On Second Thought, Palm Coast Council Expands City Manager Shortlist to 11, With Gimlet Eyes on Kandahar

After getting a small and unimpressive batch of candidates from a four-week job posting in December, the Palm Coast City Council’s head-hunter for a new city manager did a desperate thing, marking the want ad as “open until filled.” That drew nine more candidates, and two who re-applied from the first batch.

After ranking the names this morning, the council came up with six more to add to its previous short list of six (one of whom withdrew), leaving it with 11 to study and narrow down to perhaps half that number when the council is ready to call in the candidates for interviews.

This morning’s exercise produced two stand-outs, as had not been the case when the council first short-listed candidates in late January: Sonya Alves-Viveiros and Thomas Hansbarger, with William Lee Smith a close third. As matters stand today, those may well be among the final four.

Alves-Viveiros had applied in the first round. On paper, she was clearly the best qualified in the bunch. She’s been the city manager in Edison, N.J., for the past three years. (The city’s population is the same as Palm Coast’s: 107,000.) She’s also managed Englewood, N.J., for two years and the township of Maplewood, Nj>, for four. She teaches at Rutgers University, has a master’s in public administration and is fluent in Spanish and Portuguese, which happen to be the second and third languages of Palm Coast.

Alves-Viveiros had withdrawn her name by the time the council went through its first round of short-listing. She has since re-applied, to the delight of City Council member Theresa Pontieri, who had spoken highly of her in January. “The one that obviously I want to move forward with is Ms. Sonia,” Pontieri said. “So I’m very glad to see that she’s interested and does want to move forward.”

Alves-Viveiros got perfect scores but one today during the rankings. Only Mayor Mike Norris gave her a 2 instead of a 1 (lower scores are best). The remaining council members gave her 1’s (with Ray Stevens listening in, but not voting. He said it would not be fair to take part in the rankings, given his recent absences due to illness. He will be back in person next week and intends to fully participate in the selection process.)

Anna Gibson, currently a graduate assistant at Gonzaga University, is another candidate who re-applied. She is one of the few from Palm Coast. She had not made so much as the recruiter’s cut the first time, and subsequently appeared before the council, quite upset, that she had not been given a chance. “There were several candidates that we did not think in our professional experience, felt that had the background or skill set to do the work for the position you require based upon what you told us you’re looking for,” Doug Thomas, the vice president of Strategic Government Resources, or SGR, told the council. This time she made it through to the rankings and got the equivalent of an honorable mention, scoring just enough to be short-listed. Had she not have home-field advantage, it is almost certain she would not have been ranked.

The candidate with the second-best marks today (and overall) is Thomas Hansbarger, a general manager at Emcor Facilities Services, a subsidiary of the industrial giant. He has no city manager experience and no local government experience. But he was a military adviser in Afghanistan for eight months, leading a 61-person team of advisers to the Afghan Army, such as it was. His time there caught Gambaro’s attention.

“I served in Kandahar and I ran the garrison there,” Gambaro said. “It’s essentially a NATO city of over 40,000 people, large installation. And while I was serving there–and so I looked at Mr. Hansbarger’s references, and you may know, Mr. Mayor, Lieutenant General retired KT Thompson, field artillery officer.” (Norris was also in the military.) “He is probably one of the toughest bosses I’ve ever had to serve under in my life. And I work for the President, right? So, general Thompson, I called him, and he had nothing but incredible recommendations for Mr. Hansbarger.” Gambaro cited other glowing references for Hansbarger, who spent eight of his more recent years managing extra-curricular, cultural and recreational activities at West Point.

Then there’s William Lee Smith, who in the aggregate appears to have the most experience managing local government agencies–albeit counties rather than cities: two counties in his native north Carolina (he grew up on the Outer Banks and has an affinity for coastal communities, he said in an interview) and one in Georgia, for eight years until 2022. Then came his abrupt departure. Pontieri liked his resume, but was concerned about that recent history.

“Even though this isn’t an elected position, is is very much a political position,” she said. She was conflicted about Smith. “If you look at his resume, and if you read about some of his accomplishments there, they would be great in our city–some really good economic development accomplishments, budgetary balancing budget accomplishments, things like that. But he was kind of abruptly suspended and then fired by his last [county] council, and nobody had any grounds.” He got a severance package and he left. “Was it purely political, or is there more there?”

Council member Ty Miller was equally impressed. “He works in a coastal town, so that was kind of kind of impressive to me,” he said.

In an interview, Smith attributed his departure to evolving politics and newly elected commission members. “Basically I had been there nine years, closer to 10, you have changes in boards,” he said. “We do live in a political world, and when I talked to the chairman and a couple of commissioners I knew there were some issues, but most of it was disagreement on direction of the county. These were fairly new board members, and they chose some different paths other than some of the things we discussed, so we eventually agreed to separate.”

Asked to provide an example that might illustrate the differences, Smith cited a new fire tax the commission opted to impose. He was not necessarily opposed to the need for it (he called the county’s take over of fire services “gutsy”) but he disagreed with the way the tax was structured, with not enough nuances accounting for the differences between small homes and businesses, for example.

As for the reports of being suspended and investigated, he said: “There was no investigation because there was no issue so even if you were to ask for public records, you wouldn’t find any because there was no issue.” He said his evaluations were “great.”

Palm Coast Council members will spend the next two weeks reviewing the short-listed candidates ahead of the March 11 meeting, when they are expected to vote on the short-short-list: the candidates who will be invited to interview.

Copy of Applicants for Palm Coast City Manager, 2025

Note: The resumes are presented here as submitted to Strategic Government Resources, Palm Coast’s recruiter for the city manager search, and turned over to the city and to FlaglerLive. The candidates’ current location is based on the candidate’s listing of his, her or their hometown. When not listed, the location defaults to the candidate’s current job location.

The previous short-list is below:

Applicants for Palm Coast City Manager, 2025: How Council Members Short-Listed

Note: The list of candidates was drawn from each council members’ preferred choices, followed by a ranking by each council member of each listed candidate, on a 1 to 3 scale, with 1 the highest grade. So the candidates with the lowest aggregate grades were short-listed. The initialized council members are Ty Miller, Charles Gambaro, Ray Stevens, Theresa Pontieri and Mike Norris.

The resumes are presented here as submitted to Strategic Government Resources, Palm Coast’s recruiter for the city manager search, and turned over to the city and to FlaglerLive. The candidates’ current location is based on the candidate’s listing of his, her or their hometown. When not listed, the location defaults to the candidate’s current job location.