A long-shuttered watering hole in Hobart is set to meet a wrecking ball in the near future, but it’s up to its owner to redevelop the property once the building is torn down, Hobart Mayor Josh Huddlestun confirmed Thursday.
The City has not declared eminent domain on 235 Main St., nor does it plan to make an offer to property owner Jimmie Batalis after both the Board of Public Works and Town Council voted to defer to a March 8 Lake Superior Court ruling that allows the city to demolish the building that formerly housed Main Street Station, Huddlestun said. What Batalis decides to do with the property now, though, is entirely up to him.
“The process (to demolish the bar) started long before I became Mayor, and we’d been talking to Mr. Batalis for the last nine months about what he wanted to do,” Huddlestun told the Post-Tribune. “We’re not making an offer and have no intention to purchase the land from him, but he’s welcome to put something else there or sell the land to a buyer who will.
“It’s a great parcel, and I hope he’s able to put something there that will benefit himself and the city.”
Batalis said on social media that he made “several attempts” to talk to Huddlestun between then and now, but that Huddlestun “shut him down,” and while City Attorney Heather McCarthy “made it very clear” for him to file the appeal to the ruling, he ended up dropping the appeal because Huddlestun, he said, told him “once the appeal is over we will have a clear path to move forward and that he would talk to me once it’s terminated.”
Batalis was paroled in December after serving 16.5 years of a 57-year sentence for the May 2003 murder of 28-year-old Jason Nosker.
Nosker was the boyfriend of Batalis’ ex-girlfriend, and they were threatened repeatedly by Batalis before he shot into their bedroom window while they were asleep, according to court records. Nosker was paralyzed from the waist down before dying of his injuries.
Batalis’ sentence was handed down before the state of Indiana required those with high-level felonies and murder convictions to serve at least 75% of their sentence.
Batalis said the property went into probate after his father and brother died while he was in prison and the unsafe building issues started during that time.
Lake Superior Court Civil Judge Stephen Scheele on March 8 ruled in favor of the City of Hobart, the Hobart Board of Works and Building Official Karen Hansen against Batalis and Harold Killian, the Post-Tribune previously reported.
In the building case, Scheele found “no genuine issue as to the fact that Plaintiffs failed to file a timely complaint for judicial review as required by the Indiana Unsafe Building Law,” the city “is entitled to judgment as a matter of law on Count I of Plaintiffs’ Complaint for Judicial Review,” the judge wrote. The court also found that the city “did not violate Plaintiffs’ procedural or substantive due process rights,” he wrote in the judgment.
Batalis and Killian previously offered to put $60,000 into renovating the building, but Huddlestun said that isn’t enough to make the building habitable.
The Board of Works set 235 Main St. for condemnation at its July 5, 2023 meeting after at least a year of trying to get the owner’s representatives to repair it, the Post-Tribune previously reported. During that meeting, a local contractor appeared before the board with attorney Dana Rifai and said Batalis had given him limited power-of-attorney to act on his behalf while he was in prison.
Since the contractor’s company wasn’t licensed with the city to do work at the time, he told the board he reached out to Tak Construction, which is licensed to work in Hobart, to do the work with him acting as the project manager — a move the board immediately shot down.
The contractor then said he had a copy of a report that says the building is structurally sound, a point Hansen disputed as the building’s east wall needs to be replaced and the building had not been maintained. Additionally, the owners claimed to have Hobart-licensed contractor lined up to do the work at one point, but that contractor claims they never got a deposit from the owner, Hansen said.
Former Hobart Fire Chief Randy Smith added that there have been two fires at the building, and as it stands now, he would not allow his firefighters to enter the building if there were a third.
Michelle L. Quinn is a freelance reporter for the Post-Tribune.