At the January 28 meeting where he floated the idea of selling the Palm Harbor golf course, City Council member Charles Gambaro said he wanted to see posted on the city’s website every amenity’s finances, “the Southwest Rec Center, you know, other places,” as he put it, referring to the Southern Recreation Center. “How far in the red are we in those areas when you add all that stuff up?”
City staff was stunned, not just because all those numbers are already on the website, but because of all the council members, Gambaro has the most experience in government and ought to know better: parks, like roads, like fire stations, like cops (like militaries), only cost money. They’re not here to make money. Nothing in government is. If it does, something is amiss.
But the fetish of government as a business has a stranglehold on politicians left or right, in the South especially. The mayor likes to call the city “Palm Coast Inc.” and wants a “CEO” to manage it, which is why he and Gambaro have downplayed the importance of candidates with city or county managing experience. The fetish for a manager plucked out of the military is just as brawny.
It’s a mistake. It will compound Palm Coast’s problems, which for the most part were not created by incompetent management. The city administration, because of its professionalism and deeply credentialed staff, has for years been the last thing standing between chaos and civility, between governing and fiscal, populist irresponsibility. The city’s problems are the result of a string of short-sighted councils enslaved to low property taxes at any price, and councils repeatedly gutless in the face of public opposition to such standard revenue sources as the utility franchise fee, the public service tax, the local-option sales tax.
That’s one of the reasons the better cut of city manager candidates is not applying to Palm Coast. No manager worth his or her ICMA credentials is going to knowingly take a job where ideological blinders set them up for failure. And that’s before accounting for candidates’ trepidations over the recent councils outdoing the Oval Office with performative spectacles.
The sources of most of that embarrassment are gone, and this new council has been surprisingly functional (between Theresa Pontieri’s iconoclasm and Ty Miller’s pragmatism, we may have something). It’s what happens when you trust your administration. Too bad Interim Manager Lauren Johnston has too much sense to want to take the top job permanently. She just got her master’s in emergency management. It would be a perfect fit.
But the stink lingers, and the CEO fetish is standing by as the council desperately dredges for that permanent manager, what would be its fifth to hold the job since the dreadful days of Chairman Landon, when the trains ran on time but Palm Coast felt like a suburb of autocratic Singapore.
Last Tuesday a resident implored the council to hire a “successful businessman on the council who knows how to raise money for the city instead of digging in our pockets all the time.” She did not catch her own irony: that the only way to raise money in government is to raise taxes (or fees, if you like the euphemism).
But who would that executive be? The CEO of Silicon Valley Bank might be looking for work. Maybe Elizabeth Holmes of Theranos? None of the CEOs who contributed so mightily to the housing collapse got indicted so some of them are surely available, not to mention the CEOs retired at Hammock Dunes on the riches they made from the savings and loan collapse–all of which government, that perennial incompetent, bailed out, even in Flagler: the county just finished paying off that $3.2 million debt it was left with after developer Bobby Ginn skipped from the hangar it built for him at the county airport.
FDR said of business leaders “that most of them can’t see farther than the next dividend.” They would be a fish out of water in government, especially if driven exclusively by efficiency and low taxes for the sake of low taxes. They’d probably mistake a comprehensive plan for a layoff strategy and amenities for perks undeserved by a mass of proles.
Why bother with regularly paved roads? Why bother with sumptuous rec centers, a swimming pool or a golf course that attract residents, make them happy and draw new arrivals? Why waste money on culture and the arts or the odd low-income housing subsidy and all those cops and firefighters. It’s not like the city’s geriatrics are running around holding you up with AR-15s (though funding cops has been sacrosanct in this town).
No matter what its Samaritan mission statement may say, a private company’s focus is on maximizing profits, not seeking the public interest. Everything else is marketing. If it fails that test, it’s out of business. If it fails that test with a government on the hook, taxpayers pick up the tab. Always. Government is not the fool, not the incompetent, not the culprit. It’s the savior.
A government is not out to make money or win a war. Its only purpose is the public interest: to keep us safe, enhance our quality of life, ensure our toilets flush, maintain our roads, foster a sustainable environment for students, residents and businesses to prosper. It operates only to collect and spend money to those ends. Wisely, we hope.
You don’t get a dividend check from the city because you get something better: when you sell your home, your capital gains will have improved because property values have improved because the quality of life has improved because the city made sure that it would by “wasting” all that money on amenities and the rest of it. None of it made money. It devoured it. None of it is compatible or even remotely similar to how a business operates, especially in Florida, where governments are open books and companies are their own little Kremlins.
None of these differences are reconcilable because government is not like a business, it’s not like the military. It is its own creature. Only when its leaders understand that will they operate it as it should be operated: as a trust that may apply some management principles from business and leadership (and DEI skills from the military), but that best runs on its own organic and unique methods.
Palm Coast is not a barrack or a board room, just as we’re not its troops, its employees or its customers. The city is our representative government, balancing our myriad interests for the benefit of the whole. We only expect, and are owed, its services. Let it govern accordingly, with the only kind of leader fit for the job: not a soldier, not a CEO, not an entrepreneur with a moussed resume, but a city manager with the record to prove it.
Pierre Tristam is the editor of FlaglerLive. A version of this piece airs on WNZF.
