An area contractor believes he has been vindicated by the county’s decision to abandon a criminal case that it had pursued against him for allegedly violating a stop work order issued by its inspections department.
Dustin Lee Carroll insists that last month’s dismissal of this misdemeanor charge has confirmed his belief that the inspections department had no grounds for hauling him into court over the administrative order it issued in August of 2024.
“The charge was dropped by the county/state because, in my opinion, it was bogus and personal,” Carroll declared in a recent communiqué with The Alamance News. “We now plan to issue lawsuits against the state, Alamance County, and most definitely the inspector Sam Hobgood [who] in my opinion…abused his power and took things personally.”
The case against the 33-year-old contractor originally appeared on the docket this April with relatively little in the court file to explain the nature and origin of the alleged violation.
In response to a subsequent inquiry from The Alamance News, the inspections department revealed that Carroll had allegedly begun work without a permit on a new HQ for his contracting company at 2720 Saxapahaw-Bethlehem Church Road. According to the department, the stop work order was triggered by a complaint from an area resident last August, while a second complaint in October resulted in the discovery that the work was still underway.
Carroll subsequently informed the newspaper that he broke ground on this project after months of back-and-forth with the inspections department over the requirements he needed to meet to obtain a commercial building permit. Carroll recalled that at the behest of Sam Hobgood, the county’s inspections director, he spent $12,500 to have an engineer sketch out a building plan. He added, however, that Hobgood kept coming back with increasingly costly demands for engineering and design work that would’ve ultimately cost him $70,000 on a $125,000 project.
Carroll said that, as his originally plans became evermore cost-prohibitive, he resolved to refile the project as the expansion of an existing agricultural operation, thus sparing him the need for a commercial building permit.
“Originally I had it in my company’s name,” he told the newspaper in May. “I already had some cattle, and I had been buying straw, cutting straw. So, I got with my attorney and my accountant…, and I said ‘what if I put it in my agricultural business.’”
Carroll had previously told The Alamance News that Hobgood responded to his workaround with curses and the threat of arrest. Then, on April 19, a sheriff’s deputy visited his home, which is located across the road from the supposedly illegal work site, to serve him with a criminal summons. Carroll said he was confident that he hadn’t done anything wrong and looked forward to being exonerated as the case made its way through the courts.
The state’s case against Carroll reached its conclusion on July 10 when an assistant district attorney filed a dismissal notice which stated that “per [the] victim, [the] defendant has come into compllieance [sic] and the case has been agreed to be dismissed.”
Carroll, for his part, insists that the truth of the matter is a bit more complicated that this notice would seem to suggest.
“They tried to get me to take a plea, and I said absolutely not,” he told the newspaper this week. “Two weeks later they dismissed it. I haven’t done anything different, and now I’m ‘in compliance.’
“I didn’t do anything wrong,” the contractor went on to add, “and I just want to clear my name.”
