Jason DeLorenzo, Palm Coast government’s community development director and chief of staff for the last six years, previously a city council member for five years, and one of the administration’s most institutionally versed and versatile executives, will be leaving City Hall July 11 to be the assistant city manager in Palm Bay in Brevard County.
“I’m always looking to advance my career. This opportunity came up, so I pursued it,” DeLorenzo, 54, said in an interview this evening. “I put a lot of energy into the community through my work here and service, but it’s just the right time for a change.”
It is a move up for DeLorenzo, 54, to a larger, politically calmer city with a familiar manager: he’ll be reporting to Matt Morton, whom Palm Bay hired as city manager earlier this year and who’d hired him away from the private sector in Palm Coast in 2018 when Morton was the city manager here. DeLorenzo had spent just over a decade as the political affairs director of the Flagler Home Builders Association and a short stint with a title company.
DeLorenzo’s fortune is an exacting loss for a Palm Coast administration already short a community development director–a role DeLorenzo has been filling–a utilities director and a permanent city manager–a role Interim City Manager Lauren Johnston has been filling, and gaps she’s tried to bridge with the hiring less than three weeks ago of Flagler County Sheriff’s Chief Mark Strobridge as interim assistant manager.
“I’m sad and happy at the same time, right?” Interim Palm Coast City Manager Lauren Johnston said this evening. “You always want what’s best for your coworkers. They become family, and you always want what’s best for them. So I was happy that he’s found a wonderful opportunity and advancement in his career.”
But there was no question that she’d feel the loss. “He’s definitely made an impact in the organization,” Johnston said. “There’s a lot of people that’s going to miss him, but we’re happy for him. If you’re going on and doing bigger and better things, that’s something that should be celebrated as well.”
The City Council will likely be dismayed but not surprised. Fears if a brain drain are not imaginary. The council will have to contend with the fact that DeLorenzo’s departure is in no small degree emblematic of the price the city is paying for Mayor Mike Norris’s scorched-earth assaults on the administration since his election in November, despite the rest of the council’s support for the staff.
Norris attempted to fire both DeLorenzo and Johnston in a private meeting that violated the city charter months ago, as an independent investigation confirmed. He was censured by the City Council over that and other similar transgressions and offensive behavior toward administrative staff. His own party attempted to reel him in, urging him to take responsibility, only to face his defiance. Norris appears to have doubled down even as he’s abandoned most of his responsibilities as mayor.
Norris has continued to target certain members of the city administration publicly and privately, not least among them DeLorenzo, whose party former registration as a Democrat–he’s now a registered Republican–Norris would not abide anymore than he did his role overseeing the city’s development regulations: Unconcerned with slanders, Norris accused him of colluding with developers to facilitate the city’s rapid growth since 2018. It is almost certain that, in Norris’s bizarrely paranoid and fabricated political calculus, he will likely take DeLorenzo’s departure as a victory and gloat, or ask his often apocryphal social media disciples to gloat, that he brought it about.
DeLorenzo has maintained a professional demeanor throughout. His naturally congenial disposition hasn’t betrayed a hint of snit in his regular appearances before Norris and the rest of the council, even when he appeared before the board on Tuesday, when he knew he had the Palm Bay job (he got it last Friday and gave his notice on Monday).
This evening he diplomatically dismissed that aspect of the challenges he’s been dealing with for the last few months despite persistent questions. “I’m not on social media, so I really don’t hear a lot of it,” he said. “Occasionally something flares up, maybe someone will mention it to me, but I don’t really pay attention to that. I mean, it’s not that easy to be a public servant. It’s hard to make everyone happy, and so there’s always someone criticizing you, and I think that just comes with the job.”
But DeLorenzo conceded: Morale at City Hall, “while pretty good for the most part,” he said, “oh, I think it’s been better” in past years. “When there’s a lot of noise or chatter, it makes people nervous, and we’ve had to spend some time with staff on that. But that happens from time to time.”
He has no doubt the city’s executive staff and its directors will continue to steer the city. “They’re dedicated. They are hardworking public servants,” he said. “There are some gaps in the organization, some empty positions, but Lauren is smart, passionate, energetic, and she knows what she’s doing. And she’s been in the organization for quite a while. She knows a lot about the organization, and she is really strong on the operational side.”
Johnston had held off filling certain positions on the assumption that the council would appoint a new city manager, who’d want to have his, her or their own stamp on the appointments. No longer. She’s posting the positions as if the “interim” portion of her title were dimming. But neither she nor DeLorenzo have anyone in mind to fill his position. Perhaps Strobridge was brought in knowingly.
Johnston was asked explicitly whether there are worries of a brain drain, given the atmosphere. “That is always a fear in the environment that we work in. We don’t want that,” Johnston said. “But we try and prevent that. We try and have good programs that promote work-life balance. We try and be competitive in the salary market and compensation with benefits and all of that to try and keep our workforce and those talented individuals here.”
Some forces are beyond the administration’s control.
DeLorenzo will be spending his workweeks in Palm Bay but commuting back to Palm Coast on weekends, not wanting to upend his 16-year-old daughter’s high school rhythms: she’s an exceptional student in the AICE advanced studies program at Matanzas High School, and his parents live in Palm Coast, his extended family keeps moving to Palm Coast (his sister just bought a house here). His wife Rebecca, the CEO for the Florida Association of Free and Charitable Clinics, can work remotely from anywhere, but the couple will maintain their base and property in this city for now.
Turning down the noise and the detractors, DeLorenzo prefers to take stock of milestones, achievements for the city he’s proud of: delivering on a previous City Council’s business-friendly initiatives (“that was a really strong program that we’ve put together”) that vastly improved the city’s customer-service profile; the Citation Boulevard extension “the last opportunity to get an east-west connector”) that opened up an important public-safety corridor while saving the city millions of dollars by creating that access between Seminole Woods Boulevard and Belle Terre Boulevard; and as chief of staff, “breaking down silos and fostering better communication between them and be more collaborative and solution-based,” he said.
Get him going, and DeLorenzo is all wonk, all detail-oriented, thriving on the everyday DNA that makes up a city and makes it work.
“He’s caring, he’s thoughtful, he’s charismatic and he loves to talk,” Johnston said. “We would go to these functions, whether it was Tiger Bay or Chamber or even in Tallahassee, whenever we’re up there for legislative action days, and he’ll talk to anyone, and he’ll strike up a good conversation, and you’re going to come away with something good out of whoever he’s talked to at that time. This has been his community. He’s lived here for so long, and loves it here. Raised his family here, and there’s that interest that you have with wanting to make sure the community continues to be the place that you love.”
That’s what the community is losing. Unnecessarily perhaps. A portend almost certainly, if the council doesn’t mind the drain.
