Flagler County commissioners should know this: If they plan any taxing method to pay for beach protection that taxes the barrier island more than it does the rest of the county, Flagler Beach will not sign off.
Four of the five city commissioners are opposed to any such plan, and the fifth is reserving judgment until he has more information, but even he is skeptical of the county’s approach. Some of the city commissioners are especially resentful of the county for even discussing various proposals, however preliminary the discussions, without having included Flagler Beach in the discussions from the start.
The city’s opposition has as much to do with the county’s unilateral approach as it does with the merits of two proposals floated so far, neither of them fleshed out. The opposition also underscores what has been a recurring problem at the county, at least from the administrative side: clumsy, half-baked rollouts and messaging of new ideas–if there is any messaging at all–that end up making the commissioners look more half-cocked than they actually are. County Commission Chair Andy Dance has aske for a broader, more inclusive discussion.
“We’ve been asking the county for 20 years to get a beach management plan, and they haven’t done it. now that they did it,” Flagler Beach Commissioner Eric Cooley said in an interview this week. “Now all of a sudden it’s a fire drill. Now it’s hurry up and ‘we got to all of a sudden do this.’ But after they got that presentation”–when the county’s consultant presented a plan earlier this month that would levy taxes in four zones, with the barrier island paying the most– “the very first thing that should have been said is: let’s bring our partners into this discussion and talk about potential scenarios. They absolutely didn’t do that. They were working in a silo with no feedback from the municipalities. And that’s not okay.”
Cooley brought up the matter toward the end of the June 13 Flagler Beach Commission meeting, when he delivered a forceful rebuke against the county’s methods, and drew support from a majority of commissioners. Last year Cooley successfully led the effort to start periodic joint meetings with Palm Coast and the county. Two such meetings were held. He also serves on the countywide Tourist Development Council.
Cooley was bewildered that with all these forums available, the county not once either brought up the beach-management plan in the works or proposed a joint meeting to discuss it. That’s what Cooley is now proposing. “I suggest let’s have Flagler Beach be the adult in the room and request a multi municipality meeting on this exact topic,” he said. He is interested in a joint agreement that spells out in writing who will contribute what.
Cooley is suspicious of Flagler Beach paying into a fund that would get used mostly for needs north of the city. That’s before getting into the methodology of such a levy. He considered the county’s chosen approach (a special tax) the worst of the lot.
Central to Cooley’s and other city commissioners’ opposition to the county’s method is the fact, backed up by evidence from the county’s own Tourist Development Council, that 62 percent of beach users are from Palm Coast, while only 13 percent are from Flagler Beach. None of the commissioners were aware of that disparity. Most county commissioners or Palm Coast City Council members are likely not aware, either.
The numbers are drawn from data provided by Arrivalist, which uses cell phone location data anonymously to crunch consumers’ behavior. It is theoretically more accurate than any survey, since it aggregates more data and pinpoints it geographically, down to very specific locations. The data shows that the owners of cell phones with Palm Coast zip codes account for that 62 percent proportion of local users of the beach, with Bunnell a distant third, at 8 percent. Palm Coast residents also spend more time on the beach than do Flagler Beach residents (whose average is likely lowered by beach-side residents who walk their dogs on the beach or take quick runs there).
Overall, 59 percent of beach users are local. The rest are day-trippers, primarily from the Daytona Beach-Ormond Beach, Orlando zones, then Jacksonville and southern Georgia, then Atlanta.
“To have 13 percent of the total beach usage and then paying the majority of it is just insanity,” Cooley said.
It’s that sport of data that convinced Flagler Beach commissioners that Cooley’s resentment wasn’t just about being sidelined. Cooley himself reserved sharp barbs against Palm Coast as he discussed the numbers. “If Palm Coast doesn’t want to contribute to the coast, then why are we calling it Palm Coast? Why don’t we call it Palm City? That is, until they cut all the palms down and then they can just call themselves City, because pretty soon they’re not going to have palms and they’re not going to have a coast if they have that mentality.”
“I walk beside him on that,” Flagler Beach Commissioner Rick Belhumeur said. “To put it on the taxpayers of Flagler Beach is just wrong and it’s certainly something we should’ve talked about before it was brought out. Again, we’re kind of like the stepchild that doesn’t know what’s going on.” Belhumeur would oppose any plan that would more heavily weigh costs on the barrier island, “Not when you look at the data on who’s coming to the beach. It’s not fair. I didn’t realize it’s that upside down, but pretty upside down.”
