When Flagler County Commissioner Kim Carney discovered that the county was not going to levy a certain kind of tax on beachside property owners as part of a beach-protection plan starting this fall, she was not happy.
What started at this morning’s commission meeting as a position statement on beach policy quickly degenerated into accusations–Carney accusing the administration of inaction, Commissioner Greg Hansen accusing Carney of “sabotage,” Commissioner Pam Richardson accusing Hansen of making things up (he wasn’t)–that again uncovered the rifts that led to the collapse of the commission’s long-term beach-management plan, and the county with few options ahead.
The abrasive discussion underscored the inescapable: Flagler County and its cities have no plan to save their beaches beyond a cluster of temporary and thinly funded stopgaps.
The $114 million plan had hinged on an increase in the sales tax. Carney, Richardson and Commissioner Pennington were opposed. The plan ended any hope of a sustained, long-term beach construction and maintenance program in the coming years.
Carney still thought the county would create a special tax along 10 miles of unincorporated Flagler County (or the whole 18 miles of the barrier island: she was not clear) to get some funding for some beach protection going. But that approach would have drawn nominal revenue compared to needs, and while the county is preparing to establish such a taxing district at the end of 2026, the amount to be levied isn’t known yet.
Then started the recriminations.
“This lack of action will expose the entire northern 10 unprotected and unfunded for all of 25 and 26,” Carney said. She claimed she had pushed the MSBU since her election, and “never once, as a board member, believed that this was not going to happen in 2025.”
County Administrator Heidi Petito corrected her on the vulnerability of the barrier island: the county is setting aside $8.1 million in funding and has emergency berms or dunes planned as a stopgap.
“Hearing we weren’t given the right direction, or we weren’t given direction, that doesn’t work with me,” Carney said, blaming the administration.
Hansen was calm and controlled, but his words roared: “I’m sitting here listening to this, and I’ve been working on this project for years. Quite honestly, I’m incensed by Commissioner Carney’s comments because she single-handedly sabotaged the plan,” Hansen said, referring to the $114 million plan. “We had a plan in place in November of last year that was working towards implementation in December, and Commissioner Carney got on her white horse and rode in here and said, I’m going to fix it my way. I don’t like your way. Well, quite honestly, she’s sitting on a donkey right now. All the procedure and all the impetus that we had in place, she single-handedly sabotaged and got rid of it all because she had a better plan.”
Hansen was off on his timeline. The sales tax proposal was not in the plan by December, a month after Carney’s and Richardson’s election. It was not added until late February. Earlier that month officials at a joint meeting of county and city officials were frustrated by how cryptic the county plan was: it had no numbers, no details. Carney was among the critics.
Petito unveiled the half-cent sales tax proposal, along with all the other funding details, in late February. From that point on, however, the only revisions were in a few details, not in the principle of the plan, not in its main outlines.
Even then, Carney was critical, maintaining what by then became a fiction of her own creation: that the plan kept changing. Yes, it had changed–in part at her behest, to have solid numbers and projections. Despite that, Carney continued to claim that “it’s been morphed many, many times,” which was no longer true, but she used that fiction to torpedo the plan and get Richardson to go along on the same theme.
“What was the most important and critical component was a long term financing source,” Commission Chair Dance said. That was the sales tax. Carney claims the taxing districts were the answer. “Those are only components of it, those, those don’t fix the problem,” Dance told her. “They put an inordinate amount of burden on the property owners.”
Hansen continued, recalling how he called the Petito plan “elegant” for its thoughtfulness and minimized cost t taxpayers. “It was just so cheap that nobody would even feel it,” he said. “Not only is it fair and it fully funds the $12 million dollars we need to get this project done. But it also allows us to put a significant amount of money from other sources that we’re now robbing to work on the other infrastructure projects we have.” He said Richardson joined Carney just because she “didn’t like” the plan. Richardson recoiled.
“I never said ‘I don’t like it.’ I don’t appreciate him insulting everybody,” Richardson said.
“I’m sorry. It’s on the record. ‘I don’t like it.’ I looked it up,” Hansen said.
At a June 16 workshop on beach management, Richardson had said: “I don’t like that things are changeable once they’ve been diagnosed as that’s it. I just cannot keep adjusting and adjusting, adjusting to make it sound good.”
Hansen continued, describing himself as “depressed” over the collapse of the beach plan and calling the resulting budget “criminal” for its cutbacks.
“If you had done your homework and understood the plan and how it was going to work, then we wouldn’t be sitting here today. We would have an MSBU in place and ready to go, because it was ready to go last December. All we needed at that point was the buy-in from the cities,” which was getting worked out, he said. (An MSBU is a “Municipal Services Benefit Unit.” It’s a special tax levied on property owners to pay for a specific goal.)
“Thank you, Greg. Well spoken, Greg,” Carney said with a note of sarcasm. “But if this plan was so perfect, why didn’t you get it before we got up here?”
“And I resent being put in that everything that I say is because Ms Carney said something. I have my own mind, thank you very much,” Richardson said, noting her conversations with the administration. “I’m fully aware and I’m able to make my own mind up with any decision I make. I just don’t appreciate the attack on our board with disrespect towards our members, to treat us all like we’re all different people, and that we don’t have equality here. Because I thought this board was very kind to each other, but to attack a member of this board is not acceptable in my book, so I really resent that you would say and call people criminals. We’re not criminals.”
“By the end of the half-cent sales tax discussion, it was four to one,” Carney told Hansen. “You were the only one voting for the half-cent sales tax.” Dance had been a supporter as well, however. “So the timing was wrong. You should have insisted on getting that plan done before November of 2024, and you didn’t do it. So therefore we all sit here with the revised plan. It is not the Kim Carney plan. It was the best plan we could get at the time to go to budget for this year. I, for one, thought that there was an MSBU written into it.”
The commission did agree to levy an MSBU on barrier island property owners in unincorporated Flagler County for next year, but in principle, not in fact: the amount charged will be zero. That allows the commission to work on an actual figure by the time the studies are complete.
An engineering study was necessary to validate the numbers, with no time left in the budget timeline to get it done this year. But even when the MSBU levy will draw revenue, “We don’t have a long-term consistent funding plan for beach nourishment,” Dance said in a brief interview this afternoon. “It’s basically year to year.” The commission, he said, needs to “coalesce around what does a long-term maintenance plan looks like, and it’s going to involve the municipalities on the barrier island. This is going to be a big undertaking for the next year.”
At the end of the morning’s commission meeting, Dance has cautioned his colleagues from the dais: “Just remind everybody that our words have meaning. Be careful in what we say up here. Everybody sitting up here has got years left to work together. It does nobody any good to start accusing people of–you know. Obviously we have to be conscious of our decisions. Our decisions have consequences and we have to be able to understand that we’re all not going to agree. At the end of the day, it’s okay that we don’t agree, but we have to be able to put that behind us when we leave this room.”
By the time they left the room, the county’s beach management plan was back to near zero.
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