THE final owner of the Carriage Cafe has revealed Fremantle council stepped away from a full court battle over its demolition, allowing him to walk away without wearing the City’s legal bill.

But David Furness says the lease dispute wouldn’t have had to escalate if the council had listened to his persistent calls to try and settle through arbitration.

The Carriage was one of Fremantle’s high-profile victims of the Covid pandemic, with Mr Furness revealing it was costing him around $1000 a week to stay open as stringent social distancing rules saw sales plummet.

He hoped to see a turn-around when the restrictions eased, but a wet summer dampened sales and in the face of mounting debts he closed the doors in March 2022 and put the business on the market.

• Fremantle council rips down the old carriage on the Esplanade. File photo

Having started a law degree in the meantime, he says he started noticing what he believed were anomalies in the lease he held with the council.

“For example, it was on the basis of commercial retail, and in a retail lease you can’t restrict the hours of trade.”

He believes these may have played a part in at least one potential buyer pulling out.

With the end of his lease now looming, he continued to negotiate with the council in the hope of limiting his losses, but says that changed in a heartbeat.

“They were going to allow me to sell and then we had this meeting and it all went south, and 14 days later they had an internal council meeting and they decided not to renew the lease.

“I left assuming we could go to arbitration, but they handballed it to their lawyers.”

The council was now demanding Mr Furness remove the Carriage and had erected temporary fencing around it, while he says negotiations were excruciating because while he would flick off a reply to every letter the same day, it could take up to four weeks before his queries went through the council’s lawyers and came back.

The case became more complicated, he said, after legal documents were misdirected.

“In June I am sitting in Perth airport passing the time before a flight and there was messages on Facebook from lots of people, including one from a David Furness.

“This guy is from England and he starts asking me if I own a cafe.

“It turns out the council’s lawyers had sent all the legal documents to the British David,” he said.

“They were sending it to the wrong email.”

Mr Furness said the stuff-up meant he missed a court deadline to contest the council’s claim the Carriage and its contents were now essentially abandoned and it was going to remove them and send him the bill.

Drawing on his legal studies, he successfully sought an adjournment before making one final attempt to settle the matter.

He told the council’s lawyers he simply wanted both sides to walk away, and says 15 minutes later he got a phone call saying the offer had been accepted.

Within weeks the council’s contractors brought in the heavy machinery which ground the Carriage into pieces small enough to be hauled away in a dump truck.

“I felt absolutely relieved,” Mr Furness said, adding the saga had taken a deep toll on him, particularly as he copped some abuse on social media.

Despite the difficult ending, Mr Furness said the cafe had enjoyed a loyal following over many years.

“There were people who had been coming for years and years and even up to the last minute there were people coming every day,” he said.

by STEVE GRANT