Down to his last weeks as a Palm Coast City Council member, Ed Danko today brought a touch of the House Un-American Activities Committee to a special meeting of the council as it interviewed applicants for a vacant seat. He grilled applicants on their political and ideological leanings, asked they’d vote on a charter amendment, berated, ridiculed and all but insulted the city attorney for cautioning him about partisanship, blustered and bellowed about “freedom of speech” while disparaging mayor David Alfin with a couple of anatomical references and threatened to leave the meeting. To Alfin’s chagrin did not make good on the threat.
While Danko almost hijacked the meeting–he unleashed most of his sound and fury as the first applicant, Robert Bogges, stood at the podium, watching the battle and getting acquainted with shellshock–the quality of several of the applicants pierced through even as he repeatedly turned his segment of the interviews into a series of litmus tests. (See the full list of applicants and their resumes here.)
“What are your politics? Republican, liberal, Democrat, conservative? Do you believe in big government or little government?” went a typical line of questions. Most of the applicants managed to sidestep the partisanship or questions about their future vote on the referendum, either by giving general answers (“I voted the person I felt was best qualified for the position that they were running for, period,” Bogges said when he was finally allowed to speak) or refusing to answer altogether.
“Are you serious?” Leslie Giscombe asked Danko–twice–when Danko asked him about his politics.
For all the noise, Danko’s questions about the city’s referendum on eliminating borrowing limits yielded some some insights on how the proposal is perceived beyond the council. Most of the applicants are either opposed to the proposal or find its wording problematic. They couldn’t have been playing to the council, which is evenly split on the issue. That sets up the possibility that a majority of the council could end up on the side opposing the ballot measure, joining Danko and Council member Theresa Pontieri, who acknowledged its textual flaws and proposed an alternative. There was no time on the calendar to substitute the alternative.
“I don’t think the referendum as written should be on the ballot,” said Charles Gambaro, who’d been an appointee on the Flagler County School Board almost two decades ago. (Gov. Charlie Crist appointed him to fill out the 14 months on Jim Guines’s tenure and was soundly defeated in the following election. He claimed to have consistently voted to lower the school property tax rate, though the school board has nothing to do with that: the rate is set by Tallahassee. He also claimed to have been an adviser to the White House in his role as brigadier general in the final days of the last of Donald Trump’s secretaries of defense, though Trump wasn’t much concerned with policy, foreign or domestic, or his cabinet secretaries, in those final days.)
Gambaro is Danko’s pick for the job. Danko made no mystery of it. He was smitten with his resume, though he spoke as if his mind had been made up sooner. “I don’t think there’s a candidate out in the hallway, anyone sitting in this room, that can say something with that magnitude, so that speaks tremendous volumes to me. I really have no questions,” Danko said. But he did have a question: he asked Gambaro if he’d consider applying for the city manager slot the next council will fill in winter. (Gambaro is happy to consider it.)
Vincent Lyon, an attorney and the only applicant with previous service on the council–he’d been appointed to a seat several years ago–hadn’t heard Gambaro but echoed his words on the ballot language more directly: “Is the language good? No,” he said, referring to how “Pontieri had a wonderful resolution planned” as the alternative. “I don’t favor the amendment, let’s be clear on that.” Curiously, Danko did not ask him about his politics as Lyon spoke comfortably and assertively of his previous experience on the council: one of his tasks, with his colleagues, was exactly the task the new council faces after November: hiring a new city manager. In essence, Lyon told the council, he would be the only member of the new council who would have that experience, if he were to serve.
Unlike a a batch of applicants in a previous round for an appointment a few years ago, who waited their turn in a sunny snack room, the applicants today were made to sit cattle-call style in a corridor outside the chamber, where even the water fountain was out of order. They did not get to hear each other, unless their turn was done.
Pontieri asked applicants about their alignment with the council’s current strategic plan, or goals. The question was one way of gauging whether the candidates had done some homework and studied the council’s policy blueprint. Gambaro didn’t answer the question. He shifted to a discussion of Bill Delbrugge and the school district’s then-emerging initiative to put a laptop in each student’s hands, with a special deal from Apple. Darryl Boyer, just coming off his primary loss in a run for the state House, spoke as if he’d prepped for the question: Balance the tax base, protect green spaces, focus on infrastructure.
When he wasn’t asking about the strategic plan, Council member Nick Klufas’s recurring question was about the westward expansion, which drew a mix of answers accepting the expansion’s necessity, if not always with unbounded enthusiasm, but no outright opposition. “I understand the growth is necessary, but then we need to also have the road structure in place, the water, the sewage dams,” Bogges said, discussing the strategic plan.
The council had just reappointed Sandra Shank to her second four-year term on the city’s planning board that morning. And there she was again, now an applicant for the council seat. She did not get the litmus-test questions from Danko, who seemed a bit flummoxed: her reappointment “said something,” he said. “I appreciate the work, and I know you bring a lot of understanding of that process to council, if you were to make that move over here.” She described herself as a fiscal conservative big on finding alternative revenue sources to raising taxes. But she did not propose any, instead conflating her response with an idea about land trusts. When Danko asked her about potentially raising the electric franchise fee–a controversial proposal that has failed every time it’s been proposed at the council–she sidestepped the question.
Meredith Rodriguez, the marketing director for SunBelt Land Management, said she was for the amendment “strongly.” When Danko tried to use her answer as another springboard–“So you strongly support taking away the rights of voters and putting it in the hands of three people on this council?”–Rodriguez was unfazed: “I strongly support the concept of no longer paying as we go, but rather taking a more strategic approach.” She also parried a question from Pontieri about the tax base, not quite fully embracing the commercial-tax base mantra: “We need a range of multi multifamily, single family senior housing. I think it’s all very important, and I think that that certainly does come along with the expansion of commercial development,” she said. “I think that will inevitably bring more businesses.” But she was not as forthcoming with Pontieri’s question on impact fees–a sore subject with developers. “We’re all kind of new at this, and I think it wouldn’t be fair to answer that today,” she said.
Some of the council members congratulated Ronald Nakabaale for becoming a U.S. citizen a few years ago. When Danko tried to question him about his politics, Nakabaale bristled, saying the position had nothing to do with that, and later seemed to get under Danko’s skin when he said that “people are tired of the drama.”
“Which people are you talking about?” Danko asked him. Nakabaale remained diplomatic: “Politicians divide the people,” he said, before serenading Danko with words more to his liking: “We don’t need more taxes.”
The interviews ended with Jared Truehart, who presented himself in fatigues (he’s a program manager in the National Guard in St. Augustine), and who was intent on convincing the council that if Palm Coast weren’t careful, it would end up like Victorville, Calif., where he was born and raised. The city made the mistake of drawing people in for affordable housing. The city grew two fast. “So there are two sources of income in Greenfield California, fast food restaurants and welfare,” he said–a gross mischaracterization of a city that lands on at least some “best places to live” lists in California (and where healthcare and the cement industry are greater sources of income than the two examples Truehart gave). The applicant, who warned that Palm Coast could become a “ghetto,” also appeared to think only palm Coast Parkway had businesses in the city.
The council will rank the applicants at its next workshop and perhaps narrow down the list before it makes a decision on Oct. 1.
