I am beginning to think that Pam Richardson and Kim Carney, the two Flagler County commissioners sacrificing our beaches to ideological fantasy, think County Administrator Heidi Petito is a magician. Or maybe that she can generate millions of dollars to save the beaches through some cryptocurrency scheme. More likely, they just don’t seem to like her very much. They’re trying to undermine her tenure by accusing her of obstruction and deception.
Petito is capable of both, as are most county and city managers. Look at what Bunnell City Manager Alvin Jackson is doing in Bunnell: he’s speeding through one of the most massive industrial rezoning schemes in the state and pretending it has nothing to do with that fuel dump residents rejected in Palm Coast and Ormond Beach. He’s sneaking in the fuel dump–either in that rezoned area or further south in Bunnell–through a series of secret actions as he dubiously invokes a provision of law that allows him to temporarily hide public records related to economic development, preventing us from knowing who’s behind this. (Tell you what, Alvin: if it ain’t the farm, then just issue a statement saying so. You’re not breaching any confidences, just asserting a negative. But you won’t, proving by your own undue secrecy the motive of your secret.)
Petito is doing no such thing with the beaches. The obstruction–the wall between a viable beach and certain erosion–is the Carney-Richardson obstinacy.
The commission asked Petito to produce a plan to pay for beach management well into the future. After a series of misfires and rejections, she and deputy administrator Jorge Salinas pulled it off. The plan is expensive (more expensive by $4 million a year than a year ago, which raises its own legitimate questions). But it would ensure repairing all 18 miles of beaches and, more importantly, maintaining those beaches with periodic renourishment every so many years.
It would also fund Flagler County’s very expensive share of the 50-year U.S. Army Corps of Engineers renourishment project on 2.8 miles of sands in Flagler Beach. Without the county’s share, the Corps project dies, and with it any hope of preserving Flagler Beach’s sands.
All this depends on increasing the county’s sales tax by half a cent. Richardson and Carney don’t want to do that. Their position can be respected, up to a point. If they simply said they didn’t want a tax increase, that would be that. It’s ideological dogma, and it’s misplaced and misinformed (in other words, it’s politics), but it’s not deception. They would have to accept the consequence, which is killing the beach management plan.
Leann Pennington is also opposed to the sales tax increase. But she is not questioning the administrator’s methods, nor the sales tax increase on its merits. She opposes using that revenue for the beaches. Her constituents on the west side don’t care about the beaches. They care about stormwater and drainage. Pennington wants tax dollars spent there. So her opposition is based on priorities as she sees them, not on the kind of ideological opposition and fantasy wishes Carney and Richardson are conjuring.
(I think Pennington is wrong: people in Kansas and Okeechobee County are ponying up for Flagler County’s beaches through state and federal funds. What exempts the West Side? True, a minute share of their county taxes is already contributing to beach management. But a sales tax increase would be infinitesimal in comparison. Meanwhile those people in Kansas ponied up to vastly improve the West Side’s broadband access that Pennington championed. They did so through a federal aid bill, the same sort of bill giving us the new South Side library. Pennington happily cheered on that money, just as she championed and cheered a $10 million shelter at the county fairgrounds those people in Okeechobee also paid for. How about giving back a little for your neighbors a few miles east?)
Saving the beaches isn’t just for the fun of walking them at sunset. It’s not just tourism (whose share of local sales tax revenue county officials keep blatantly lying about: it’s nowhere near 30 percent). It’s a matter of safety to the barrier island as essential as codes that keep buildings from collapsing and firefighters that keep them from burning. And yes, it’s also matter of county identity. The West Side would scream bloody murder if no one lifted a finger if a preventable disease (probably caused by global warming) were ravaging crops, and they’d be right, even though we’d all survive without the West Side’s cabbages, potatoes and sod farms. Why should we not all lift a finger–and taxes–to save beaches getting ravaged by warming-caused sea rise and that, pound for pound, are far more valuable than potatoes and cabbages?
Carney and Richardson claim they’re all for the 18-mile plan. But they want Petito to give them alternatives to the sales tax they had supported as recently as early March. Then reversed, claiming that there are alternatives, and blaming Petito for not providing them. They have not presented a single one, at least not a viable one. Carney suggested the harebrained shift of the county’s Environmentally Sensitive Lands revenue to the beach, once it’s up for renewal, even though that would rob Peter’s forest to pay Paul’s dunes and would be a fifth of the needed revenue or less.
Richardson and Carney think gas tax money could do the trick, though state law doesn’t allow transportation revenue to fund beach management. Richardson thinks you can also cut a few million dollars out of the budget, DOGE-like (even as the nut case who brought you DOGE is now at war with his nut-case boss and his debt-exploding “big beautiful bill,” and both reveal what a swindle the whole thing was.) In any case, you need recurring revenue, not one-time cuts, and aside from ridiculous ideas like stopping construction on the South Side library or staffing it with ghosts, Richardson hasn’t dared propose a single cut.
That’s the sort of straw-man suggestions Carney and Richardson have come up with to claim that Petito can propose alternatives, but refuses to. But the only thing Petito is refusing to do is play into their deception. She knows: They want her to take the blame for what they’re doing: killing Flagler County’s beach-management plan–the only viable plan we have.
Personally, I think raising the property tax to whatever level necessary to fund beach management is the way. That’s a viable alternative. It cuts across all classes and regions. Everybody pays it (renters and businesses proportionately much more than homesteaded homeowners), Palm Coast and the other cities included. But even the two champions of the beach management plan–Andy Dance and Greg Hansen–won’t go there: raising the property tax is heresy for Republicans who love their revenue as regressive as possible. That’s a theology for another day, and compromise is more useful than theology.
That leaves us with the regressive sales tax, immune though are groceries, medicines, soon-to-be-clothes up to $75 and innumerable other exemptions. As a political reality, the sales tax remains the only choice, and compromise on that score, for all of us, the only way.
So Petito is right to resist. She’s not to blame here. The commissioners are. Maybe we can name what will be the inevitable 18-mile sea wall after Carney and Richardson as the beaches disappear and the barrier island’s life expectancy dwindles.
Pierre Tristam is the editor of FlaglerLive. A version of this piece airs on WNZF.
