The Palm Coast City Council is launching a review of the city charter. The year-long process will include the appointment of a five-member committee and public hearings. The committee’s work is to be done by next spring. Any proposed amendments will appear on the Nov. 3, 2026 general election ballot, should the council vote to place them there.
Theoretically, the council could vote down any amendment recommended by the charter review committee, which, like all other council committees, sits only in an advisory capacity.
The city is opening a 30-day application window for residents who wish to serve on the committee. The mayor and the council members will each appoint one member. They will not do so by vote: each council member will make his or her own choice, which may not be vetoed. The candidates will not be interviewed by the council.
“We definitely have a lot of shortcomings in our charter as it currently reads,” Council member Theresa Pontieri said. “We’ve had some challenges, obviously. So I think this is a great initiative.”
The charter requires a review at least every 10 years. The review will be conducted with two years to spare.
The review committee will hold workshops in each of the city’s four districts and possibly hold additional meetings, if the committee finds it necessary. The meetings of the committee will be open to the public, and seek public input.
“We would want to make sure we do a robust public education campaign to encourage participants to come to these sessions held in each district,” Acting City Manager Lauren Johnston said. “Previously, when this was done, we worked with the Florida League of Cities to help provide a consultant or a facilitator to navigate those discussions.” (It was actually a consultant from the University of Central Florida.)
What Johnston did not say is that when the council appointed a committee in 2017, it appointed itself, rather than an autonomous committee.
It did so for reasons that became transparent at the time. Then-Council member Steven Nobile had been pushing for a review of the charter since 2014. But his thrust was as aggressive as it was opaque: he would not say what he wanted changed. Nobile’s first push died in 2015. Twice. He revived it in 2017. The council, then significantly under the control of City Manager Jim Landon, found a way to corral him: it would appoint itself as the charter review committee.
For $6,000, it hired Marilyn Crotty, the director of the Florida Institute of Government at the University of Central Florida, who led what turned into barely attended humdrum workshops as the public got the impression–fairly or not–that the fix was in: this was more of a pro forma exercise than an authentic review of the charter. A majority of the council–if not a majority of residents, if their view were represented by the council–did not think the charter needed a complete revamp.
The 2017-18 review resulted in three proposed amendments for that November’s ballot. Amendment. Amendment 1 was to remove outdated language and update the city’s boundaries.
Amendment 2 was to require a charter review at least every 10 years. The previous language had left the 10-year review optional. The new language also called for “an appointed Advisory Charter Review Committee in the Charter Review process,” implying that the council had to appoint a committee. But the new language in the charter proved no different than the old, except to remove the requirement that council members appoint a committee member from their own district.
The old language read: “A five-member Charter Review Committee shall be appointed. Each district council member shall appoint one member from his or her district, and the Mayor shall appoint one member at large.” The new language reads: “The Mayor and each council member shall appoint one Committee member.” Neither version strictly prevents council members or the mayor from appointing themselves, as the 2017 council did, though the implication of the Amendment was to prevent a repeat of 2017’s self-appointments.
Amendment 3 was to provide that a council vacancy be filled within 90 days by appointment (instead of 30 days in the old charter), unless it fell within six months of the next “regularly scheduled election.” It is notable that the wording of the ballot language referred to a regularly scheduled election, not just a “general election.”
All three amendments passed with 80 to 81 percent of the vote.
This time, it appears that the council will appoint an autonomous committee.
“So we could have a hodgepodge of ballot referendums that pass,” Mayor Norris said (assuming the council votes to have those amendments on the ballot, the city attorney told him.). “So technically, we go through the whole process of amending the charter, and then the voters can say, Nope, don’t want it. We’re gonna keep the charter the way it’s written.”
“Or vice versa,” Council member Ty Miller said.
It is almost certain that the council will want to again attempt to float the amendment it proposed last November–to eliminate the charter requirement that voters approve by referendum any long-term lease or loan exceeding $15 million (outside of enterprise funds such as the utility and stormwater).
Last November’s referendum failed by a 60 percent majority. But it was mostly a messaging failure rather than a rejection of the principle behind the proposed change (few local governments have a borrowing limit of the sort). The charter language did not clearly explain the intended change to voters. Its opaque wording lent itself to fears–fueled at the time by then-Council member Ed Danko and since by Norris, and confirmed by th administration–that the only purpose of the amendment was to facilitate the financing of a sports complex on the west side of the city, at a cost of more than $90 million. That effort is now getting channeled through the County Commission.
The city has held only one such referendum in its 26-year history–in 2005, when it asked voters if they’d support a $22 million bond for a new city hall, and a $10 million bond for two new community centers. Voters rejected the city hall proposal by an 82 percent majority and the community center proposal by a 60 percent majority. The council built a $10 million city hall in 2015 (initially priced at a little less than that), and rebuilt the Palm Coast Community Center on Palm Coast Parkway in 2018, for $8 million. Both projects were financed without bonds or borrowed money, as have numerous other major city capital projects.
