3 NC lieutenant governors, a historic house, and a case of missing furniture

Dan Forest’s term as North Carolina lieutenant governor ended like an episode of “This Old House.”

An architect by trade, Forest took great pride in raising hundreds of thousands of dollars in private donations to painstakingly renovate and refurnish the 140-year-old Hawkins-Hartness House, which serves as the lieutenant governor’s office.

He aspired to make it a showpiece “for lieutenant governors well into the future.”

“We had an opportunity to create a bit of a legacy here,” Forest said in a 2020 video released months before the end of the Republican’s second term. “… We want to pass it on for generation after generation.”

But when Democratic Lt. Gov. Rachel Hunt took office in January, she found little trace of Forest’s handiwork. Her staff entered the Hawkins-Hartness House to find many of the rooms empty or sparsely outfitted, including what would be the lieutenant governor’s executive office.

Her term had started more like an episode of “Scooby-Doo”: Who took the furniture from the creaky mansion on Blount Street? But the culprit wasn’t hiding behind the drapes in this mystery. Because the drapes were gone, too.

Several state government agencies have since been engaged in a low-profile effort to replace desks, chairs, tables, lamps and more that were taken from the house. They’ve spent months quietly trying to determine what exactly is missing, who it belongs to, how much it was worth, and whether it’s worth replacing.

Forest was succeeded in 2021 by Mark Robinson, a fellow Republican. A number of items were removed during the transition from Robinson to Hunt, according to several people familiar with the matter and state documents obtained or viewed by WRAL News.

No one has been accused of wrongdoing. Law enforcement agencies that protect the house told WRAL that they hadn’t received any formal reports of stolen property. And the agency that tracks state furniture doesn’t appear concerned.

Rather, the situation appears to stem from a lack of communication between political foes — and the unraveling of Forest’s efforts to appoint the office in a way befitting one of the state’s highest-ranking executives. Robinson says the mystery can be solved with a phone call.

Hunt is now dealing with a new riddle: How to furnish the place for her term and for those who succeed her — not a simple task given the peculiarities of the property and the stinginess of lawmakers bent on trimming costs throughout state government.

Hunt declined an interview request for this article, but she’s singing a familiar tune to budget writers: She hopes to revive the property in the spirit Forest outlined when he left office.

“We are committed to restoring the Hawkins-Hartness House to a condition that the lieutenant governor can be proud of,” Hunt’s staff wrote in a budget request intended for the Office of State Budget and Management. “As the house receives numerous requests for events and tours from the public, we aim to reopen it for these purposes and share its history with our community.”

The document solicits $97,300 for new furnishings and carpeting. But the desired funding — which has become a gossipy sidebar in state budget negotiations — isn’t a sure thing. After all, Republicans control state spending. Hunt, the daughter of former Gov. Jim Hunt, is a Democrat.

So far, legislators appear open to the idea. Buried in the state Senate’s 1,000-page, $32 billion state spending proposal is $95,000 for carpeting and office furniture at the Hawkins-Hartness House. The state House of Representatives’ spending proposal also makes room for the expenditure.

But priorities can change in budget negotiations. Lawmakers have no obligation to fulfill Hunt’s request — or even approve a state budget. And Senate leader Phil Berger and House Speaker Destin Hall, who both declined to comment for this article, have signaled that they don’t expect to pass an overall spending plan anytime soon.

Legislative leaders have been divided over a number of issues, ranging from tax rates to education policy to state employee pay, people familiar with the negotiations say.

The lieutenant governor’s office told WRAL News in a statement that Hunt is “grateful for the legislature’s support in this effort and looks forward to hosting elected officials and the people of North Carolina at the [Hawkins-Hartness] House in the near future.”

While Hunt awaits a decision on the funding, her staff has cobbled together enough furniture to get the basics of the job done. But the lack of some items has presented challenges to operating as efficiently as possible, people familiar with the office told WRAL.

‘Just a dump’

The furniture mystery appears to have taken root with Forest’s passion project, and his general disgust with the state of the Hawkins-Hartness House when he entered office in 2013.

