After serving less than four months as director of Brunswick County's economic development department, Michael DiTullo has resigned.

Once again, Brunswick County manager Ann Hardy will be taking over the role for now.

"I will be formulating a plan for the recruitment" of a new director, Hardy wrote in an email Wednesday.

DiTullo, whose hiring was announced in September, started leading the county department at the beginning of November with a salary of $100,000.

The news of his resignation came a day after details about Brunswick County potentially being in the running for a new, large employer were reported. Those details included that the county had responded to a request for information for a privately held, international manufacturer of vehicle and aviation tires. According to the RFI documents, the company is searching for a place to locate a U.S. operation that would result in a $458 million investment and create more than 1,000 jobs over a six-year period.

Documents related to the RFI, including a spreadsheet with the county's response, were available to the public, as of Tuesday afternoon, in emails on the county's public terminal, located at the Brunswick County government complex in Bolivia.

Asked whether the information's release on the public terminal had anything to do with DiTullo's resignation, Hardy said she cannot comment on any personnel matter. Efforts to reach DiTullo for comment were not immediately successful on Wednesday.

In general, the recipient of an email is responsible for determining whether that email is appropriate for the public terminal, said Hardy and Brunswick County Board of Commissioners chairman Scott Phillips.

"Typically, any information that is for a pending business is not released as public information," Phillips said Wednesday.

The same is true for the Economic Development Partnership of North Carolina, one of the groups that, according to the emails available on the county's terminal, Brunswick's economic development department was working with on the RFI response.

Mary Wilson, communications and public relations manager for the EDPNC, said in an email Tuesday that "as a matter of policy, the EDPNC doesn’t confirm whether any individual company has approached the state regarding expansion or relocation plans, or comment on details of such inquiries, unless the company has committed to locating in North Carolina and that decision has been formally announced."

Although such documents are public records, state laws allow local governments to withhold information about specific business or industrial expansion projects until a deal is done or fails to be reached.

Brunswick County is in somewhat atypical circumstances. This summer, the Brunswick County Board of Commissioners voted to create the county department rather than continuing to provide some funding and support to the separate legal entities that previously did the job. The change came after questions surfaced about how those entities, the Brunswick County Economic Development Commission and Brunswick County Economic Development Corp., had used county funds.

A selection team made up of senior county staff and county commissioner Frank Williams interviewed candidates over two days in August, with subsequent follow-up interviews. DiTullo was a highly qualified candidate, according to the county's September announcement about his hiring.

In New York, DiTullo participated in 15 corporate attractions that came with more than 2 million square feet of industrial, office and high-tech space, more than 2,500 new jobs and nearly $1 billion in private sector capital investment, according to the county's news release at the time. He also worked as the managing director for the Orange County Business Accelerator in New Windsor, New York, and has three decades of experience working in business development and real estate in New York, the release said.

Phillips said he is "somewhat surprised" by DiTullo's resignation but expects the county to continue its economic development efforts.

"We have a county manager that has stepped into that role as the interim economic development director and she’s currently putting together a plan for seeking a replacement. We want to share that Brunswick County is still open for business and we are willing to work with any economic development opportunities that come forward," Phillips said.