City Council Cuts City Manager Candidates to 5, But with Sharp Disparities Regarding Most

Shortly before giving applicants yet more reasons to think twice about working here, the Palm Coast City Council Tuesday shortened its list of city manager candidates to five, with one clear front-runner–William Smith, a former county and city manager in Georgia and North Carolina, with vast experience in the field, and the first candidate to get across-the-board top scores from all four council members so far.

The other four are Paul Trombino, Richard Hough, Sonia Alves-Viveiros, and Michael Reese. A conspicuous absence from the list:  Thomas Hansbarger, a general manager with military and private sector experience but no local government experience whom Council member Charles Gambaro had especially championed. Hansbarger had withdrawn after he’d made a second shortlist in late February.




All five are invited to a two-day interviewing schedule on April 24 and 25. The candidates will each meet in one-on-one interviews with council members on the 24th. Council members can choose to keep those interviews open to the public, as some council members have in the past, or decide to interview behind closed doors. City staffers will also take the candidates on a tour Palm Coast.

The next day, each candidate will appear before the full council, in open session, for a 90-minute interview. The council will hold a special workshop and meeting either on April 28 or 29 to make the selection.

The council is also expected to appoint a replacement for Ray Stevens, their colleague who resigned on Feb. 28 due to health difficulties, by April 15. That decision has now taken on particular weight, as it may provide the key vote in swinging the manager choice one way or the other as that new council member will presumably take part in the city manager interviews and the final vote.




Council members are divided by some sharp disparities regarding the four, with some willing to overlook lack of municipal managerial experience in favor of executive experience. The differences reflect the council’s own divisions, which themselves reflect a polarized electorate. That makes Smith the only consensus candidate so far. Council member Theresa Pontieri is pressing for a unanimous vote, and said Tuesday she was willing to forego some of her top choices to ensure that the decision is unanimous.

“I have to admit, there obviously is some disparity here in terms of where you’re at,” said Doug Thomas, the vice president of Strategic Government Resources, or SGR, the consultancy the city hired to recruit. “My sense is that some of this stuff may get softened when you get a chance to meet them, and you’re going to either fall in love with a candidate or not like the candidate.”

The final short-listing was hurried. Pontieri and Council member Ty Miller wanted more time to study the 10 candidates short-listed until Tuesday, due to the volume of material under review. But that would have required an additional workshop, and Mayor Mike Norris said there was little to gain from additional time. “I really don’t think you’re going to get anything else out of those videos,” he said, referring to video interviews with the candidates that the city’s recruiter conducted. “A lot of it is fluff,” Norris called the videos.

“I was less than thrilled to receive essentially three days to review everything,” Pontieri said. “I also have a concern about not at least narrowing down the field tonight. I don’t want some of these good folks to take positions elsewhere because we haven’t continued to make decisions.”




In any case the council could not settle on a date that would accommodate everyone, including Thomas. So it went ahead with a final vote to reduce a list of 10 candidates to five.

“These three or four or five folks we want to bring in, and they potentially, any one of them, could become your next city manager. So this is a kind of a critical step,” Thomas says. “You’ve got kind of one shot at how many you want to bring in and where you may be as a group. So I really do encourage you that if you’re not fully prepared to make that decision, that you just take a couple more days to make that work.” But the time crunch decided it.

The council members ranked the 10 names to emerge with the final five, and in some cases explained their rankings. Alves-Viveiros, for example, had received near-top rankings in a previous round, but fell somewhat this time, getting top marks from Pontieri and Miller and bottom marks from Gambaro and Norris.

“Sonia Alves-Vivieros, I have concerns,” Gambaro said. “There was an ethics complaint about her hiring her husband’s company for fireworks, Fourth of July issue there while she was the city manager. She also applied to be the city manager in Fernandina Beach, and then withdrew. She applied to be our city manager then withdrew, and now she applied again. So in my estimation, somebody that flip-flops all the time is not a leader.”




Thomas quickly corrected the information about Alves-Vivieros, the current city manager of Edison, N.J., a city the size of Palm Coast’s: it was an engineering contract on an issue several years old from which Alves-Vivieros recused herself. There were no penalties.

“She’s very cognizant and mindful of smart growth,” Pontieri said of a candidate who remains the one she champions. “Some of the things that she talked about were government transparency, being very communicative.” One of her leading accomplishments was reforming an animal shelter, an experience relevant to Palm Coast and Flagler County, and she is fluent in Portuguese, one of the main secondary languages in the city.

“That said, I do want this to be a unanimous decision,” Pontieri said, “so knowing those things if you mayor and you Councilman Gambaro are not confident that you could have an in-person interview with her, talk to her about her experience, and actually have that one-on-one, and be persuaded, then I don’t think there’s any point moving forward with her.”

But Alves-Vivieros’s name stayed.

“I’m more than willing to be convinced by someone in person,” Miller said. “That’s when you’re actually going to kind of get the measure of a real person is face to face.”

Pontieri also stressed the importance of getting a candidate who knows government. “I think it’s really important that we recognize a few things that we absolutely need in a city manager,” she said, “and that’s in-depth and intimate knowledge of government accounting, because it is a completely different type of accounting than any of us have ever dealt with.”

Final Short List of Applicants for Palm Coast City Manager, 2025

The Applicants	Current Location	Current Job	City Manager Experience	CG	TM	TP	MN	Score (Short-listed)
Anna Gibson	Palm Coast	Graduate Assistant, Gonzaga University	No	3	3	3	3	12
Lee Eureste	Green Cove Springs, Fla.	Not employed.	No	3	3	3	1	10
Scott Pillath	Palm Coast	Not clear.	No	3	3	3	2	11
Sonya Alves-Viveiros	Edison, N.J.	City manager, Edison, N.J. (pop. 106,000)	Yes	3	1	1	3	8 (Yes)
William Lee Smith	Port Wentworth, Ga.	Not employed. Was Chatham County manager until Sept. 2022.	Yes	1	1	1	1	4 (Yes)
Jerome (Jay) Wilverding	Stockton, Calif.	County administrator, Stockton County, Calif. (pop. 320,000)	No	3	2	3	3	11
Kara Boyles	Elkhart, Ind.	City engineer, South Bend, Ind.	No	3	3	3	2	11
Michael Reese	Maplewood, Mo.	Not employed. Was city manager, Maplewood, Mo. (pop. 8,000), until 2023.	Yes	3	2	1	3	9 (Yes)
Paul Trombino	Greeley, Colo.	Public works department director, Greeley, Colo.	No	1	1	2	3	7 (Yes)
Richard Hough	Fort Atkinson, Wis.	Public works director, Walworth County, Wis.	No	1	2	2	3	8 (Yes)

Note: The resumes are presented here as submitted to Strategic Government Resources, Palm Coast's recruiter for the city manager search, and turned over to the city and to FlaglerLive. The candidates' current location is based on the candidate's listing of his, her or their hometown. When not listed, the location defaults to the candidate's current job location.