A day after he pulled up his truck to City Hall and cleared his office, Mayor Mike Norris delivered what amounted to a Palm Coast Carnage address to a stunned audience at the State of the City Thursday evening at the Community Center.
A prickly, aggrieved, and paranoid-sounding Norris fabricated the story of a “blockade” of City Hall by homebuilders, attacked unnamed forces for allegedly orchestrating city employees’ complaints against him to drive him out of office, referred to land owners as “swamp peddlers” and challenged residents to chart a new course away from “people that have failed our community for more than 40 years.”
The city had never heard anything like it, and never had a mayor so isolated that he no longer speaks or meets with Interim City Manager Lauren Johnston or directors–an essential part of the job if the mayor is to make informed decisions outside his own echo chambers–and limits his interactions to the city clerk and assistants who keep his calendar.
Breaking with custom, Norris had kept his speech to himself until delivering it. City staff weren’t even sure he’d show up for the event, especially after he’d stripped his office. He’d not explained to anyone why he was packing up. Staffers suspect he was upset that items in there were moved. (He did not respond to a text or a phone call this morning.)
He turned up at the Community Center 5:15 p.m., not long before the event, and cursorily informed staffers that he’d speak briefly before freeing the stage for anyone else who wanted to speak.
State of the City addresses have never featured a prayer or an invocation. Norris requested one for the 2025 version. He had asked for Mark Schreiber, a pastor retired from the military, several weeks ago. Schriber’s bleak, hectoring words about discerning “between righteousness and wickedness” set the stage for what was to come. “We are god awful certain that our own reasonings are invincible until a second opinion arrives,” Schriber intoned with Lutheran gloom. “Remind us that arrogance always precedes a fall, and by insolence comes nothing but strife.”
Norris thanked Schriber by name but did not mention the name of Flagler Palm Coast High School’s Lorelei Kilmer (as Vice Mayor Theresa Pontieri immediately did when she later took the stage), simply nodding for her to take the stage for the National Anthem. (That may have been an oversight. After her performance, Norris shook her hands, thanked her and presented her with a commemorative mayoral coin).
He then walked back to the stage and acknowledged only Sheriff Rick Staly, rather pandering, as “the highest ranking public servant” in the room (the sheriff is not higher ranking than any other constitutional officer except in salary) while ignoring other elected officials, his own colleagues included.
“This is to celebrate what we’ve done in the past year, all the positive things the city has accomplished over the past year,” he began. “We have tremendous employees with the city, and they do a great, great deal of work for us.”
He could’ve fooled everyone.
He then immediately called the city “challenged” and “under the mercy of the swamp peddlers,” his term for landowners, immediately attacking the “swamp peddlers” (a term he used three times in 180 seconds) for planning a costly sports complex on the west side of the city–the complex taxpayers rejected in a referendum, he said, while ignoring other needs.
“To date, I have not been approached by any major landowners that are willing to support broad-based industrial manufacturing development,” he said. (Local developers have complained that Norris refuses to speak with them.) “The mere mention of a moratorium on residential housing a couple of weeks ago at City Hall was met with a blockade of our City Hall by elements of the Flagler County Home Builders Association. Let that sink in. Our City Hall was blockaded by the building industry. Sheriff.”
“Elements” is usually a pejorative term used in the context of insurgencies or civil wars, and is associated with illegitimate actors. He added: “How often have you heard of our sheriff having to deploy canines to ensure our city hall is safe for residents and staff? This is what is called intimidation and coercion of a government body and civilian population.”
There was no blockade. No one’s movement was impeded–not cars, not individuals. No one felt intimidated. There was a quiet, civil, unobtrusive demonstration, an orderly line-up of work trucks on both sides of one street leading to City Hall, punctuated by small clusters of rank-and-file workers here and there. Some of them spoke to the council that morning to oppose the building moratorium Norris was proposing. None lacked courtesy. It was no different than any demonstration about any issue of concern, except that builders tend to have bigger hardware.
There was a level of hypocrisy to Norris’s claims. The March 18 City Council meeting was preceded by calls from Norris’s own partisans for a show of force at City Hall. Though he said he had nothing to do with it, he disseminated the call on his own social media page. The builders and their supporters showed up in larger numbers. The stepped-up security was not over concerns that builders would get out of hand, but that Norris’s supporters would (as FlaglerLive confirmed with sheriff’s officials before the meeting).
“We have organizations in our community encouraging city employees to file trumped up HR charges to force a duly elected mayor out of office,” Norris continued, again without evidence, his jittery body language and halting delivery speaking their own message.
Several employees starting immediately after Norris was elected have filed complaints or documented incidents with the Human Resources Department, alleging rude, inappropriate, dismissive or demeaning conduct by Norris toward employees. He has described it all as employees misunderstanding his humor. (See: “Mayor Norris In Pattern of Offensive Behavior Toward Staff Since November, Internal Complaints Show.”)
“These are the headwinds that I have faced in the first few months of being in office,” Norris said to the Community Center audience. “It’s challenging to say the least. In closing, I will leave you with this. Our city’s theme for today’s State of the City is charting a new course. Are we as a community going to allow the same people that have failed our community for more than 40 years to chart that course for us, or are we going to do it?
Brightness and an authentically celebratory tone returned to the stage when Pontieri took it, delivering the speech the mayor should have. Johnston, the acting city manager, Staly, Fire Chief Kyle Berryhill spoke, with Johnston highlighting most of the year’s achievements before Norris joined Council member Ty Miller and Pontieri for the customary awards portion.
Pontieri announced the Public Safety Award for Flagler County Sheriff Chief Deputy Joe Barile. Norris was supposed to introduce the Citizen of the Year Award. Johnston did instead, with Norris merely handing Bill Butler, the city’s former landscape architect, the plaque. Miller announced the Next Generation Award to Stephen Wilcox, “an Eagle Scout and dedicated member of Boy Scouts of America Troop 400” who installed mini free libraries at some of the city’s more prominent public buildings.
Johnston announced the Employee of the Year Award, which went to Dan Niemann, a lead operator at the city’s beleaguered Waste Water Treatment 1–the challenge and headwind the mayor may have more accurately referred to.
“As we close tonight’s program,” Johnston, not the mayor, told the audience, “I want to express my deepest gratitude to all of you—for your passion, your dedication, and your belief in the future of Palm Coast. Together, we are charting the course for a city that is stronger, more connected, and ready for whatever lies ahead.”
