So You Want to Recall a Council Member or Write an Ordinance? Palm Coast Codifies Process After 24 Years.

The Palm Coast City Council in its 24th year is codifying its own referendum and recall process–the direct-democracy methods by which residents may pitch or force the reconsideration of an ordinance, amend the city charter, or initiate a recall of a sitting council member.

It’s not that the process wasn’t in place in state law or spelled out, to some extent, in the city charter.




But “we didn’t have a one stop shop where someone could come in and say hey, what’s your process?” City Attorney Neysa Borkert said. The administration has been developing the process for eight month with Supervisor of elections Kaiti Lenhart, including a joint agreement between the city and the supervisor.

Mayor David Alfin was dubious. “The city of Palm Coast has worked through 23 years, so almost a quarter of a century, without this,” he said. “The question is, is this a solution looking for a problem? I’m not sure I understand the energy or the fuel behind the need to do this.”

Borkert said there are more than half a dozen state laws, plus the charter, to wade through before the city administration and residents can figure out how to conduct these initiatives. The current proposal “is an easily accessible roadmap for people to read through it.”

“So don’t take offense but so this is the the referendum for dummies version, the short book,” Alfin said. The attorney was taken aback, laughing nervously through a long, hesitating pause before saying she was happy to have the process in place: it wasn’t clear why the mayor wasn’t favoring a clearer process in a matter that, over the years, had in fact beguiled and possibly pre-empted some of those who would otherwise put it in practice.




There’s also a more salient reason: Palm Coast was required by its own charter to have an ordinance in place spelling out that process, and had skated for 24 years without one.

“When you didn’t have one, that was given me a lot of stress,” Supervisor of Elections Kaiti Lenhart told the mayor and the council. “There is no local initiative process in Florida state law. So they have the constitutional amendments, and that’s great. But that doesn’t apply to you all. And I can’t charge costs for the verification of those petitions because it’s a local measure. So it was because there was no process that I lost a little bit of sleep. I don’t have gray hair yet. But it was stressful, because we had to bring all those things together and come up with a plan. So I love this process.”

Other council members more readily embraced the proposal, especially after Lenhart disarmed all skepticism. The only substantial question was from Council member Nick Klufas who asked whether there is now a digital way of producing those petitions.

But there was vigorous headshaking–no–from Lenhart and the attorney. “The administrative rulemaking requires a physical signature on paper, we have to verify the paper,” Lenhart said. “It would be nice and actually during Covid there was an exception to that. There was an executive order passed by the governor that allowed candidates to collect their petitions electronically. That has expired and has not been renewed.” (Electronic balloting is not unusual: many states allow it in some circumstances, but the petition process is different.)

“I just think that’s a big impediment for collecting all of these,”: Klufas said.

The process is straight-forward on paper, but still laborious in fact. Registered city voters may petition the council to consider a specific ordinance or reconsider an existing one, or to add a ballot measure for a charter amendment. But either choice requires roughly 8,000 petitions–10 percent of the city’s electorate.




The first step in any initiative, referendum or recall process is the required establishment of a political action committee through the city clerk. (One such committee was established in April to push a referendum that would test voters’ appetite for backyard chickens.)

Citizens may then petition for the council to consider an original ordinance. But the sphere for such proposals is limited. Citizens may not propose ordinances regarding the budget, taxes, debt obligations, capital improvements, rezoning or land-use matters or any other matter prohibited by law. The same limitations apply to petitions for reconsiderations of ordinances. Those petitions have to be filed within 60 days of an ordinance’s passage.

Once the supervisor of elections validates the petitions (at no cost to the city or to petitioners), the petitions are submitted to the council, which then either considers the proposed ordinance or reconsiders its own ordinance. “If the city council fails to adopt or enact the ordinance or reverse the measure after reconsideration within 60 days after the petitions are verified, then the measure is submitted to the electors at the next general election,” Borkert said.

The only way the council can stop an initiative from moving on to the ballot is to pass the measure. Voting it down ensures that it goes on the ballot, at the city’s expense.

The council has no role regarding proposed referendums, once a political action committee succeeds in securing the required and certified number of petitions. The council’s role is merely to place the proposed referendum on the ballot. The ballot measure must have only one subject, however. The deadline for the measure appearing on the general election ballot is April 1 of that election year.

Recalls have a lower petition threshold: just 5 percent of the electorate or 1,000 petitions, whichever is greater (it would be the 5 percent portion in Palm Coast). But the grounds for recall are limited to malfeasance, neglect of duty, drunkenness, incompetence, an inability to perform duties, or conviction on a felony regarding moral turpitude. The restrictions leave a lot of room for interpretation. There has never been an attempted recall in the city’s history.

In the end, even the mayor was agreeable and complimentary of the proposed new process (and ordinance and joint agreement), which the council is expected to approve later this month. “Thank you for eight months of hard, hair coloring work,” the mayor told the supervisor of elections and city staff.