In Muddled Manifesto, Mayor Norris Wants to Sell ‘Bougie’ Southern Rec Center and Cut $10 Million in Spending

Palm Coast Mayor Mike Norris wants to sell the “bougie” Southern Recreation Center, cut spending out of the city’s property tax revenue by $10 million, or a third, and roll back the tax rate even as it’s fallen 12 percent in five years. 

Norris set those goals at the end of Tuesday’s council meeting even as he repeatedly contradicted himself, saying he is “happy with the last year’s budget,” that if  “we’re going to cut $10 million from your ad valorem, that’s going to be devastating to this city,”  and that if Palm Coast overshot its budget in the last five years, going by Florida Chief Financial Officer Blaise Ingoglia’s controversial formula, it did so by only a modest $3 or $3.4 million. 

Norris was responding to Ingoglia’s campaign tour that uses local government budgets as props to claim that local governments are overspending. The claims are based on an economically dubious formula and a total absence of documentation or specifics. In an appearance in Flagler last month, Ingoglia attacked Flagler County government but spared Palm Coast. Norris was in the audience, as were numerous local elected officials. 

“Our big concern was where our city, our city fell within this methodology that they’re using,” Norris said Tuesday.  “He did mention at the meeting that there’s two states, I think, Utah and Colorado, that use that as their benchmark, and he says it’s very effective,” Norris said of Ingoglia. 

It is not. Like most of what Ingoglia says in his presentation, he was inaccurate.

“Colorado is the poster child for fiscal conservative and fiscal conservatism and keeping government in check because it is enshrined in their constitution,” Ingoglia had said in his presentation in Flagler County, claiming that Colorado applied the same formula by law. “So we take the same methodology and we apply it to local governments to contextualize how large these governments have grown.”

In fact, Colorado’s general fund budget has increased 40 percent between 2019 and 2025, from $11.6 billion to $16.2 billion, according to the Urban Institute, a government think tank. Its population increased 7.1 percent in that period, and inflation increased 27.8 percent. 

Utah’s figures are worse: its general fund went from $7.5 billion in 2019 to $12.7 billion in 2025, a 69 percent increase. 

Norris took Ingoglia’s claims at his word, without verification. He summoned Helena Alves, the city’s finance director, until he had “extracted what I needed” from her, as he put it. 

Alves had applied the same formula to the city’s budgets that Ingoglia devised: taking the general fund budget of 2019 and comparing it to the current budget, then adjusting for population and inflation increases since. Ingoglia’s formula also applies what he has referred to as a 10 to 15 percent “inefficiency factor.” 

“So your approved City Council budget was higher by 5 percent of the calculated number using a formula for inflation, population and inflation,” Alves said. 

Council member Ty Miller calculated that taking only property tax revenue and spending, the excess is “less than 5 percent.” In dollars, that’s around $3 million, Miller said. 

Alves did not include Ingoglia’s inefficiency factor, or “buffer,” as Norris called it. Had she done so, the city’s numbers would have been $1.7 to $2 million under budget. 

The city’s property taxes generated $43 million this year. The property tax in 2019 was $4.689 per $1,000 in taxable value. It is now $4.0893, or 12.8 percent lower. The homesteaded owner of a $300,000 house with a $50,000 exemption would have paid $1,172 in 2019, and is now paying $1,020, not accounting for appreciation or inflation, a $152 saving. 

In inflation-adjusted dollars, and with cumulative inflation adding up to 27.8 percent over that period, the homeowner is paying $478 less, since the 2019 bill would have been $1,498 in current dollars. That’s $478 in decreased purchasing power for the city. 

The $42.7 million in property tax revenue in the general fund is less than the $44.6 million the city spends on police and fire services, when capital projects are included. Without capital projects, the city this year is spending $16 million for fire services, $11.2 million for policing through the Sheriff’s Office, or 64 percent of property tax revenue. 

In 2019, the city spent $9 million for fire services and $3.5 million for policing. In other words, the fire budget has increased 78 percent and the policing budget has increased 220 percent. Norris made no reference to those increases, and usually applies the Ingoglia formula to police and fire: those budgets are untouchable. 

Despite Alves’s and Miller’s numbers showing the city’s general fund within five percent of Ingoglia’s goal without an inefficiency adjustment, Norris said the city had hired too many employees and was spending too much money. 

The city is about to start its annual “strategic action plan,” or SAP, process, when the council sets out its priorities. 