“The place was just a dump,” Forest told WRAL in an interview.

The house — named for the family that built it and a former North Carolina Secretary of State who later purchased it — sits one block north of the Governor’s Mansion and one block east of the legislative complex.

Ever since the state bought it more than half a century ago, the lieutenant governor’s place hasn’t regularly benefited from executive-level care and attention as those other offices.

The red-brick Second Empire-style house isn’t used as a residence, even though it looks like one and bears a title that suggests it is. Unlike the Executive Mansion — where the governor can live, often doing so with some of his or her own personal furniture — the Hawkins-Hartness House serves exclusively as a government office. And it was outfitted like one when Forest replaced Democrat Walter Dalton.

At the time, the property contained some ratty, state-owned institutional office furniture and a surprising number of near-obsolete printers — items that, in Forest’s mind, weren’t suitable for a mansion built during the Gilded Age.

“It was just awful,” Forest said. “There were probably, like, 30 old, unused printers in the office or just sitting around in corners. There were wires out of every corner of the floor and every corner of the ceiling. They were just hanging there. … All the carpet was this red, nasty carpet from the ’60s that had never been taken care of. And the kitchen was disgusting. The bathrooms were disgusting.”

So Forest and his wife, Alice, launched an ambitious renovation. They solicited donations. They called in favors from contractors. They rolled up their sleeves to paint walls. After seven years, their efforts had resulted in at least $500,000 in restoration work.

Most of the worn-out state office furniture he had inherited with the house was replaced with loaned desks, chairs and tables that, in his view, better fit the style of the house.

Forest opened up the house to the public, allowing associations and other groups to use it for events. His efforts led to hundreds of thousands of dollars more in state funding for exterior renovations.

“My goal was that the place got better over time, not worse, right?” Forest said. “I would love to see every lieutenant governor come in and make the place a little nicer.”

But when he revisited the property this year, at the invitation of Hunt, he found something different. He toured the empty rooms and found furniture that had been loaned to the property stored in the basement, much of it damaged and unusable. Some of it wasn’t there anymore — something he chalks up to the way state government works. “Furniture gets moved around from one place to the next,” he said. “You just don’t know.”

An accounting of property at the house shortly before the end of Robinson’s term lists a few pieces of office equipment as missing — printers, a phone, a fax machine. But the furniture on the list appeared to be accounted for. The state Department of Administration, manages state furniture and equipment and provided the list to WRAL, says an investigation isn’t warranted.

“I don’t sense any wrongdoing at all,” Forest said. “Disorganization? Yes. Probably a lack of concern to get the place back to the way it was when you moved in, like my hope was.”

‘Nobody tells you anything’

Forest said he was disappointed as he walked through the house that he and his wife had helped restore.

“Lieutenant Governor Hunt was expecting a whole lot more, and she should have been,” he said. “… There was a whole lot of time and energy and effort spent to get this place looking really nice and making it presentable. And that’s not what Lieutenant Governor Hunt took over.”

Before Forest took office, the conservative Republican met several times with his predecessor, Democrat Walter Dalton. Dalton briefed Forest on his day-to-day routine and about the quirks of the office.

“He was very gracious,” Forest said, adding that such meetings are critical for incoming officeholders — especially to political newcomers such as himself. Forest hadn’t held office before he narrowly beat Democrat Linda Coleman in 2012. “There’s no playbook,” he said.

After the multi-year renovation, Forest lost to Democrat Roy Cooper in the 2020 gubernatorial election. That year, Robinson, also a political newcomer, won the lieutenant governor’s race. When it came time for Forest to hand over the property to Robinson, Forest sought to provide the same kind of guidance he had received from Dalton. Without it, transitions can be awkward or incomplete.

“Nobody tells you anything,” Forest said. “You’ve just got to take over and figure it all out. So we created a bit of a handbook for the next person. And I don’t know what happened to that.”

When Robinson took the keys, Forest’s administration pointed him to the furniture that had been left behind.

