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Lee Roberts' Island Dreams
Past the sizzling parking lot and an alligator warning sign, people trickled into Deep Point Marina in Southport.
Across the marina, a docked ferry started to hum. “If they’re firing up the Sans Souci, then they’re leaving at 12:15,” a woman standing in line pronounced, loud enough for those nearby to overhear—a courtesy that also felt like a warning.
She tugged her rolling cooler across the crushed-shell concrete, ditching her spot in line for a different gate. The woman was clearly a pro.
At the stern of the Sans Souci, a 1970s-era ferry used primarily to tote contractors to and from Bald Head Island, the woman was sitting on her cooler. We talked—yelled, rather—about the ferry’s uncertain future while watching the engine forcefully churn the Cape Fear River’s light tea-colored waters.
A private equity firm wants to buy this boat–and all other components that make up the ferry system. Like many of her island neighbors, she wasn’t thrilled with that prospect. She would have preferred that her village government buy it instead. “But I think they blew that chance,” she said.
The ferry system, which has been owned and operated for decades by the island’s developer, Bald Head Island Ltd., is currently up for grabs. One of the leading contenders to buy it is the Raleigh-based private equity firm SharpVue Capital–a company co-founded by Lee Roberts, who was recently named UNC-Chapel Hill’s new permanent chancellor. But clinching that job means parting with another: Roberts is stepping down from the firm to lead the university, he told The Assembly on Monday.
SharpVue faces fierce competition in its quest to buy the ferry system: The island’s small municipality–where a seat in last year’s council election tied at 102 votes and was decided by plucking a name out of a foam Uncle Sam hat–is also angling to buy it.
Leaders of the village of Bald Head Island argue that the motivations of profit-driven outsiders are incompatible with the island’s long-term stability. Under village ownership, excess revenues would be reinvested into the system for much-needed improvements. In the hands of SharpVue, they say, profits instead would line investors’ pockets.
SharpVue has a different perspective: The tiny village government for years has been an obstructive force in blocking the transaction and is wasting taxpayer money in pursuit of owning a system it can’t realistically afford or manage.
Roberts’ handling of the ferry deal is emblematic of his operating style: analytical and understated, but also patient and persistent with an unflinching eye on long-term success.
For The Assembly, Johanna F. Still details Roberts’ hard-fought attempt to acquire the Bald Head Island ferry system:
Issues at Gannett
Earlier this month, StarNews laid off its freelancers, including longtime contributors Celia Rivenbark and Ben Steelman, both former staff writers whose work has been a part of the community for decades.
Rivenbark told me she got the call on a Friday afternoon.
“I later learned this was happening on the same day in other parts of the country at other Gannett papers,” Rivenbark said. “I believe they had slashed reporting positions and papers were using freelancers as a workaround but they got called on it when freelance costs kept growing.”
Rivenbark said she “wasn’t shocked.” Having survived “quite a few” rounds of cuts, she believed that executive editor Sherry Jones had fought for her and Steelman and that this decision was out of Jones’ hands. (Steelman politely declined to comment.)
Gannett, the massive holding company that owns StarNews, offered little beyond acknowledging the company is “evolv[ing] our strategy,” and insisting StarNews “remains committed to providing reliable and trusted local content.” Curiously, Gannett asked that their statement be attributed to a local StarNews spokesperson—as if the decision came from StarNews’ local office, and not Gannett’s corporate offices in New York City.
As my colleague Johanna Still covered in The Assembly this spring, Gannett’s systemwide cuts amid an industry-wide upheaval have decreased resources, often with demoralizing impacts—like requiring employees to take five days of unpaid leave during the holiday season in December 2022.
More recently, Gannett fired a veteran editor for criticizing the company’s failure to deliver on its promise to restaff smaller newsrooms in an interview. Gannett claims the editor was fired for revealing the content of internal memos; Poynter’s Rich Edmonds was skeptical, and later said the move could put the “fear of God” into any other Gannett employees who might speak out.
For her part, Jones referred me to Gannett’s statement and a Sunday column she wrote.
“The mission of the StarNews is to deliver quality local news that our community can’t get anywhere else, and our staff of local journalists works diligently each week to produce essential coverage,” the column begins. “To that end, we’ve made the decision to stop publishing some features not produced by local staff members.”
For their collective 70-plus years of writing for the paper, Jones committed two sentences to Rivenbark and Steelman.
“This was not an easy decision because both are former StarNews employees and have worked as freelancers for many years. We appreciate their many contributions and thank them for their years of service to our community,” she wrote, before pivoting away from the layoffs to highlight some of StarNews’ recent reporting efforts.
Rivenbark said she was “extremely disappointed” with Jones’ piece. She told me she resented both the “public outing” that she’d be fired, and having it “spun like some sort of happy ending for the paper I’ve represented for three decades.”
