Palm Coast Charter Committee Wraps Up Work with Several Recommendations That Sharply Diverge from Council

After 10 three-hour meetings and three community workshops since last October, the Palm Coast Charter Review Committee completed its work Monday night, concluding with nine ranked recommendations for amendments that now go to the Palm Coast City Council for due consideration. 

Georgette Dumont, who moderated the committee, will draft the final report and present it to the council on Feb. 17. The council may accept the recommendations in whole or in part, reject them all, and add some of its own. Proposed amendments will be placed on the Nov. 3 ballot, where Palm Coast voters will have the final say. 

The five committee members,  each appointed by a council member, were  Patrick Miller, Ramon Marrero, Perry Mitrano, Michael Martin and Donald O’Brien. O’Brien chaired. The committee finished its work early: additional meetings were canceled. Don’t expect its recommendations to be merely ratified by the council. 

Several of the committee’s proposals knowingly diverged sharply from council stances as it wrapped up its work over the past few meetings, especially at the Jan. 12 session and last night. Those include:

• Removing health benefits from council members’ compensation.
• Retaining the $15 million borrowing limit on the city. The limit has been in place since incorporation in 1999. The council attempted and failed to repeal it at a referendum in 2024.
• Requiring a supermajority of the council to censure a council member.
• Requiring the physical presence of council members for votes. 

Committee members acknowledged that they are going against the council’s grain with several of their proposals. But the committee was made up of five self-assured individuals who at no point conveyed the impression that they were carrying anybody’s water, except for Martin, much of whose work and proposals had been inspired by former Mayor David Alfin. But Alfin is no longer the mayor, and even he would have likely been surprised by Martin’s independence. 

The gap between the committee and the council was especially pronounced as the committee discussed barring council members from voting remotely, even though the council, citing technology and members’ commitments, recently made that part of its allowances. 

“They don’t want to stop it,” Mitrano said, “because that board is a bit younger than it used to be, and they realize that this is an important growth aspect of the future. So I don’t know if we should restrict it. I know we agree that we don’t like it, but I don’t know if we should restrict it.”  

“The crux here is, how do these citizens get to engage with you?” Dumont, the moderator, said. “Should they be able to engage online? Are you going to open up public comment online? And everybody gets to have their little avatar talking. So that is a discussion that really is being held in my circles. There’s no answer.” She said the technological changes are “exciting but slightly freaky.” One of the committee members called them “scary.” 

“We can put whatever you want to put in the charter, and progress is going to continue,” Committee member Marrero said, expecting the in-person requirement to be overruled by the council. The requirement was the pet project of Chantal Preuninger, an alternate member of the committee who attended every meeting and harped on the necessity to have every council member present at every meeting, whether for discussions or for votes. 

But the discussion turned into a salad of mixed technologies and metaphors as members and Dumont talked about AI, avatars, deepfakes, hacks and other supposed means of impersonating a council member phoning it in, or linking in by zoom. 

The members’ somewhat shallow understanding of the technologies–as is most people’s regarding rapidly evolving technologies–and shallower assumptions about them risked framing charter language that, by 2027, will already be outdated. 

The discussion was also one of several examples of the committee getting too deep into the mechanics of city government rather than sticking to governance principles flexible enough to be adaptable in the next few decades and leaving it to council resolutions and ordinances to fine-tune that adaptability in real time. 

The committee ranked its priority charter recommendations as follows:

1. Filling vacancies.
2. Council salaries, eliminating benefits. 
3. Qualifying fees and petitions for elections.
4. Updating qualifications and evaluations for the City Manager and the City Attorney.
5. Maintaining a borrowing limit but leaving i to the council to study and update the limit amount, which has been $15 million since the city’s incorporation in 1999.  
6. Explicitly forbidding the Mayor and Council from interfering with city staff.
7. Adopting a preamble to the charter. 
8. Codifying a process for censure or removal of council members. 
9. Limiting members to two terms for council and two for mayor, though a former two-term council member may be mayor for two more terms, and vice versa. 

Other recommended changes include requiring two council meetings a month (it has not had fewer than two business meetings a month almost since the city’s inception), and the physical presence requirement for votes. The rankings are “strictly advisory,” Martin said. 

The council does not have the power to suspend anyone. It may censure one of its own. But it has that power already–and exercised it twice last year, against then-Council member Ed Danko and against Mayor Mike Norris. Last year’s censures did not have to be by supermajority. They happened to pass with majorities of four votes in Norris’s case, on a 3-1 vote in Danko’s case (and in his absence). The committee  is recommending that censures from here on be by supermajority only. 

