The Palm Coast City Council did the right (and impressive) thing when it voted down both of the last two remaining candidates for city manager on Tuesday. It looked messy. But that’s what deliberative democracy is like, especially on high-stakes votes. It would have looked more suspicious if the council were in lock-step, especially in this case.
Instead, we had two council members–Theresa Pontieri and Ty Miller–staking out the difficult but necessary position: why settle for anything less than the stellar candidate they have been seeking? We had another, Dave Sullivan, refusing to lend his vote to anything non-unanimous, even if it meant sacrificing his preferred candidate. We had a fourth, Charles Gambaro, who set aside his natural predilection for leaders with military credentials as he went for the civilian, then stood firm against the mayor’s pressure to switch.
We even had the fifth, Mayor Mike Norris, willing to go either way for the sake of a decision, though that would have been more capitulation than decisiveness. Compromise is essential on most decisions in government. This was not one of those decisions. Clear-eyed leadership distinguishes between compromise and surrender. Four council members showed that leadership Tuesday. The city manager decision will not be half-baked.
Let’s hope they stick to that resolve. As of this writing, one of the last two dropped out. Of course he did. It’s the only thing to do when a majority of a board votes against you, especially when you are already near the tail end of a threadbare list whose top choices dropped out a long time ago. Remember: the leading candidate who was nearest to the unanimous support of the council opted to run with the caribou near the Arctic Circle rather than so much as risk a job interview in Palm Coast. He was right: who wants to be interviewed by the tailpipe of a truck?
The question is why is Rich Hough still in it? The desperation is concerning. If it’s not desperation, it’s obstinacy, and that’s even more concerning, because it reflects a damn-the-torpedoes temperament unsuited for a civil, local government that needs more steering than fixing.
And no, let’s not confuse it with tenacity. Tenacity would have been Hough’s willingness to stick out an arduous process on equal footing with three or four other candidates going through the same stress tests. That’s not what’s happening here. He’s the last man standing by elimination, not by right. As a city councilman from a distant era told me, “Palm Coast needs a city manager, not a Survivor winner or a commanding officer. Picking Hough just because he self-selected as the last man standing would not be good.”
If there is pressure to appoint a manager, it’s artificial.
Let’s not take our cues from the misinterpretation of public-comment segments at council meetings. Every time the council has discussed the city manager hire, the chamber has been mostly empty. It’s the case in most instances. Contrary to the mayor’s misconception about crowds, empty chambers are not a sign of indifference or lack of engagement. They’re an endorsement from the city’s 100,000 residents that the council can do what it was elected to do: take care of business while the 100,000 take care of theirs–work, school, golf. Chambers fill only when councils fail.
Thoughtful people do show up to address specific issues. But they don’t recycle. That leaves the floor to vainglorious commenters, the same six and a half misinforming and disinforming dregs who keep monopolizing the lectern during public comment segments.
These aren’t dissenters, challengers or insurgents, which every government needs. They’re gadfly demagogues. They keep blabbering on about corruption and forensic audits and that damn splash pad or the utility or the legitimacy of Charles Gambaro, spitting falsehoods, slandering city staff and shrilling to the old propagandistic standard: repeat a lie often enough and people will start believing it.
They create the disproportionate impression that they stand for more than the performative grouchers they are. Their three minutes are their stage, their self-validation. They address anything and everything because they don’t have anything better to do than play Joe McCarthy in Town Center. These days they’re Mike Norris’s amen corner. They’re the reason these council meetings have degenerated into circuses, with Norris’s gavel-armed encouragement. But they represent a cult, not a majority.
The council has at times been swayed by the din. Tuesday showed us that it also knows where to draw the line. Now it has to find a way to defuse the IED in its midst, as the mayor has become a one-man demolition show.
That task aside, and as Sullivan put it, the city is “not in crisis.” Nor is the administration lacking leadership. There are rumors that a staff exodus is under way at City Hall–the kind of rumors those dregs I just mentioned would spread to further fabricate the image of a city adrift. There is no exodus from the numbers I’ve gathered. There are some 600 employees in the organization. Ten resigned in March and April. A year ago in those two months, nine resigned, and the year before that, 10. Only one of those 29 was in the central administration. So let’s not confuse the one-man debacle on the City Council with instability at the city, or even on the council as a whole.
Lauren Johnston has the council’s and the city’s confidence to manage City Hall. The council should see her as the regent the city needs right now (or the manager pro tempore, if we are to stay away from monarchic allusions), until the council gels and restores the kind of reputation that draws 120 applicants next time it searches for a city manager, not 38. If anyone doubts Johnston’s capabilities, they only need listen to the final two minutes of Thursday’s council meeting, when she capped three hours of manure with wisdom and proved that she is the right person in the right place at the right time. She’s not acting. She is steering a sturdy ship. Only its captain is mistaking it, with disturbing zeal, for the Titanic.
Pierre Tristam is the editor of FlaglerLive. A version of this piece airs on WNZF.