The county estimates it needs between $7 million and $10 million a year to pay for its “beach-management plan,” a permanent plan to preserve the county’s 18 miles of beach as globally warmed seas rise, intensify storms and erode the shore more rapidly. Even the engineers designing the new Flagler Beach pier to be built next year are accounting for sea rise by raising the pier 10 feet higher than the old one.
For obvious political realities in an anti-tax county where at least a segment of the electorate doesn’t believe in global warming–three quarters of Republicans nationwide don’t think it’s a major threat–the County Commission is willing to stick with $7 million. The money is to pay for ongoing beach rebuilding. It is also to go into a trust account for future beach-rebuilding, which will never cease.
For example, while the $27 million, 3.2-mile renourishment project most local governments (Bunnell was notably absent) celebrated with a groundbreaking this week is paid for, iot is due for a new round of renourishment in 11 years, and every 11 years after that. Even the Corps knows it’ll have to happen much sooner. The cost will have to be split 50-50 between the federal government and Flagler County. Flagler County doesn’t have a dime for that next renourishment. That’s what the county hopes beach-management tax would pay for, assuming it has accumulated enough money: remember, the $7 million a year is to pay for renourishment along all 18 miles of shore.
The county is planning to draw $2 million of that from tourist tax revenue, reducing the needed money to $5 million. But it hasn’t settled on a permanent method. The proposal it discussed at the beginning of the month foresaw a new tax on almost all county residents, broken down into four zones–the barrier island, two zones in Palm Coast, and the west side of the county. The further residents are from the beach, the less they’d pay, with some west-siders exempt altogether.
Flagler Beach and even Palm Coast residents and city council members howled. The county quickly retreated. Its next proposal was to tax the barrier island for $3.5 million, draw $1.5 million from the county’s general revenue, and $2 million from tourist tax revenue. That’s not drawn better reviews from other cities’ officials.
“Everybody needs to pay for it,” Commissioner Jane Mealy said. “If the county can’t come up with the money itself, maybe they should have budgeted for it, knowing that it was coming. But if they need to tax anybody, it shouldn’t be everybody. Because as you know from the statistics it’s mostly Palm Coast people who come to the beach.”
Mealy is opposed to breaking the county down into zones, or even within the zones to make certain people pay more than others: the person in a mobile home would have to pay the same as a person in a million-dollar home.
Commissioner James Sherman had conducted some of his own research before last week’s commission meeting and spoke with County Commissioner Dave Sullivan and heard Palm Coast City Council discussions about the proposals. WHen he heard a city council member speak against the proposed levy, “That really irritated me because even our own TDC, they put ‘Palm Coast and the Flagler Beaches,’” he said, referring to the tourism council’s way of marketing the beach: Palm Coast is always named first.
“Who’s parking their cars on the dunes? It’s the people that are coming over the bridge,” Sherman said. “They’re the ones that are actually putting a lot of wear and tear on the dunes for this beach tax that they’re looking to fund things for the future. If there has to be a tax it needs to be county wide.”
Only Scott Spradley, who chairs the commission and characteristically prefers to study issues before declaring himself on them, was reluctant to address the specifics of Cooley’s and his colleagues’ take. “I feel I don’t have enough information to take a position yet because I want to sit down and crunch the numbers and see what they are. But as of right now, there’s nothing pending. It’s just talk,” he said.
Nevertheless, just as a judge’s or a justice’s questions and comments during oral arguments tip their hand–Spradley is a practicing attorney–Spradley was clearly skeptical of the county’s approach so far.
“People who live and work on the island feel that they already pay increased costs because of certain things that go hand in hand with living on the beach,” Spradley said, starting with higher property costs. “It’s going to be our job as elected officials to first of all understand the basis for whatever is going to be proposed, so that we can then discuss it with residents and see what they say. We have a lot of residents here who are very reasonable in how they view these things. And there’s just a perception that we don’t want to be on the short end of the stick and wind up paying for more than our share, whatever that is, given the fact that most of the beach traffic is from the other side of the bridge.”
Or, in Belhumeur’s Everyman words: “We ought to be part of the conversation. Gees.”
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