbered settlement proposal in front of the Town of Lake Lure Monday night. Not a vague olive branch. An actual document, with dollar figures, dates, and a signature block, ready for both sides to sign — and Paul Brock brought printed copies to hand out.

Here's what happened in the room, what the proposal says in plain English, and then the two numbers that matter most to anyone paying attention to this fight: what the space actually costs per square foot today, and what it would cost under this deal.

Inside Monday night's meeting

It was a short meeting — about 35 minutes, start to finish, adjourning around 5:35 p.m. Two things are worth knowing before getting to the proposal itself.

Commissioner Scott Doster was not there. According to the account relayed to this outlet, he was absent following the death of his mother. Lake Lure Insider sends its condolences to Commissioner Doster and his family. The rest of the routine business moved quickly: a heads-up that the dam road will close weekdays, 7 a.m. to 5 p.m., from mid-September through mid-December; a September 30 kickoff planned for the bridge's centennial; the comprehensive plan pushed to next week's meeting; a Parks and Recreation report crediting volunteers with 997 hours of work on the flowering bridge last month; and two of several open board seats filled after nominees were approved. Multiple boards reportedly still have vacancies.

Public comment, at 5:20 p.m., is where the meeting turned back toward the Second Mountain fight. Two residents signed up to speak. Hilary Yoxall — the Grace Foods Co-Op founder who has pressed the Town on transparency before — asked that her questions be entered into the minutes and eventually answered: where does concession revenue actually go and how is it spent, and where are the minutes and vote records documenting the Town's decision-making on the Lured Market eviction. Her closing line, as relayed to this outlet: "Don't be secretive. We want to trust in you." Kathi Hatfield, speaking for the Hickory Nut Gorge (HNG) Chamber, announced the Chamber will host candidate forums for the upcoming Council and mayoral races — adding, to laughter and applause, that Edmund (the goat this outlet loves to cover) can't be one of the candidates, on account of being a Chimney Rock resident.

Then Paul Brock spoke. He apologized to the community for how hard the fight has been, framed it as standing up against a bully, and thanked residents for the turnout and support over Labor Day weekend. He also said — and this is Brock's own characterization, not this outlet's — that this has been the most aggressive fight the Town Council has waged against a small business in his experience. More concretely, per the account relayed to this outlet, Brock said three council members have privately told his wife and co-owner Cara Brock that they want to make things right, and that Mayor Pro Tem David DiOrio separately told Paul the same thing in person at Lured Market. Brock also said the two sides' attorneys have been discussing consolidating the Superior Court case and the small-claims eviction case by consent — which would track with the proposal's own terms below, which call for dismissing both cases outright.

None of that — the "three council members," the DiOrio conversation, or the "most aggressive fight" characterization — has been confirmed independently by this outlet, by the Town, or by the named council members themselves. It's Brock's account of private conversations, and the Town, Mayor Pritchett, Mayor Pro Tem DiOrio, and the other commissioners are all invited to confirm, deny, or clarify any of it.

That's the context Brock's proposal landed in when he handed out copies at the end of the meeting.

What the proposal actually says

For right now: Second Mountain brings August and September 2026 rent current by September 15 — money it says it has already tried to pay twice for August and once for September, only to have the Town refuse it. Both sides agree to stop holding old defaults over each other's heads. The Town cleans up and secures the boathouse area by the same date.

Going forward, in a new addendum to the existing lease:

• Second Mountain drops any claim to the police boathouse itself, but keeps lake access through the public boat slips for itself and its customers.
• Second Mountain gets first right of refusal if the Town ever privatizes the boat ramp behind the market, and keeps the right to use that ramp for its kayak-rental business either way.
• Rent for Suites A and B — combined, both spaces in the building — becomes $2,750 a month, fixed, from September 2026 through April 2027, plus 15% of whatever the kayak-rental business brings in.
• That combined rent steps up to $3,250 a month from May 2027 through the end of the lease term in April 2029, same 15% kayak-revenue arrangement.
• Second Mountain can sublet the space.

Outside the lease itself: the Town works to get a crosswalk built near the market on Memorial Highway. The Town drops the small-claims eviction case once rent is current. Both sides drop the bigger Superior Court lawsuit once the new addendum is signed and they've traded a mutual release of claims. And both sides agree to sit down and negotiate an entirely new, cleaner lease starting no later than November 1 and wrapped up by the end of the year — falling back to this arrangement if that doesn't happen.

That last part is worth sitting with for a second: this isn't Second Mountain asking to keep the boathouse fight alive. It's Second Mountain offering to drop it entirely, in exchange for a rent number and a clean slate.

The math the Town hasn't shown you

Here's where it gets useful to actually do the arithmetic, because the current setup already priced this out — the Town just never showed the two numbers side by side.

The building at 2654 Memorial Highway is 3,016 square feet, combined between Suite A (the Market) and Suite B (currently the gym/rowing concession) — that's not an estimate, it's Rutherford County's own tax record for the parcel (REID 1616937), which lists "Total Gross Leasable Area: 3,016" square feet, data current as of today. Right now, under the original 2024 lease, the two suites pay separately: Suite A owes $3,518 a month (that's $3,218 in base rent plus a $300 monthly payment toward the deck the Town built), and Suite B owes $1,082 a month. Add them together and the building brings in $4,600 a month, or $55,200 a year — for the whole 3,016 square feet.

Do that division and the building's current combined rent works out to about $18.30 per square foot, per year.

