To lipstick the piggish way it fired City Manager Denise Bevan at the end of March, the Palm Coast City Council’s muddled majority came up with a mix of vague laments about vision and gluteus smoke-blowing about how fantastic, how wonderful, how terrific Bevan was.
“Vision” is the blind politician’s all-purpose whitewash. It means nothing while appearing to mean everything. In any case if there is to be vision, it’s the elected’s job to come up with it, as we all thought this council’s vaunted “strategic action plan” (a dressed-up way of referring to priorities) was. It’s the executive’s responsibility to enact it.
Bevan, as even the mayor conceded, was fired for political reasons, chiefly in a misguided hope that it might help David Alfin’s reelection chances by getting an extremist faction off his back. He’d correctly identified it as a loudmouth minority. You know them: the conspiracists and blowhards who fabricate corruption behind every civil servant, slandering government workers behind the cowardly immunity of three-minute public comments. The council sacrificed Bevan to those Visigoths. The council chamber has weirdly emptied of them since. They’ve been appeased. They must be snorting their laurels. But appeasement doesn’t work with extremists. It only fuels.
So we’ve prematurely moved onto the second act of this Netflix spoof (“twisted. embarrassing. hopeless.”): hiring the next sacrificial putz, or whoever is willing to settle for a job that may not last past November.
By then, Nick Klufas and Ed Danko will be off the council. They’re running for County Commission seats. Alfin’s seat may also turn over: he is a weaker candidate today than he was a month ago. He tried to staunch the bleeding by standing by Lauren Johnston as the acting city manager. He rebuffed Danko’s attempt to shunt the ethically-challenged Jerry Cameron, reject of Flagler Beach, in her stead. But then he made the ridiculous claim that only this council has the experience to hire the next city manager, and three of the four other council members joined him.
Let’s talk about experience. First off, other than Nick Klufas, there’s not much experience on this council. Its longest-serving member is Danko, at three and a half years, and two of those years were a shitshow. He, Alfin and Klufas hired Bevan. They can certainly say she was the right person at the right time, and she was. But firing her is their admission that they made a mistake. So by their own standard, they have poor judgment. Curiously, Theresa Pontieri, one of two rookies on the panel, preferred to wait until after the election. Not for the first time in her brief tenure on the board, her judgment is proving to be dead on.
And what does the majority’s claim that it alone has the experience make of the 12 candidates running for the three council seats? I doubt they think of themselves as chopped liver. They may not have the experience to hit the ground running as council members, knowing the intricacies of land-use laws or the catacombs of the stormwater system. None usually do, and some who’ve been on the council a few years still don’t. But most elected officials, including this council, either never or rarely get a chance to hire a chief executive. You pick up that experience as you fulfill the task. No two searches are the same. On that score, the candidates have an advantage over the council: they have not hired someone they felt compelled to fire. Their record is clean.
The majority is not just contemptuous toward the candidates. It is more especially so toward voters. The council is telling them bluntly: we don’t trust you to elect the right leadership. Only we can do this job. That’s especially true of Alfin, whose electoral insecurity is clouding his judgment. He brought us here. He is making it worse by snubbing the higher road, as this man of paradoxes very nobly could. He knows better. He should be the one leading the call to wait until after the election. That would restore voter trust and remove suspicions that he’s doing someone else’s bidding before he’s booted out. It might even tip the election his way.
There’s also the message the majority is sending Johnston and city staff. Of course council members lavished her with praise when they named her. But they’d done the same with Bevan. “I appreciate the great comments about how everyone does a great job, but apparently,” Klufas told his colleagues the day of Bevan’s firing on March 19, “that doesn’t mean too much.”
By rushing to the next search on an abbreviated schedule in the middle of an election campaign, the majority is telling Johnston it doesn’t trust her or her staff. Or if it does trust her to manage for four months, it doesn’t for eight. What’s the difference? In city management, where everything moves slowly, deliberately, the difference is not explained by policy. Only by politics. Particularly since budget season is under way and won’t be done until just before the election. No new manager can or should jangle that timetable. Politics, in this case, is poisoning the process.
Finally, if the council really has the city’s best interest in mind, it would want to attract the very best pool of candidates. No candidate worth his, her or their salt would look at this crash scene, knowing that three council seats could turn over, and risk a career move that could last mere months and leave a stain. Undoubtedly many people will apply anyway. But chances are they won’t be the best, because their judgment will be suspect and their desperation obvious. Because that’s all Palm Coast will end up with if this lame-duck council continues to insist with pathological arrogance that it alone can save Palm Coast from itself, and from the next council.
So let’s not play into the false narrative that it’s the city manager’s job that’s volatile, as these council members have been quick to deflect. It’s the council members who are: these allegedly, brilliantly experienced council members don’t know what they’re doing from one day to the next. Their big picture blurs in the fuzz of their navel. At least that’s the message they send, because they sure as hell aren’t coherently communicating anything different. People are watching. Laughing. Despairing. And waiting for this council, or at least its mayor, to snap out of it and do the right thing.
Pierre Tristam is the editor of FlaglerLive. A version of this piece airs on WNZF.
