Whatever her other issues may be, Sally Hunt, the School Board member, is right on security: It’s not what it should be at the Government Services Building, the administrative building next to the courthouse that’s home to county offices, the tax collector, the property appraiser, the elections supervisor and the school district. It’s also where County Commission, School Board and many advisory board meetings and workshops take place.
Unlike the courthouse next door or even City Hall in Palm Coast, you can walk into the GSB and circulate almost at will. A few places have locked doors, most notably the county offices on the third floor, which is unfortunate. In a government building, a public building, people have a right to enter those offices, at least up to each department’s front desk. But as you can see, even county employees don’t trust their front door at the GSB.
Nor does Hunt. Nor do I, on some occasions when I reluctantly attend public meetings where nut cases get angry and try to intimidate the elected with their bluster. Chances are it’ll never get beyond that. But this is the United States, and this is the gunshine state. The chance of a nut case pulling a gun at one of these meetings isn’t zero. And chances are it’ll be pointed at the elected or at staffers. No one should have to fear that at a public meeting, least of all when we have the means to eliminate that fear. (Ask Milissa Holland how she felt when one of those theatrically aggressive characters rushed the dais at a City Council meeting in 2021.)
There’s a sign at the entrance to the GSB that says guns and other weapons are forbidden inside. Everyone ignores it. One of our school board members (not Hunt) is probably packing when attending these meetings, the way Armando Martinez, Bunnell’s one-time city manager, used to, until it was pointed out to him that he (an ex-police officer) was breaking the law.
At the courthouse, you go through a metal detector. That building is secure. But even there a couple of weeks ago the sheriff’s office conducted training for judges on what to do in case there’s a repeat of the Las Vegas courtroom incident, where 30-year-old Deobra Redden attacked Clark County District Court Judge Mary Kay Holthus as she was about to sentence him for–what else–battery. He now faces a nine-count indictment for attempted murder.
At Flagler Beach City Hall there’s no possible entry without being buzzed in, though the public meetings there are open access. At Palm Coast City Hall, some of the offices are open-access, some not, but at every City Council meeting and workshop, the metal detector in that wing is activated.
The least the GSB could do, pooling its resources from all the government agencies that occupy it, is provide that level of security, at least when public meetings are in session. That would be a good start, though in reality the building is so busy and open that metal detectors should be standard at all times.
Don’t take my word for it. Sheriff Rick Staly not only supports the idea. A while back he offered to the county to hand over bullet proof vests that technically are past their warranties, so a discrete bullet-proof barrier could be built beneath the dais, where elected officials sit during meetings. If there’s an incident, they can dive for more effective protection than a wood panel. It’d be an ugly set up, but no one would see it. The county never took him up on it.
In 1991 Staly wrote his master’s thesis on how law enforcement in the 21st century would see more social unrest and violence from social issues. It was “pretty damn accurate,” in his own words. His deputies were regularly dispatched to the GSB a couple of years ago when anti-maskers, anti-vaxxers, book-burners and genderphobes chanted their “rational people will not replace us” anthems, with help from some of the elected.
It’s been calmer since, but that’s no indication of anything. Goonish behavior at public meetings across the country isn’t rare. We’re an angry, cowardly, often stupid country. A few weeks ago in Arizona a board of supervisor meeting in the state’s biggest county had to end abruptly when goons rushed the dais claiming the supervisors were illegitimate. The supervisors had to be escorted by cops through a side door. Two weeks earlier white nationalist anti-Semits (redundant, I know) used a city council meeting in Massachusetts to spread their hate. Same thing happened at a Silicon Valley municipal meeting last October, and in another California municipality last month, and in Denver, disruption and shutdowns of city council meetings have become endemic.
At the GSB, Staly told me, “there is not enough security by technology and hardening that there should be. They have a security guard that is armed, and that’s a good step. But people come there for meetings on volatile issues and they’re angry, so there’s never metal detectors, and there’s a way to do metal detectors that aren’t in your face. They’re just not cheap.”
But they’re not cost-prohibitive, either–not in a building where the combined budgets of the agencies in there approaches half a billion dollars.
In 2021, Palm Coast government paid $2,972 for the walk-through metal detector it uses during council meetings. Its security costs, which include at least one security guard during all business hours plus any additional guards needed when the metal detector is activated, totaled $50,000 in the last fiscal year. Even if that were doubled at the GSB, it’s not a lot of money for basic security. Garrisoning our public buildings is unfortunate and distasteful. It runs counter to the ideals of an open society. But that openness is being demolished by its anti-democratic abusers.
So I’m with Sally Hunt and the sheriff on this one. The county and the school board need to to take their own and the public’s safety more seriously in the county seat, and not with harebrained ideas like locking public meetings’ doors, but with reasonable, inexpensive and unintrusive measures that are becoming standard in public buildings. That some of those elected themselves act like goons toward others’ safe spaces–abetting and encouraging their fellow-haters at large– shouldn’t compromise everyone else’s security.
Pierre Tristam is the editor of FlaglerLive. A version of this piece aired on WNZF.
