A Virginia businessman is claiming ownership over a new island that formed off the coast of North Carolina’s Outer Banks — sparking a standoff with park officials for the mile-long chunk of new real estate.

Ken Barlow, who operates a cleaning business in Mechanicsville and owns property on Hatteras Island, has filed a quitclaim deed — used to transfer interest in property — for $26 earlier this week. If granted, Barlow intends to designate the mile-long land mass off Cape Point — dubbed “Shelly Island” by a local boy earlier this year — as Hatteras Island Veterans Park, the Virginian-Pilot reports.

“I don’t really want to own an island,” Barlow told the newspaper. “All I want to do is keep the park service from having control.”

But county officials say the new sandbar — which stretches several hundred yards wide — either belongs to the National Park Service or Dare County. Bobby Outten, the county’s manager and attorney, said an island that forms in navigable waters becomes property of the state under North Carolina law, while it would belong to the National Park Service if the mass grows to attach itself to Cape Point.

Dave Hallac, superintendent of the Cape Hatteras National Seashore, which is owned by the National Park Service, said state and federal officials are debating who owns the island and how it should be used “if it is still there next summer,” he told the newspaper.

Hallac declined to comment on Barlow’s deed.

Barlow, meanwhile, argues the island belongs to him because of the Race Statute, which indicates the first to file a deed has ownership of the land, he said. Just three states — North Carolina, Delaware and Louisiana — allow this type of filing, also known as the “race to the courthouse” statute, according to LegalMatch.com.

Barlow also claims he was granted a quitclaim deed for a sandbar in the same location in 1985 by a businessman from Virginia Beach. Barlow, who said the sandbar was gone by the time he visited the site three weeks later, still has a copy of the deed, he told the newspaper.

Ready for a legal fight, Barlow said it’s also no coincidence that the island appeared after a beach nourishment project in Buxton, sending sand floating southward after the dredging began, leading to the creation of the island, he said.

“I’ll fight them all they want,” Barlow said.

Visitor Janice Regan and her 11-year-old grandson, Caleb, spotted the island and named it “Shelly Island” after they stumbled upon it and many large seashells there during Memorial Day weekend.

“Yeah, isn’t it crazy?” Regan told the newspaper. “It was just a little bump in April.”