It was rough going at the Palm Coast City Council meeting this morning as the administration’s budgetary options crashed against a fractured council that has yet to agree on whether, by how much, and at what price to municipal services, to cut the property tax even as any considered cut would have a negligible–and to some taxpayers invisible–impact on tax bills.
The meeting got tense and a few recriminations flew about before City Manager Mike McGlothlin and City Attorney Marcus Duffy drew out this much clarity out of the five council members:
- They want to see a budget set at the rolled-back rate. The rolled-back rate is the rate at which the city will take in as much property tax revenue next year as it did this year, excluding new construction.
- They want to see a budget set at rollback plus inflation.
- The sheriff will most certainly not get the nine deputies he requested, and there’s strong doubt whether he will get even five. Two council members are pushing an outright “pause” in hiring new deputies, at least until the November election and the fate of the homestead amendment is made clear.
Council members Theresa Pontieri and Mayor Mike Norris were interested in a budget exercise that reflected an overall 10 percent cut in the general fund, but even Norris stepped back from that, preferring to set a target tax rate and leave the rest to the administration.
The final outcome was puzzling because what the council ended up requesting after much sound and fury was not that much different from what Finance Director Helena Alves had just outlined in three scenarios.
One of the scenarios was a budget at rollback. That budget would result in no new positions anywhere in the organization (or at least the side of the organization paid for through the general fund), except for two additional sheriff’s deputies. The sheriff is requesting nine new deputies. That scenario would also have reduced the allocation to the Flagler Humane Society, though no precise number was given.
And it would reduce the code enforcement division by 11.5 positions, following Pontieri’s proposal that code enforcement no longer be a patrolling division. It would only respond to complaints. After today’s discussions, and strong opposition to that approach by Council member Charles Gambaro, changing code enforcement’s role is no longer on the table: the proposal would not have the votes, Council member Dave Sullivan said.
So Alves’s scenario would still have to be reconfigured significantly. She does not see the new proposal coming before the council again until Aug. 25. “It would be the earliest, just because we’d have to recalculate all of the allocations in the department’s budgets,” Alves said.
The budget will look more like the kind of austerity budget Norris wanted than the budget the administration is recommending. It will also leave the council very little room for negotiations: the first hearing for the budget and tax rate adoption will be the following week.
When Alves had initially outlined three scenarios–one at rollback, two at slightly higher tax rates–Pontieri, who is running for a County Commission seat, got visibly and audibly upset, using language unusually critical of the administration. “This option has been shoved down our throat as a recommended proposed budget to raise taxes. Why?” Pontieri said, “When we have expressed from this council, we don’t want to raise taxes. Why has nothing else been looked at and proposed other than this? And then, oh, let’s also do what, you know–blame it on Theresa. She wants to go ahead and cut a whole department, but nothing else has been proposed to look at cutting a level of service by 10 percent, even though I remember you saying that from the dais.”
Pontieri was referring to past references to that effect from Norris. She was especially frustrated by the third scenario. It set the tax rate at the maximum that the council approved last week (4.2296), which would amount to a tax increase that would raise the budget to $72 million, from $67 million, “while still not providing any meaningful cost savings,” in Pontieri’s view.
Things got testy between her and McGlothlin. Alves and the city manager disputed that the proposed scenarios had no cost savings. The 4.2296 scenario funds no sheriff’s deputies and no new administrative or other positions. McGlothlin said there had not been, by council consensus, precise direction on which way to go other than to seek cuts.
“What has been shared with me, ma’am, and what I have also seen in the time that I’ve been here,” the city manager said, “is that we have cut every single possible place that we can and still meet the mission. If the mission needs changing in order to be funded, then we need a mission change, and those mission changes come through the service level reductions. The only reduction that we have received to date has been via the code enforcement model change, and that’s why we bring these back to you.”
Alves reminded the council that this is the first time in 14 years that the city has not seen an increase in property values, so there is no windfall from that for the general fund. “We already know we don’t have the 10 percent that we had last year,” she said. “We don’t have the 14 percent we had a year before, so we still had to deal with the increases in inflation. We still have to deal with the increase in costs.” She outlined those, and noted that any additions to the budget were cut if they were not in public safety. That’s how the scenario ended at the 4.2296 rate.
McGlothlin went as far as challenging the tax-cut dogma head-on, as if he wasn’t worried about his job: “We’ve had four and five-fold increases in cost post-Covid. If we had simply left our millage at what it was in the 2018-19 budget year, and not even messed with it,” McGlothlin said, “we’d be over $51 million dollars to the good. It’s a combination of things. It’s responsible spending and planning, and it’s also appropriate funding. This year alone, because of this current budget year’s decision on millage, we have lost over $8 million in potential revenue, and that’s buying power over the years.”
Just as unexpected were several council members openly challenging the sheriff’s request for nine deputies, at times suggesting–as Sullivan and Gambaro did–the very notion that Palm Coast should be paying as much as it does for the additional service. “Palm Coast is paying just under 27 percent of the sheriff’s budget,” Gambaro said (the city funds 67 deputies out of 251 uniform deputies).
Sullivan said the city should “pause” the hiring of new deputies until it knows the outcome of the November amendment on the homestead exemption.
“We’ve got a big thing hanging over our heads, and that is the amendment from the state,” Sullivan said. “If that amendment goes through, and we try to fund the government at some level of service that we have right now in the coming year, the following year has become a real problem, and if we were to add nine new sheriff deputies this year, not knowing what’s going to happen with that amendment, we’re putting a tail.” By “tail,” Sullivan meant that the additional nine deputies would be an annual expense from then on.
As he has at previous meetings, he said the Hammock is not receiving a lesser quality of service in policing than Palm Coast does, just because it doesn’t have a supplemental contract.
Council member Ty Miller agreed with a pause. “I agree. I think it’s a tough decision to make,” Miller said, “but I think it’s prudent to take our time with this and, and as you said, maybe defer this decision until we know more.” He added: “My position would be to pause. I applaud all the work that the sheriff’s office does–they do a great job. Obviously, we have a very safe community because of them, and so the ask would be hold the line for one year till we know what’s going on in the future with this funding situation, at least from my position.”
It is not yet clear who may join Miller and Sullivan for a complete “pause” in deputy hirings, just as it is not clear how the council will line up for a new budget. Once the new numbers are in at the end of August, the council will have very little time to make decisions on both counts, though that leaves plenty of time for lobbying in the meantime.
Leave a Reply