A defiant Mike Norris Tuesday evening said he didn’t care if he “cost the city a million dollars.” He was not repaying a dime of the $30,000 the lawsuit he just lost cost taxpayers. He gave no indication that he accepted the court’s ruling. He blamed his colleagues for not taking his advice in December to protect the city against the lawsuit he ended up filing. He warned his colleagues on the Palm Coast City Council that he would be seeking reimbursement of his legal fees over the pending ethics complaint they filed against him. And he renewed conspiratorial claims about city staff and “what’s going on in this city.”
The mayor threw the gauntlet at the end of a four-and-a-half-hour council meeting after colleagues, prompted by Council member Charles Gambaro, said only Norris could voluntarily pay back the fees he cost the city.
Norris in May filed suit against Gambaro and the city, charging that the council’s appointment of Gambaro past last Nov. 5’s election day was illegal. Gambaro called the suit “frivolous.” Circuit Judge Chris France last week ruled unambiguously that Norris had no standing to sue, and that even on the merits, the city acted within the charter.
Norris did not acknowledge losing the suit on Tuesday, instead hinting that the city was wrong, the judge was wrong, and he was right. “If I’m defending our residents’ right to pick their representative, and if I feel something’s wrong, I’m going to do it every time,” Norris said.
He gave no indication that his defiance–of investigative findings, of legal advice, and now of a court’s decision–would end. Nor would the costs. He did not say whether he would appeal. If the council was hoping that the ruling would put an end to the turmoil, Norris disabused it of that hope.
“Now twice we have heard–whether it’s true or not according to you–we have heard that legal advice has been given to you that you that you haven’t followed,” Council member Theresa Pontieri said, “and it’s ended up costing us money. So it’s frustrating. I want it to stop.”
Before the lawsuit, City Attorney Marcus Duffy had advised Norris that Norris’s attempt to fire Acting City Manager Laurent Johnston and Chief of Staff Jason DeLorenzo was a violation of the charter. Norris ignored the city attorney’s advice and asked the two top staffers to resign anyway, triggering an investigation by a Tallahassee attorney that found he had violated the charter. The investigation cost the city several thousand dollars.
Duffy on Tuesday said the lawsuit, litigated by GrayRobinson for the city, would cost “around the $30,000 range.”
“We spent a lot of time talking about figures and dollars, and efficiency, saving taxpayer dollars,” Gambaro said. “What’s the council’s position on perhaps asking the mayor to reimburse taxpayers for the frivolous lawsuit?”
Norris laughed it off. “Take me to court,” he said.
Pontieri wanted to know whether Norris had received advice before filing the lawsuit–why the decisions regarding the appointment were made, and whether he had standing to sue. “Yes, both myself and Mr. Blocker advised the mayor on those issues,” Duffy said, referring to Jeremiah Blocker, one of the attorneys at the St. Augustine-based Douglas Law Firm who is also part of Palm Coast’s team of attorneys.
“Mayor Norris, were you advised of those issues?” Ponieri asked him.
“No, I was not,” Norris said.
“I’ll tell you flat out, I blame your attorney in part, because a basic tenet of your attorney’s job is to tell you you don’t have standing file a lawsuit,” Pontieri, herself an attorney, told the mayor. Norris was represented by Anthony Sabatini of St. Augustine, a former legislator who made his name embracing controversy masked as populism, a tactic Norris favors.
“These monies come out of the general fund. So they come out of the very fund that affect property taxes,” Pontieri said. “They come out of the very fund that we take for fire, police, parks and rec, streets, all the funds that we talked about tonight, that money comes from those same coffers. So, you know, I have an issue with it.”
The vice mayor–who, with Norris abandoning the majority of his mayoral responsibilities, has fulfilled the role of mayor at the expense of her own personal treasury of time, unaccounted expenses and less tangible sacrifices–looked into the legal grounds of pursuing attorneys’ fees but found none. Nor is there a mechanism the council could pursue to recover the fees, she said.
But it’s “frustrating for me,” Pontieri said, as it should be “for the whole council” and residents if Norris received advice that there was little to zero chance of success with his lawsuit, but he sued anyway.
