A Durham hotel had rooms, but shut the door on local flood victims | Opinion

You don’t reckon the front desk clerk at the Candlewood Suites motel thought Gwen Montague said “termites” instead of “Durhamites,” do you?

Montague and her husband, Ira, thought they’d left the worst behind them, at least temporarily, when they fled their flooded home Friday night and pulled up to the motel on Highway 54 in Durham.

They figured they could confront the floodwaters’s devastation – “We lost everything,” Ira Montague said – come morning, after a good night’s sleep and a continental breakfast.

Neither a good night’s sleep nor any other kind was to be had at the Candlewood Suites, though. Not for the Montagues.

The front desk clerk studied Gwen Montague’s driver’s license, handed it back – and informed her that there was no room at the inn for them, despite her reservation.

Say what?

She phoned Ira, who’d waited outside in the car because it was dark and they’d crammed as many of their possessions as they could salvage into the car. “She called me on the phone and said ‘I need you to come in right away,’” he told me recently. “I could tell something was wrong.”

What was “wrong” was a newly implemented Candlewood Suites policy that allows them to deny Durham city or county residents a room.

“I couldn’t believe that,” said Montague, a retired Durham police officer. “I told him that we’re flood victims, but he said ‘That’s the policy.’ I raised my voice, so my wife dragged me out of there.

“She said ‘Let it go, let it go,’” he said. “I did, because we were in the middle of a crisis, so I couldn’t focus on that at the time. But I am not going to let it go. I’m going to call the upper echelons of management and let them know.”

They already know.

The Montagues, as was I, were offended. You see, we longtime Durham residents remember the not-all-that distant period when the city and its residents were treated like the baldheaded, snaggle-toothed stepchildren of The Triangle.

Now you’re telling us that we can’t even get a room in a Durham motel?

It’s scant consolation to the Montagues, but Candlewood Suites is not the only motel across the state to have a similar water-logged policy, although calls to 16 Durham motels discovered that it is the only one with that policy in the Bull City.

The exclusionary policy went into effect at the Candlewood Suites July 1, according to a “new check-in policy” sheet on the front desk. Various other motels across the state have had the policy even longer, according to information found online.

Residents of Asheville and Wilmington, for instance, have bemoaned a similar policy since at least 2018. Those motels cite crime and destructive parties, among other reasons for the policy.

Nazreen Ahmed, a spokesperson for the N.C. Attorney General’s office, said the Consumer Protection division has received no complaints on such policies, but suggested anyone who wishes to file one call 1-877-566- 7226 or email it at www.ncdoj.gov/complaint.

Calls and emails to the local Candlewood Suites and the chain’s corporate offices resulted in me being passed along life a spliff at a Willie Nelson concert. Despite assurances that someone would answer my question, the only response was from corporate headquarters telling me that the local motel would call me to explain.

Funny, but that is precisely the opposite what the local property had told me days before.

It’s understandable that management at reputable establishments don’t want to see their places turned into no-tell motels or low-rent rendezvous spots where everyone signs the register as “Me and Mrs. Jones,” but common sense and empathy should prevail, especially after residents have been displaced by flooding of near biblical proportions.

Not a single person to whom I mentioned the Montagues’ plight had ever heard of anything like that before.

I had.

I, myself – a person of sterling character - was once denied a motel room when the front desk clerk told me the motel didn’t rent to people without automobiles. I calmly - or as calmly as one could after trudging two miles in the broiling Carolina summer sun and being passed by 8,000 drivers who ignored first my thumb and then another finger - explained that I had one.

It was an unreliable 1977 Ford Maverick that went by the name of OTIS: Often Times It Stops. On this particular day it had lived up to its name on the side of the highway, leaving me to hump the bogart to the first motel I saw. Since this was in the pre-cellphone days, calling ahead and making a reservation was not possible.

The unswayed and unsympathetic clerk looked at my bedraggled self and told me “There are other motels down the street.”

By this point it was a matter of principle, and I demanded to speak to the manager and threatened to tear the roof off the sucka.

She relented and rented me a room, from which I called a tow truck and got Otis on the road again.

I don’t remember how long it was before I realized what a chump I’d been – standing there arguing with someone who was disrespecting me and demanding that they take my money. I’ve kept my vow to never patronize that motel chain again.

I wonder if the Montagues and other victims of the recent flooding who might’ve been turned away in their night of need will feel the same way once the floodwaters recede.