County Attorney Al Hadeed, Stalwart of Environmental Stewardship and Local History, Is Retiring in August

Al Hadeed is retiring.

“I am going to head for the hills come August,” Flagler County’s attorney for the last 18 years, and for a combined 26, told the County Commission Monday. “I’m going to retire and step down from this incredible, lucky role that I’ve had in my professional career.”

Hadeed had been the county attorney for nearly a decade until the commission in a dubious move ended his contract in 1998. A different commission re-hired him in 2007. His retirement will remove the single-most important store of institutional memory from county government.




Hadeed made his mark most substantially as an environmental attorney who oversaw the county’s enlargement of its protected lands, such as Princess Place Preserve. Signature accomplishments included securing public, customary use of local beaches even along private-property sands, the state’s first local vacation-rental ordinance, which other governments copied, and the securing of the 140-some easements necessary to prepare the way for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers’ renourishment of 3.2 miles of beach in Flagler Beach last year. He’s also been a stickler for the Sunshine law.

“Bittersweet, but at some point we all have to hang up. We all have to hang up our spurs and stuff and move along,” Hadeed said.

His announcement was not unexpected. He turned 77 on March 9, and he’s been talking about retiring for a while, at one point last year signaling that it could happen at the beginning of this year. The definite date he submitted Monday was nevertheless a “shock,” as Commission Chair Andy Dance described it, no matter how much he had also expected it.




“Everybody understands that his breadth of knowledge and history, Flagler specifically, is incredible,” Dance said. “Very few people have that historical knowledge and can recount instances instantly. So that is something that that you just don’t replace. And knowing Florida Florida law, especially in coastal counties, is a handful.”

Hadeed had told Commission Chair Andy Dance at one of their regular one-on-one meetings that he would be announcing his retirement. “The good part is, he’s working on his exit strategy. So he’s trying to clean up a list of projects that he wants to get done before August 1 and set up Sean with the ability to follow up on things.” Sean Moylan has been the assistant county attorney for over a decade.

Dance said he will bring up the matter of Hadeed’s retirement at a coming meeting to get consensus on “what everybody wants to do, what their thoughts are, to replace Al.” The four months ahead give the commission some time–but not much time–to transition.

Hadeed said he’s developed a workplan to allow his department to seamlessly move forward through the coming months, July being his last. That includes completing the work of securing more easements for the next two segments of beach the county plans to renourish, “so it’s all behind us and nobody has to worry about easements anymore,” he said. That may be overly ambitious considering how difficult was the job for the first segment. It took three years.




He will also still be working f and when the county succeeds in enacting a countywide beach management plan, which hinges on an increase in the sales tax and on formal mutual (or interlocal) agreements with every local government. “It is going to generate a lot of work,” Hadeed told the commission, “because as you nail down these different items, whether it be increasing the surtax and having the pledges of the locals, special assessment units, all of that is going to take a lot of work. That is a very complicated interlocal agreement.”

At the same meeting Commissioner Kim Carney said the county shouldn’t wait finding a replacement. “I would like to see a search started as soon as possible,” she said, signaling that perhaps she might not be interested in an internal succession plan.

Hadeed has prepared Moylan for the job, and Moylan has increasingly taken on lead roles in that office. He’s handled some of the more high–profile matters commandingly, as he did the tense negotiations with the School Board over impact fees two years ago; the brief dispute over a road at the south end of the county with Ormond Beach, when Ormond Beach sued Flagler County: Moylan, after an eyeball-to-eyeball meeting with the Ormond Beach City Commission, resolved the dispute in months); and as he has regarding the Old Dixie Motel controversy that’s been dragging for several years: the county just won a final judgment, which is all but signed.

The county attorney’s office has also had its setbacks: the settlement with Captain’s BBQ at Bing’s Landing, the county park, after a dragged out battle was costly and even a little humiliating for the county. The recent scramble over the River to Sea Preserve in Marineland, which jeopardized the county’s ownership of that park, was also a misstep. But those issues have been few.

For now, Hadeed said, “I’ll be busier probably than I’ve ever been. That’s what I expect.”