“I’m not going to call Mayor Norris a liar. I’m not going to call Mr. Duffy a liar,” Pontieri said. Only Norris, Duffy and Blocker know what occurred in their conversations. “If, in fact, there was advice given that you have no standing and you really have no ability to recover damages in this lawsuit, I think if it were me, I would pay the legal fees. But I wasn’t privy to those conversations, so I can’t request something based on–we don’t know what happened.”
Council members Dave Sullivan and Ty Miller agreed: the most the council can do is request that Norris pay the legal fees. “That’s been asked and answered,” Miller said. “Doesn’t look like we’ll recoup any of those fees.”
Looking to end the meeting, Norris had several times impatiently asked council members if they had anything to add. He then took to his defense.
“We can close this out real quick, be done with this,” Norris told his colleagues, a statement that belied his seven-month war on the council, or its cost to taxpayers. In one of his most astonishing deflections, he then blamed the City Council for his own lawsuit. “I specifically asked for a legal opinion. Specifically. And every single one of you denied it,” he said.
Norris was referring to a Dec. 3 meeting when he first hinted at litigation, though no one at the time expected that he would be the one filing it. He brought up the legitimacy of the appointment toward the end of a long meeting that December day. (See the segment here.) He said he wanted a “formal opinion” on the Gambaro appointment from Duffy, with an interpretation of the charter.
All four other members of the council, who at the time included Ray Stevens (he has since been replaced by Dave Sullivan), were very hesitant, especially as Duffy said he had already provided that opinion in the form of emails. Stevens said “we might be expressing some sort of guilt” by asking for an opinion after the fact. Pontieri said it “opens us up to further vulnerability” when the council had already taken steps based on Duffy’s advice. (See: “In Puzzling Move, Palm Coast Mayor Norris Seeks ‘Legal Opinion’ On Gambaro Appointment, But Is Rebuffed.”
Curiously, Norris repeatedly justified a legal opinion as a means of protecting the city from a lawsuit. No one, including the nine other applicants to the seat to which Gambaro was appointed, said they’d sue. Members of the public had been critical of the process, but none had mentioned suing (and none would have had standing to sue.)
In retrospect, Norris’s “puzzling” Dec. 3 request–as it was characterized in a headline on this site– now looks like it may have been an intentional maneuver positioning him for the lawsuit he eventually filed in May. On Tuesday night, he was using those Dec. 3 statements again in his defense.
“If you want to try and take me to court, or try to take get back money for a law firm that Mr. Duffy should have been representing us in that case, not an outside firm that we contract, you go right ahead and try it,” Norris said Tuesday. None of the council members had suggested that Norris should be sued for the legal fees.
Norris continued: “All the money wasted, the Lawson report, all the other money that’s been wasted in the city, and you want to come after me, go right ahead and try it. But I’ll stand up. I don’t care if it cost the city a million dollars. If I’m defending our residents’ right to pick their representative, and if I feel something’s wrong, I’m going to do it every time.”
Seemingly more concerned with media reports than a judge’s ruling or the city’s $30,000 bill, Norris then falsely accused Acting City Manager Lauren Johnston of speaking with FlaglerLive of a meeting he’d had with Johnston and Mark Strobridge, the interim assistant city manager, and of giving “specifics of that conversation.” (Norris was inaccurate, relying on accusations and conspiracies rather than evidence. No one at City Hall had informed on the meeting, though the city manager’s meeting schedule, as the mayor’s ought to be, is a public record. A city spokesperson confirmed that the meeting took place, but did not speak to its substance. Strobridge in an attempted interview would not even confirm whether the meeting took place. Johnston was not contacted about the meeting, prior experience making any attempt to gain privileged information from her, on or off record, a hopeless exercise. Norris did not contact FlaglerLive before making his false claims, and does not respond to FlaglerLive’s requests for interviews.)
“What does that have to do with anything?” Pontieri asked Norris.
“I’m telling you, what’s going on in this city,” he said. But he was not. When Pontieri asked him to be more specific with his allegations, Norris wouldn’t explain. The meeting adjourned.
