Mike Norris has a choice. He can either resign or convert.
I don’t mean he should embrace City Hall’s prevailing creeds. Disruption has its benefits. A harder look at the city’s pace of development is not a bad thing, and on this council he’s not the only one taking it. But that’s policy. Every elected official is entitled to his/her/their own, and to try to change that of colleagues. It’s the nature of government.
Norris’s conversion is a matter of self-reflection. He would benefit from giving his Napoleonic ego a four-year sabbatical and from giving up the illusion that his power is more than one-fifth of the council’s, that his word is law, or that the mayor’s position is defined by authority more than ceremony.
He should learn that using his position to humiliate others isn’t funny. It’s not folksy humor. It’s cruel, and judging by where his eyes stray, it’s somewhere between Mad Men-sexist and a private predilection that should remain private. He should learn that it’s not his City Hall, and it certainly is not his staff. He was right to clear his things out of his office there. He was getting more pasha than mayor, more thrilled by his title than his responsibility to live up to it.
Which, I suspect, he could do very well. I think Norris is a good and sincere man at heart, easily likable if you look past the lunar crust and much smarter than people give him credit for. His judgments and political whisperers are another story. So is his AWOL self-awareness. he needs self-discipline. He needs to realize he’s the rookie. If he doesn’t want to fit in, it’s his right. But that doesn’t absolve him of the responsibility to listen, observe, learn, respect staff, respect the charter, respect the office he represents (which is our office as constituents, not his), then try changing the world. No one would begrudge him for trying. It’s what we elect people to do.
But we don’t elect them to destroy the village to save it. This self-aggrandizing ex-soldier seems to have no clue that Palm Coast doesn’t need saving. It’s not even in trouble. It merely needs steering, which, to City Hall staff’s credit–and specifically to City Manager Lauren Johnston’s credit, who would be the city’s ideal permanent manager–is being steered despite the mayor’s carnage. He’s made himself superfluous. If he doesn’t convert, he’ll be a four-year irrelevance. His colleagues will make sure of that.
Because continuing as the Mike Norris we’ve come to know and dread is not a choice. It is, to borrow from his likely beloved Phyllis Schlafly, an echo from his barrio of buffoonery–the embarrassment of his State of the City address, the puerility of his “Wanted” poster, the insult to city manager candidates of his tailgate interview, the contempt he showed them hours later by dissing the community meet-and-greet. What next, replacing the best communications department in Northeast Florida with Dennis McDonald?
Clearly, the mayor isn’t interested in governing. He’s our Peter Bergman (“I’m not a mayor but I play one on TV”), mistaking chaos for change and misinterpreting the few sycophants pledging allegiance to him at meetings or on his Facebook page for a political compass. All he’s done since his election is accuse, criticize, denounce, bellyache. The only initiative he championed was the ill-fated fuel dump off U.S. 1, pulling back when he saw the flames. Then it was back to grievances and fabrications, and that ridiculous claim that he’s the victim of a cabal because he wants a building moratorium.
He has plenty of time to rescue his mayorship. The council would be his first ally. So would the administration. These aren’t vindictive people. He doesn’t seem interested.
Norris is not the resigning type, and driving him out of office is undemocratic. He was duly elected by a large margin: 63 percent is landslide territory, even though one suspects that figure is now more than halved by regret. The City Council has every reason to censure him or express its lack of confidence. But to draft the governor to expel him? This isn’t Albany in 1920, when the state legislature expelled three assemblymen for being “disloyal” (that is, socialist) or Nashville in 2023, where three Black lawmakers were Jim Crowed out of their seats for exercising their First Amendment rights on the House floor.
Norris’s sins aren’t as noble as socialism or Black lives. He merely mistook City Hall for his man cave. But as Oliver Wendell Holmes put it when describing our system, “I quite agree that a law should be called good if it reflects the will of the dominant force of the community even if it takes us to hell.” The same holds true for the elected. If the electorate wants to take Palm Coast to hell, who are we to stop it with banana republic tactics?
The mayor could theoretically sustain four years of bluster and disruption. It’s not as if his role model isn’t doing the same to the country. (I wish the other Trump-addled council members came to that realization. We’re not there yet.) Thankfully, Norris is just one vote, and the council, under the deft and dignified leadership of Theresa Pontieri–who is now the mayor in all but name–the city will not go to hell.
For all of Norris’s follies, we now have a solid, intelligent and effective council only occasionally resembling a military commission. He can either be a part of it or play the irrelevant mayor in his self-built labyrinth. It’s his choice. But he doesn’t have to be our problem anymore.
Pierre Tristam is the editor of FlaglerLive. A version of this piece airs on WNZF.