Only the governor may remove a council member, although one of the proposed changes to the charter would give the council the power to remove a member following three unexcused absences in a row. Martin said that would be reserved for “egregious” cases. “They’re supposed to be representing their voters, and if we’re not here, not doing their job, they shouldn’t have it,” he said. 

Committee members wanted to include ethics violations among the causes for removal, but that again falls in the governor’s purview, and defining what type of ethics violations would warrant removal could be complicated. Many an elected official has been fined by the state Ethics Commission for minor violations, never leading to removal (except by voters at election time). 

The removal from office language recommended for the charter would be as follows: “The Council may request the governor of Florida to remove the mayor or any other council member from his or her office, as determined by a vote in the affirmative of a super majority of the council acting as a body after issuing multiple censures.” The language then enumerates the reasons for removal, such as a felony conviction, but also a first-degree misdemeanor conviction,  violating “city standards,” and so on. 

“Now the council has documentation and a track record as to why they are asking the governor to remove one of their members,” Dumont said. “”This is the rationale. This is the background. It’s not like it came out of the blue. And so you are providing the materials needed for the governor to make a decision.” The present council did just that when it asked the governor to remove Mayor Norris last year. The request has been answered by silence, and Norris has since mended his ways. 

The committee made a minor but significant change in the definition of the mayor’s duties, stripping charter language implying unspecified duties and more clearly defining the role as presiding over meetings and acting as the  head of government without administrative power.

The proposed charter language reads: “In addition to the mayor’s regular duties as a council member, the mayor shall preside over the meetings, will be recognized as the head of government, shall have no administrative duties other than those necessary to accomplish and approved by Council.”

Mitrano noted that the mayor does more than that–signing emergency declarations, signing city contracts, and so on. He did not see the need to narrow the definition of the mayor’s role, although some of that wording is already included in a separate section of the charter. 

As it has on several occasions, the committee revisited the vacancy and appointment clauses of the charter, electing to propose that if a vacancy occurs within six months of an election, the council will not fill the seat by appointment regardless.  If a vacancy falls outside that window and no election is scheduled within 12 months, the city must announce a special election date within 30 days. 

Council members’ salaries would be eligible for salary increases tied to inflation raises awarded city employees. But any increase above inflation would have to be approved by voters at a referendum. The charter committee is recommending the elimination of health benefits. That provoked one of the more spirited discussions in the last two meetings. Mitrano had supported removing benefits, but now has “buyer’s remorse.” 

“Talk about hamstringing the city and people that want to run for these seats,” he said. “I have spoken to numerous people that want to run for seats, but as I go through things with them and tell them about how elections work, they say, I can’t give up my job. I got benefits. I can’t work part time because I have benefits.” Mitrano chairs the Republican Executive Committee and recruits candidates for local offices. He blamed a “mean spirited” attitude–the attitude he acknowledged was his own–for suggesting that benefits should be removed. But now he’s against that. 

“So you’re saying the decision making to run for office is based on whether I would get health insurance?” Committee member Patrick Miller asked him. Perry said he did not mean it to sound like that. But it is that, Miller said:  “You’re out there, you’re having a job, you’re making a living, you’re paying for those benefits. Why should the city reimburse you for that benefit?” He said the job is part-time, and that the decision to run should not be based on “compensation for what they’re making at their job.” 

“I don’t want to give them any benefits whatsoever. I mean, period,” Miller said. 

Martin agreed. The assumption that higher salaries and better benefits attracts better candidates is “a fallacious assumption,” he said. With O’Brien silent on the matter, Perry lost. 

The requirement for qualifying to run for a seat by petition would be made easier, lowering the required number of citywide petitions to 100 for a council seat and 400 for the mayor’s seat, or, if not by petitions, to pay 4 percent of the seat’s salary (the state required 1 percent plus a city required 3 percent), instead of the current 10 percent. 

Nearing the three-hour mark Monday night, committee members thanked Dumont for her work, which proved a lot more voluminous than what she’d signed up for. “You’ve been an ace in all this,” Marrero told Dumont. “Even though we didn’t have a large crowd, but the ones that were here and did come, thank you. We appreciate your support.”

The meetings drew at best two or three audience members. 

“We’ve all put our hearts into this. We’ve all done our best efforts to try to make the charter the best thing it can,” Martin said. 

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