Paul Trombino, one of the last two finalists for the Palm Coast city manager job, withdrew his candidacy this morning, less than 24 hours after the Palm Coast City Council made clear in a series of split votes that he doesn’t have the council’s full confidence or enthusiasm. That leaves one man standing: Richard Hough. The council did not feel any differently about him. Three other finalists had dropped out before they were interviewed.
“I can confirm that Paul dropped out,” Brittany Kershaw, the city’s communications director, said in late morning today. Doug Thomas of SGR, the recruiting firm a previous city council hired to lead the search for a city manager, “talked to Lauren and Renina this morning and let them know that Mr Trombino had removed himself from consideration.” Lauren Johnston is the acting city manager. Renina Fuller is the director of human resources.
Trombino and Thomas did not return calls and texts. Trombino’s decision is less of a surprise than Hough’s to stay in. Three-member council majorities voted against hiring either of them at Tuesday evening’s meeting. Council member Theresa Pontieri was especially concerned about what she saw as a lack of budgeting experience in both candidates.
Then, in somewhat of pile-up of humiliations, the council agreed to assign them both homework: they’d have to draft a “white paper” on budgeting and submit it to the council for review at next Tuesday evening’s meeting. That’s after the mayor interviewed both of them by the tailpipe of his pick-up truck in City Hall’s parking lot because he refused to conduct the interviews in his office.
All council members lauded the two candidates and all said they’d be willing to vote for one of them, but a majority–Pontieri, Ty Miller and Dave Sullivan–was reluctant, while two of the five did not want to appoint anyone without a unanimous vote. Council member Charles Gambaro motioned to appoint Trombino, but would not lend support to a Hough majority.
Being left with one candidate “doesn’t change anything for me,” Miller said today. “My position is, they’re not necessarily what I envision what our city manager to be, and that’s no slight to them. Both candidates have an obvious career projection and experience, they’ve done a lot of things that are important.” But Miller sees them more as department heads than city managers who will “fundamentally change the way the city does business.” He said they are “not necessarily the rock stars we were looking for.”
But there’s a third choice, Miller said, echoing Sullivan: the city has a city manager in Johnston. The city needs time to get past the turmoil of the last few months and burnish the council’s reputation so that in a renewed search, the candidate pool would be of a higher caliber.
“We have to keep the city running,” Sullivan said. “I don’t think the staff is doing a bad job, I think Lauren is doing a pretty good job, I don’t think it’s a crisis or anything like that, and we’ve got other issues to work on.” Sullivan was close to giving Trombino the third vote he needed to be appointed, and in a mistaken vote, did exactly that until he reversed. He appeared willing to affirmatively cast a vote for Trombino in a re-vote, but opted not to once he realized it would not be unanimous. As the newest member of the council, he said, he did not want to be the swing vote on such an important decision.
Sullivan was not ready to say what he would do next Tuesday, though the council may discuss that sooner: it has a special meeting scheduled for 1 p.m. Thursday (May 1), when it is to discuss the results of the independent investigation that found Mayor Mike Norris to have violated the charter.
Norris, the investigation found, unilaterally and out of public view sought the resignations of Johnston and Chief of Staff Jason DeLorenzo, among other improprieties. The investigation was conducted by Tallahassee attorney Adam Brandon, who is appearing before the council at the special meeting. Brandon found a case of malfeasance could be made against Norris.
Allegations against Norris, compounded by Norris’s own unsupported allegation that Charles Gambaro, one of the council members, is serving illegally (the city attorney dismissed the claim), have contributed to council instability that pre-dated the current majority, projecting a difficult work environment for any prospective manager. Barely three dozen people applied when SRG recruited last winter, forcing an extension of the application window. It didn’t help.
Johnston, the city manager, has not received any direction regarding next Tuesday’s meeting in light of Trombino’s withdrawal, meaning that as things stand now, the council would still discuss Hough’s lone white paper. In a text, Pontieri said today: “My concerns regarding lack of large-scale budgeting experience at the magnitude our city requires are not alleviated by the withdrawal of Mr. Trombino.”
A clause in the SGR contract provides that SGR would restart the search if the council does not find a candidate to its satisfaction. But the chances of the council sticking with SGR–the firm the city used when it hired Matt Morton as city manager in 2018–are diminishing.
Editor’s note: An earlier headline for this story characterized the council’s actions as a “debacle,” suggesting council malfunction. The description was not reflective of the meeting—or the article as reported—and was therefore inaccurate. While there was a minor malfunction involving Dave Sullivan’s initial vote for Paul Trombino, caused by technicalities out of Sullivan’s control, that malfunction was corrected in the re-vote. The headline should have reflected the fact that the candidate dropped out because the council majority voted against him. The number of votes to get there was not reflective of malfunction but deliberation, none of it improper, discourteous or unusual when the stakes are this high. The headline has been edited accordingly.
