Normalcy shouldn’t be news. At the Palm Coast City Council’s workshop on Tuesday, it was. Normalcy returned, if perhaps temporarily, after a string of meetings going back months that degraded proceedings with embarrassing regularity, derailing the city’s search for a city manager and culminating in the mayor’s censure and his retaliatory lawsuit against the city he leads.
The tone on Tuesday was oddly, radically different. It wasn’t the meeting’s unusual length–it lasted eight hours, not including a break for lunch–or the complexity of the half dozen issues the council took on and largely resolved, or the fact that some of the issues, like increasing impact fees or the ranking of certain priorities over others, were not free of contention or political risks.
It was, rather, the meeting’s tenor, especially in contrast with most meetings of the last many weeks. From start to finish, council members and city staff bore down into the work without distractions, without grandstanding, without bizarre non-sequiturs. From start to finish, council members tangled with issues, sometimes with each other, but with respect and deference and without a hint of tension. There were no incendiary surprises. You’d have thought it was the Flagler Beach City Commission, the local standard of workman-like civility in the last many years.
No vacation had so sharply boosted the city’s productivity and morale in recent years.
Most notably, there was none of what had become the routine flame-throwing from the floor during public comment segments. The chamber was mostly empty, and those who addressed the council did so attuned to the same civil wavelength as the council members. The meeting was chaired with equanimity and fairness shocking for its difference with recent meetings. Most remarkably, the meeting ended with cheer and not a little gratitude to all involved despite its length.
There were two differences with previous meetings. Mayor Mike Norris was on vacation (as were, one official quipped, his sycophants). And Vice Mayor Theresa Pontieri chaired the workshop. No vacation had so sharply boosted the city’s productivity and morale in recent years.
“Clearly, the fact that the mayor’s been gone for two or three meetings has put a different tone on the meetings,” Council member Dave Sullivan said. “I think that had a lot to do with the fact that the meeting went smoothly.” Sullivan described Pontieri’s chairing as “an absolutely outstanding job under quite a bit of pressure, because she’s been put in a position to carry things on, and she’s done a very good job. She takes a very straight-forward, intelligent approach to handling things.”
Council member Ty Miller was “beat” from the length of the meeting, but otherwise cheery. “It’s apparent that the council was interested in making progress on a number of key issues,” he said, “most importantly the impact fees and ensuring that we’re capturing money for infrastructure while also balancing that against affordable housing and economic development, but also the Strategic Action Plan.”
The Strategic Action Plan is the council’s list of annual and long-term goals. Its periodic discussions about ti can get testy. Miller said council members worked through concerts and reached clear-eyed directions for city staff through compromise and flexibility, enabling solutions without being “paralyzed by deadlock. I look forward to focusing on the job at hand. Anything other than that is a distraction in my eyes.”
Council member Charles Gambaro addressed the tenor of the meeting specifically at its end, thanking the vice mayor for handling it (and for hosting the city’s Memorial Day commemoration the day before). “Thanks for a great meeting,” he said. “These are tough issues, and I think we were showing our residents what right looks like. And I’m thankful to be working with the three you and the city leadership and everybody in the back.”
The number he used–three–was lost on no one. Norris sued Gambaro and the city over Gambaro’s appointment to the council last fall, calling it illegal. Gambaro had led the charge to censure Norris after an investigation found the mayor to have violated the charter and demeaned several city staffers. The city’s ethics complaint against the mayor is pending at the Florida Commission on Ethics.
City staff and Acting City Manager Lauren Johnston were especially applauded at the end of Tuesday’s meeting (if not quite literally) after it had been weathering recurring, usually false and often slanderous attacks from members of the public taking advantage of Norris’s tendentious managing of comment segments to allow those attacks to go unchallenged and at times unmetered. “We recognize all the hard work you do,” Gambaro told the administration. (Johnston declined to comment when asked about the tenor of Tuesday’s meeting.)
“I also want to thank you all, and staff, for the meeting,” Pontieri told her colleagues. “A lot of really tough stuff. Thank you for some creative problem solving on the fly.”
Sullivan, the longest-serving public official of the group (he’d been a county commissioner for eight years before his appointment to fill Ray Stevens’s seat a few weeks ago), had as if been thrown into a fire when he began his tenure on the council. “We have to get on with business,” he said. “The group that we have right now is willing to do that, hang in there.” He was referring to the group with the empty chair in its midst.