“They instructed us on where the stuff was and where we could find things that were left there if we wanted to use them,” Robinson told WRAL in a telephone interview. “But when it came to the actual setting up and actual tearing down, that was all on us and our staff.”

He set out to put his own stamp on the Hawkins-Hartness House, noting that much of the furniture was put in the basement. “If I wanted it furnished the way I wanted, I had to get my own,” Robinson said.

Robinson said a separate group loaned furniture to his administration. When it came time for him to leave office, the company came to collect the furniture, he said. “The only thing that I took when I left was my memorabilia, the things that belonged to me,” Robinson said.

Meanwhile, art handlers from the North Carolina Museum of Art came to collect paintings that had been on loan to the lieutenant governor’s office, according to the North Carolina Department of Natural and Cultural Resources, which oversees the museum.

So it was no surprise to Robinson why Hunt arrived to empty offices with artless walls. The only mystery in Robinson’s eyes: why wasn’t he part of the conversation?

“Nobody has called me,” he said. “Nobody’s called any former staff members that I know of.”

Unlike during the transition from Dalton to Forest or from Forest to Robinson, communication between Hunt and Robinson was virtually nonexistent before she took over, people familiar with the transition said. Some of it may have come down to staffing and politics.

‘It was their furniture’

Robinson and Hunt occasionally crossed paths in the state Senate, where the lieutenant governor can preside over debates in the chamber. Hunt was a state senator before becoming lieutenant governor. Robinson says they’ve never spoken. A Hunt spokesperson didn’t respond to a request to respond to the claim.

Late last year, in the final months of his lone term, Robinson was working with a skeleton crew. Much of his staff had resigned following allegations reported by CNN that he made racist, antisemitic and lewd remarks in the chatroom of a pornographic website years before entering politics. Robinson, who eventually lost the governor’s race to Democrat Josh Stein, denied the allegations.

On the campaign trail, Hunt appeared in an ad holding a bottle of bleach, suggesting she’d need to disinfect the Hawkins-Hartness House if she were to beat the GOP’s nominee, Hal Weatherman. Robinson, the state’s first Black lieutenant governor, called the ad racist. Hunt pointed to the CNN report in response, saying in a social media post at the time, “there’s a lot to clean up,” pointing to Robinson’s history of divisive statements.

While Robinson might have little inclination to interact with Hunt, he says a phone call could help clear this up. “We can tell them exactly where the furniture was taken and who took it, because it was their furniture,” he said. “It wasn’t ours.”

In early January, Hunt’s office began working out of temporary offices, away from the Hawkins-Hartness House. One of her staff’s first tasks: untangling the inventory of the furniture that was left in the building.

Pictures of some of the house’s interior, provided to WRAL after a public records request, show deskless rooms, some with bare walls. Other images obtained by WRAL show temporary furniture, including folding tables. Notes accompanying another image point to window furnishings that appear to have been removed.

Hunt’s staff eventually tracked down a list that detailed who owned some of the furniture stored in the house when she took office, according to staff notes in a budget request. After reaching a company that owned most of the remaining furniture, the staff was left with no guarantee that any of the furniture left at the property belonged to the state.

Hunt’s staff outlined plans to let companies display their furniture in the home with the intent to purchase it using state funds. The funding request, if approved, would reduce the need for loaned furniture — something agencies in traditional offices don’t typically have to deal with when administrations change.

That could lead to fewer mysteries and less finger-pointing over who owns what at the property, while also making the house more consistently presentable to the public.

“The lieutenant governor has plans to refurbish the Hawkins-Hartness House so that visitors can enjoy a space that reflects the beauty of North Carolina for many years to come and beyond her time in this office,” Hunt’s office said in a statement to WRAL.

Meanwhile, Hunt is also asking the state for an additional $115,000 to beef up security, including fencing designed to provide increased protection.

The administration’s request includes a mindful detail: the fence would complement the historical aesthetics of the house — a consideration Forest might appreciate.