Now look at what's on the table. The new offer folds both suites into one number:

To be clear about what the Town gets in return, because a rent cut in isolation sounds worse than it is: the Town keeps full, undisputed control of the boathouse — the entire thing this lawsuit has actually been about — plus 15% of the kayak-rental revenue on top of the base rent, plus a shot at a real crosswalk near the business district, plus an end to two active court cases. It's not a giveaway. It's a trade. But it's a trade with real, calculable numbers, and taxpayers deserve to see them laid out before the Council votes on anything.

Is $18.30 high, low, or about right? One honest comparison, with the caveats that go with it

Naturally, the next question is whether $18.30 a square foot — or the proposed $10.94 — is actually a fair number. That turns out to be harder to answer cleanly than it sounds: small tourist towns don't publish retail rent surveys the way big cities do, and this outlet pulled and then had to throw out several "comparable" listings that looked close on paper but turned out to be nothing like the bare shell Second Mountain occupies (a fully renovated event venue here, a brand-new luxury build there). Rather than publish a shaky number, here's the one comparison we could actually stand behind, with its limits stated up front rather than buried.

Myrtle Beach, SC is one of the only nearby markets with enough active retail listings to produce a real average. Two different sources give two different slices of it: LoopNet's own live listing data puts the average asking rent across 32 current Myrtle Beach retail listings at about $26 per square foot per year, though individual listings in that pool range all the way from $12 to $44 — a reminder that "average" is doing a lot of work in a tourist market with everything from strip-mall storefronts to beachfront restaurant space. CommercialCafe's broader figure, which blends retail in with office, industrial and every other commercial property type in the market, comes in lower, at about $20 per square foot per year. Neither number is a signed-lease rate — both are what landlords are currently asking, not necessarily what tenants are paying once a deal closes.

That comparison only means something once the two towns are sized honestly, and they are not close. Myrtle Beach the city had an estimated 40,937 year-round residents as of mid-2025, per the U.S. Census Bureau — roughly 30 times Lake Lure's own published population of 1,350. The Myrtle Beach area's tourism board puts the region's annual visitor count at over 17 million people a year; Lake Lure doesn't publish a comparable figure, but nobody who has driven Memorial Highway in July versus January would mistake the two towns' traffic for the same order of magnitude.

Put plainly: a market with thirty times the population and a tourist season that dwarfs Lake Lure's is currently asking somewhere between $20 and $26 a square foot for retail space — not dramatically more than the $18.30 Second Mountain's building already commands today, and not even double the $10.94 the new proposal would set. Read one way, that's a point in the Town's favor: Lake Lure's existing rent isn't obviously underpriced next to a much bigger, busier beach town. Read the other way, it's a point in Second Mountain's favor: cutting the rate to $10.94 doesn't look like giving away a space that a genuinely comparable market — even a far larger and busier one — would command two or three times over. It doesn't prove either side's case. It's context, offered with the same caveat this outlet keeps repeating: a handful of scraped listings is not a lease appraisal, and anyone who needs a real answer should ask a licensed commercial broker to run actual comps on 2654 Memorial Highway.

Meanwhile, the lawyer meter keeps running

Here's the part that should bother every taxpayer in Lake Lure regardless of which side of the boathouse argument they're on: while all of this has been negotiated, the Town has been paying multiple attorneys, at multiple stages, to fight a case its own outside counsel effectively admitted might not be worth fighting this way.

A few things are documented, not just alleged:

• At the August 14 mediation — a single, six-and-a-half-hour session that ended in impasse — the Town brought two attorneys, Jeffrey K. Stahl and Marty Benson, on top of the mediator's own $1,800 fee. That's the court's own Report of Mediator, not a rumor.
• The eviction complaint the Town filed ten days later lists two attorneys of the same firm, Robert C. Carpenter and Thomas M. Benson (Marty Benson's formal name on filings), both from Allen Stahl + Kilbourne.
• The September 3 small-claims hearing is its own small case study in how this runs up a bill. Second Mountain's attorney had already told the Town's lawyers, in writing, that state law doesn't even let a magistrate hear this case while a transfer motion is pending in Superior Court. The magistrate agreed — twice, in the same hearing — after Town Attorney Marty Benson opened a binder and tried to call a witness anyway. Per this outlet's sources, the Town again showed up with two attorneys for that hearing, the same pattern as the mediation. The result: another continuance, to September 15, with the underlying jurisdiction question still unresolved. Unless a Superior Court judge rules before then, taxpayers are on track to pay for a third trip to the same courtroom, with two lawyers again, to hear the same "not yet" answer.

None of that is this outlet's opinion. This is: Second Mountain's own attorney, Edward Bleynat, put it plainly in a letter to the Town's lawyers the day before that hearing, warning it would be "poor stewardship of tax payer dollars for the Town to spend more money on attorneys' fees than on reaching a business solution." That's not Lured Market's owner talking. That's opposing counsel — someone with every incentive to keep this fight going, since it's billable to him too — telling the Town's own lawyers where this is headed if nobody signs anything.

Whatever the Council decides to do with the proposal now that it's on the table, it should decide it having actually seen these numbers side by side: what the building brings in now, what it would bring in under the deal, and what continuing to fight instead of signing has already cost — and will keep costing — while the meter runs on two more court dates nobody's confirmed will settle anything.

Have documents, invoices, or a source inside Monday night's meeting? Lake Lure Insider is still trying to get the Town's actual legal-billing records into the open. Reach out.

Last updated: 2026-09-09