Tampa man jailed for not demolishing his guest house is ‘not done fighting’

Michael Martin came home from the Hillsborough County jail on Friday exhausted and 12 pounds lighter, but his words sounded strong. “I’m not done fighting,” he said from the couch of his South Tampa home. A nurse had just hooked him up to an IV. “I’m really dehydrated. The water isn’t very good at the jail.”Martin, 62, spent nearly three weeks inside, charged with contempt of court for failing to follow a judge’s order that he demolish the two-story gym and guest house, his pool and a pickleball court he’d constructed in the back yard of his Beach Park home. Between what it originally cost to build, the $400,000 it will cost to tear it down and the hundreds of thousands of dollars he has paid to lawyers, Martin said he stands to lose nearly $2 million.“I’m completely perplexed about how I’m here,” he said, “when I did everything by the book and the city approved the permits every step of the way.”The city did approve all the permits for the construction, but in 2021, Martin’s neighbors, Gordon and Barbara Babbitt, sued him, saying his construction created a nuisance and infringed on their right to enjoy their own property.Among other things, the Babbits complained that the structure blocked the sunlight from shining on their swimming pool and prevented natural light in their house. The case went on for years. The Babbitts’ attorney eventually argued that the construction should never have been permitted, because the land at the back of Martin’s lot had been reserved for public use.Decades ago, there’d been an alley there, Martin’s attorney, Sam Heller, said. “In the ‘60s or ’70s, the city did away with the alley and all of the individual lot owners took the piece of the alley that was behind their house,” he said.That land was part of the property that Martin originally purchased, said Dennis Johnson, a land development and zoning expert who helped Martin work with the city to divide it into three lots. Martin eventually built his own home and the guest house in question on the big, middle lot.Johnson said that at the outset he asked land development officials with the city if he needed to replat the properties — the legal process of redrawing the boundaries — and was told it was not necessary. There were no other restrictions on the plat, he said. In 2023, two years after the Babbits first sued Martin, 13th Judicial District Judge Christopher Nash ruled that Martin’s guest house did not comply with the original plat. He ordered Martin to tear it down, and later added Martin’s pool and pickleball court to the order. On April 20, after the sixth filing from the Babbits’ attorney asking the judge to find Martin in contempt of court, Nash did just that. Deputies arrested Martin at home and brought him to jail.At the time, Martin still had an appeal pending. When that appeal was denied this week, Martin agreed to move forward with the teardown so that he could be released. Among the conditions were his moving hundreds of thousands of dollars into an account to pay the demolition company. His property is too tight for heavy equipment. The large building will have to be dismantled by hand and carted out on wheelbarrows, his lawyer said.Heller, Martin’s lawyer, called the situation “unprecedented.” His client, he said, is being held responsible for laws that city staffers are paid to uphold when they approve permits. Earlier in the week, City of Tampa officials released a statement reading: “The court ultimately ruled that the area in question was not buildable — a decision that was later upheld on appeal. This is a legal matter between the litigants and the courts."The Babbitts declined to speak to the Times. “The city screwed up,” said Beth Leytham, a spokesperson for the law firm Hill Ward Henderson, which is representing the Babbitts. “The court made it right.” Martin, Leytham said, is not a victim in the case. “The Babbits went to him and essentially said, do you have to do this?” she said. “And he ultimately dismissed them and started to put up this monstrous 27-foot structure that required him to raze all these 100-year-old trees and cast a shadow over their yard.“Then their lawyer sent him a letter, at the very beginning, saying this is the case law and if you keep building you could be required to demolish it. He chose to do it anyway, and he ended up losing.”On Friday, Heller stood on Martin’s offending pickleball court, and pointed over the fence at the pool cages and other buildings peeking over the fence. “Look around, everyone around here has built on it,” he said, referring to the former alley that the court has deemed unbuildable. Last year, Martin filed a lawsuit against the Babbits for building a pool there. The suit, Heller said, used the exact same language as the Babbits’ lawsuit against Martin.That lawsuit is currently pending before the same judge.In a motion to dismiss the suit, the Babbits’ lawyer argued that if Martin is going to sue the Babbits for building on the former alley, he would have to sue all the neighbors who’ve done it.“I don’t want to do that,” Martin said, “but they’ve painted me into a corner. That’s what I’m going to do.”

Tampa man jailed for not demolishing his guest house is ‘not done fighting’

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Tampa man jailed for not demolishing his guest house is ‘not done fighting’

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