She noted her column that week was replaced by a staffer from USA Today, part of Gannett’s national network of papers, who was decidedly not local.
“It made no sense to me to talk about the need to clear me and Ben out to make way for local reporting,” Rivenbark told me, calling it “disingenuous at best to act as though getting rid of us will somehow boost local content… You can’t get more local than the two of us.”
She also noted that, financially, axing her and Steelman “wouldn’t pay for one day of a reporter’s salary.”
Rivenbark, who over the years served as a writer, editor, and columnist, said she loved the job and traveling across the seven-county region the paper covers. With the exception of her stint as a bridal editor, she said, “It has been so much fun and I will miss it.”
Looking ahead, she plans to publish a mix of free and paid humor writing, largely political, on Substack–noting with pleasure that she’s had over 800 StarNews readers pre-subscribe to receive her newsletter when it drops.
BS: Alright, Johanna, on this week's edition of The Dive, you wrote about Lee Roberts’ island dreams. Most people will know Lee Roberts as the new Chancellor of UNC Chapel Hill, but he has a whole other life, and you dug into a little bit of that. Tell us about this.
JS: Yeah. So for this story, we took a dive into one of the big projects that Lee Roberts was working on up until basically Monday, [when] he announced that he would be stepping down from his firm. He shared with us that he'd be stepping down from his firm, and this comes after few days prior, he was publicly named UNC Chancellor. He's been interim chancellor, so he had maintained a sort of ‘still connected, but not in a day-to-day basis’ role for this big project. But of course, now he's stepping back completely to lead the university.
So what is that project? That project is SharpVue Capital, which is a firm that he co-founded, an investment firm, is trying to own the Bald Head Island ferry system. So if you've lived in the area for a while, I'm sure you've seen some headlines. The ferry system is basically up for grabs. There have been multiple attempted owner transactions with lots of litigation involved. So it's this very complicated saga. It's been going on for years, and Lee Roberts is one of the people who were trying to buy the system, and his firm still is trying to buy the system. In fact, they were – the team behind SharpVue and Bald Head Island Limited, which is the current owner -perator of the Bald head Island ferry system – in the North Carolina Court of Appeals on Wednesday to argue in a case, one of the five cases that are basically clouding and hanging over this system and whether and how it gets transferred.
BS: So for people who don't know, this was originally created by the very wealthy Mitchell family, who are legends on Bald Head Island and help put this thing together. And after the patriarch died in 2013, I believe, that's when this process sort of started. So it's been going on for a long time. Do you have a sense of how close we are to getting some resolution on who will be in charge of the Bald Head ferry? Because that's – unless you have a private watercraft or a helicopter – pretty much the only way to get there.
JS: Yeah, it's the, you know, it's the keys to the kingdom. Bald Head Island Limited, which is, you know, owned by the Mitchell family, they are trying to divest, right? So the heirs, they want to back out, they have been trying to back away for the past decade. They've sold all their assets on the island, or most of their assets on the island, you know, the clubs, the restaurants, lots of commercial real estate, they're backing away. And so this kind of creates an existential question and issue for people who live on the island, or, you know, the tiny island, you know, village government, which is, what do we do now? And the village government has been trying to own the system, the ferry system, themselves. There's some sort of Shakespearean drama in the background going on where the family, the Mitchell family, does not want to sell the ferry to the village government. And so there's been some case, you know, some litigation about that.
And then there's, of course, SharpVue capital coming in and trying to buy it for themselves. And so Bald Head Island Limited, the company that's been operating and developed the island and the ferry system, they are in favor of SharpVue Capital, right? So they're behind this deal. They want that. They want the deal to go through – where the village government, they want to buy the ferry. So it's just this very multi-layered, very complicated issue. And as this has all been going on and really dragging on for years. Baldhead Island, the tiny village, has raised its tax rate over and over, and so they have the highest tax rate in the region. They're raising rates to, in part, compensate for rising legal fees. And so some of the islanders over there are not happy with that. They would really prefer for the village to back out.
But some village leaders, including the mayor, they tell me that it's worth it in the long end that they, you know, they would prefer to run this system because they don't have a profit incentive. So if this system were to be making profits, that money would go right back into the system, whereas what they say, you know, sharpeview capital would be letting those profits line investors pockets, because that is, you know, that is their function. That's a private equity firm's mission. But, of course, SharpVue Capitat, they believe that they could take over and run it efficiently, and they point out all the issues and all the ways that the village government has, you know, in their terms, kind of obstructed this deal from moving forward.
BS: Well, Johanna Sill, I know you have covered this story for quite some time – it sounds like the saga continues. And I should add before we go, that I am told that you can walk to Bald Head Island from Fort Fisher.
JS: You sure can you just got to time the tide right.
BS: …maybe the ferry is the best bet.
JS: Certainly, yeah, yeah.
BS: Alright, Johanna, thanks for being here.