“I would like us to cut our ad valorem, which is strictly from property tax, around $8 to $10 million,” he said. “Another thing that I want when we start talking about the SAP, is consideration of selling that Southern Recreation Center,” the tennis, pickleball and community center that opened in 2024 and that the city has since touted as a jewel among its recreation offerings. As if to make the point, the administration on Wednesday issued a release touting the coming high school tennis tournament at the Rec Center, a pointed rebuff to the mayor. 

“The Southern Recreation Center is a drain on our money. It is. It’s going to be a bigger drain,” Norris claimed. “To me, the Southern Recreation Center is not a true recreation center. It is a racket center, plain and simple. And me personally, you can cuss me all you want, but to me, tennis and pickleball, those are bougie sports. The high number of population of kids in our city are not running down to the Southern Recreation Center. So we can market that Southern Recreation Center and sell it and gain back those revenues. Let somebody else that wants to manage that kind of facility do it.” 

He said the center is costing the city $850,000. The actual figure is $762,000. He did not provide figures for Holland Park, Waterfront Park or the Palm Coast Community Center. The city’s parks, recreation and park facilities maintenance budget is $6.7 million, not including the Rec Center, the municipal swimming pool or its Palm Harbor Golf Club. 

“If the state says we’re going to cut $10 million from your ad valorem, that’s going to be devastating to this city,”  Norris said. “So we need to cut and trim, become as efficient as possible. And my take away from the CFO and some of the people in Tallahassee is either you consolidate down, regroup and reevaluate, or you become irrelevant.”

Norris was mischaracterizing both the state mandate and the CFO’s authority, whose limits he did not appear to understand. 

The state is not requiring local governments to cut $10 million from their budgets. Norris was referring to House Bill 1329, which calls for a required “budget exercise” of showing what a potential 10 percent reduction in the overall budget of a local government would look like. The law does not specify that the 10 percent must apply only to the general fund. The law exempts police, fire and “legal obligations.” The law does not require governments to apply the 10 percent cut to their budgets. It only requires that the “exercise” be conducted at a workshop at least 14 days before the adoption of the final budget, and that it be made available to the public, a superfluous requirement since all such records are automatically public. 

City Manager Mike McGlothlin also reminded the mayor that Ingoglia was chastising local governments “without a statutory mandate to do so.” In a challenge no local elected official has dared, McGlothlin said Ingoglia “would probably be better served if he would focus on his core tasks, one of them being the insurance cost that we pay as citizens. I agree with the premise, but I’m not necessarily sure if I agree with the method.”

“I agree,” Miller, the council member, said. “I think it’s kind of like a chainsaw to do surgery kind of methodology there. However, having a baseline of fiscal conservatism is always a good thing.” 

No one disputed that: fiscal conservatism has been the adopted mantra of every local government for years. “Once we roll in this budget cycle, nobody up here does not call themselves a conservative,” Norris said, though he also threw a swipe at Theresa Pontieri, Charles Gambaro and Dave Sullivan, who will not be on the council past November: “Three people are leaving. This is a lame duck council. But we need to do the best we can for this city, for this budget cycle coming up.”

They did not take kindly to the characterization, and Pontieri took on Norris’s larger claims about the budget. 

“I agree that we should always be trying to achieve rollback,” Pontieri said, before qualifying the goal with a specific example, as opposed to the abstractions that, like Norris’s, have typically reflected government officials’ responses to the Ingoglia claims. 

“We had to transfer $2.5 million basically into the impact fee fund to pay for two fire stations because we were not getting enough impact fees,” Pontieri said, referring to the two fire stations under construction in Seminole Woods and on Colbert Lane and Palm Coast Parkway. 

Impact fees are the one-time fees builders or developers pay to defray the “impact” of new development on city infrastructure and services. The city rectified the problem when it increased its fire, parks and road impact fees last year, only to be sued by the Flagler Home Builders Association. 

“Let me just provide a big picture here for the people that are suing us,” Pontieri said. “We are talking about cuts that detrimentally affect our quality of life, and at the same time, being sued because we are trying to allow development to pay for itself. So just so everybody understands that landscape: It’s very frustrating, if you can’t hear it from my tone of voice. I think we need to look at the bigger picture and see what is really affecting our residents. And honestly, yes, government has grown, but government has grown because of the incredible population influx we got after Covid.”

Palm Coast and Flagler County grew by 25,000 residents between 2020 and 2025, the sixth-fastest growth pace among Florida’s 67 counties. 

“When we look at it in that scope, we have actually been very good fiscally, with what we’ve had to deal with,” Pontieri said. 

“I don’t think we’re in a bad spot. If we were, we would have been beat up that day,” Norris said. 

Nevertheless, Norris has decided to beat up the city himself.