Attending and chairing most meetings aside, a piqued and vengeful Palm Coast Mayor Mike Norris is no longer fulfilling basic public and administrative council responsibilities that his four colleagues are fulfilling, in some cases causing his colleagues to carry the weight of the responsibilities he’s shrugging off.
He has abandoned all but one of his committee responsibilities, he refuses to meet with the acting city manager to prepare for meetings, his petulance or absence has required Theresa Pontieri, as vice mayor, to step in and lead high-profile public functions, including the State of the City event, the Memorial Day commemoration and several city meetings, and he is declining to hold the kind of town hall meetings his colleagues will be hosting over the next few months.
Other than name-dropping Sheriff Rick Staly’s name from time to time–an attempt to boost his credibility by appealing unbidden to the popular sheriff’s coattails–Norris neither refers to nor appears to be fostering or maintaining professional connections with officials in other governments, other than attendance at one or two of the quarterly meetings of mayors.
Norris has not decline to take his salary of $33,758 a year, plus a $1,200 car allowance. He still chairs most meetings, projecting authority and feeding off validation from a diminished if raucously and at times rudely loyal core of supporters.
On Monday the city announced the council’s “Let’s Talk Palm Coast” series of town halls, starting with Pontieri’s at the Community Center on June 25, and continuing monthly for the following three months, with each of the other council embers–bot not Norris. “We were told that he declined to participate,” a city spokesperson said. Norris did not return an email asking about his participation.
When he was sworn in on Nov. 19, he participated in the customary assumption of committee assignments on about a dozen boards where the city is represented. The assignments are among the council members’ important responsibilities, requiring a time commitment and resporting responsibilities, as members share with their colleagues relevant issues from each board.
Norris agreed to be the liaison on the countywide Affordable Housing Advisory Committee, on the Flagler County Transportation Disadvantaged Local Coordinating Board, on the River to Sea Transportation Planning Organization, and, along with Ty Miller, on the joint cities and county workshop that meets periodically during the year.
“When we had this discussion with Ms Johnston,” Norris had said in November, back when he had discussions with Lauren Johnston, the acting city manager he sought to summarily fire a few months ago, “I specifically said I would like everyone to volunteer for the positions that they would like. I think I asked that there be a few reserved for me, specifically that I like to be on one. The primary one was the TPO,” the Transportation Planning Organization, which meets in Daytona Beach once a month and blueprints transportation projects in Flagler County and other counties under its umbrella.
He was also eager to serve on the Affordable Housing Committee. “I’ve been to one of those meetings, and I found some valuable information,” Norris had said. “I’ll gladly put my name on that one.”
He was well aware of the responsibilities. “Some of these you have to stay on top of them,” he said. “like I know for a fact the Affordable Housing Advisory Committee. If you miss two meetings or so, you’re off the board.”
The council censured Norris and declared it had no confidence in him after an investigation confirmed that he had attempted to fire top staff without the council’s knowledge, breaching charter prohibitions on council members’ interference with administrative duties. By then the council had appointed Dave Sullivan to replace Ray Stevens, who resigned a few weeks into his tenure for health reasons. The council had to reshuffle committee assignments on May 6.
“I can make some of it quite easy for everyone,” Norris vengefully said at that meeting. “Since this change, this council has censured me and voted no confidence, I would like all of you to fill those positions, other than the joint city-county commission. Since you don’t have the confidence in me, you can fill all those positions. So that’s up to you to pick whichever ones you want. But I do want to stay on this, the joint city and county workshop, so pick and choose as you please.”
Norris didn’t explain how, lacking the council’s confidence, he could justify disregarding most responsibilities while holding on to the joint city-county assignment, or why, for that matter, if he did not have the council’s confidence, he was remaining in his seat: once in the seat, the electorate generally expects an elected official to fulfill the office’s responsibilities in whole rather than pick and choose at the expense of colleagues.
As a result of Norris’s “abdication” of responsibilities, as one of his colleagues described it, his fellow-council members have had to pick up his slack, with Pontieri serving on four boards, two council members serving on three each, and one serving on two.
Johnston methodically meets with each of the council members ahead of meetings and workshops to brief them on the agenda and prepare them on any issue about which they may have questions. Such one-on-one briefings are routine in local governments, if not essential for elected officials who are typically faced with meeting materials of several hundred pages at a time, assuming they read them. Norris has stopped holding those briefings, and scarcely has more than erratic contact with administrative staff, generally when he needs something.
None of the council members have made an issue with the mayor’s desertions, with one exception: last month Council member Charles Gambaro–who originated the call to have Norris investigated, and against whom Norris filed a lawsuit to boot him off the council (it’s pending)–read a statement that had also ran in the local press.
After the investigation brought to light instances of Norris demeaning staff and interfering with the administration, Gambarro said, “Mayor Norris has responded by systematically abandoning key mayoral responsibilities that our citizens expect and deserve. He has publicly refused to fulfill Council liaison appointment duties that are essential for coordination between the council and various city departments and community organizations. Even more troubling, he has physically removed his belongings from the shared council office, symbolically and literally, withdrawing from collaborative governance. These actions represent a troubling and unprecedented, unprecedented abdication of fundamental duties he swore to uphold when taking office.”
Norris is expected to chair Tuesday evening’s workshop.
