‘I Don’t Want to Wrestle With Pigs’: Palm Coast Rejects Danko Push to Lock City Into $2.3 Million Budget Cut

Overcoming what Council member Nick Klufas called fellow Councilman Ed Danko’s “pontification,” the Palm Coast City Council today rebuffed an attempt by Danko to remove $2.3 million from the city’s proposed budget and adopted instead a slightly reduced tax rate for next year while preserving funding for the addition of nine new sheriff’s deputies and three new firefighter-paramedics.

But it took a long discussion even after it was clear that four of the five council members were not interested in giving in to Danko’s pressure.




“I don’t understand why we give the platform to this kind of discussion,” Council member Nick Klufas said. “I think we could have had this over probably about 30 minutes ago. I don’t want to pontificate. But I don’t want to wrestle with pigs because at some point, you realize that the pigs like to wrestle in the mud and everybody gets dirty when we do it. So I don’t know why we’re having this type of discussion.”

Danko had sought to reduce the property tax to the “rolled-back” rate, forcing the city to take in only as much money as it took in last year, excluding revenue from new construction, thus forcing it to forego the additional $2.3 million generated from keeping the tax rate the same. The extra revenue is generated from rising property values.

Under a codified definition of Florida law that would not pass muster in a dictionary, if a government generates more money year over year, it rates as a tax increase, even when tax rates don’t rise. Palm Coast is proposing to reduce its property tax by a few fractions, but the rate would still be above the rolled-back rate and so, according to Florida law, that would count as a small tax increase. (See: “What is the Roll-Back Rate in Property Taxes?“)

The proposed rate a 4-1 majority of the council voted for today–$4.2154 per $1,000 in taxable value, or the equivalent of $843 for a $250,000 house with a $50,000 homestead exemption–is slightly lower than the existing $4.2570. Either way, homesteaded property owners would barely see a change, and would continue to benefit from lower tax bills, when adjusted for inflation.




The administration proposed three options. One continued at the same tax rate, which would fund the budget the administration presented, with an additional $615,000 available to the council to fund positions the administration is asking for. A second option would use that $615,000 to reduce the tax rate accordingly, eliminating the possibility of funding the additional positions. A third option (the one adopted) was to reduce the property tax slightly, but leaving $390,000 to pay for additional positions (a code enforcement officer, an IT programmer, an equipment operator).

It’s not final: this is only the proposed rate beyond which the council may not go once it sets the final property tax rate for next year, in September. But it may go below the rate between now and then, and in fact both Council members Theresa Pontieri and Mayor David Alfin are leaving that possibility open.

Danko wasn’t satisfied, making a motion for the full rollback now, which would have foreclosed on any flexibility but further down. He’s running for a County Commission seat, he’s staked much of his message on lower taxes, and blusters that message every chance he gets, turning budget discussions into campaign speeches–as he did today on several occasions.

“We do the full millage rate rollback but we do not touch public safety,” he said. “We find the other places where cuts need to be made. And that basically puts a little more work on our staff and our city manager to work a little harder, but that’s what they get paid to do. I’m sure they can find the cuts that we need. We found them last year. I’m sure we can find them this year.” Danko has refused to offer suggestions for getting at a $2 million reduction, laying that responsibility on the city manager.




Going to rollback would mean that a $250,000 property with a $50,000 homestead exemption would save $51 for the year. It would also remove $2.3 million from the city’s budget. Compounded with last year, when the city went to rollback, it would be a total of $6 million removed from revenue in two years. (This year, the increase for fire and police budgets alone equal $2.9 million.)

“I’m not going to vote for the full rollback today. But I do think the discussion is worthy of having,” Pontieri said, after seconding the motion only for discussion. She said the council was not unmindful of taxpayers, noting that a few months ago the council stopped a utility rate increase for that reason. Pontieri was in favor of the third option, reducing the property tax slightly bu still funding some of the administration’s requested new positions.

Directing her comment at Danko, she said: “It’s very easy to say, ‘I want full rollback because our taxpayers are hurting, but I’m not going to look at ways to save millions of dollars.'”

“I’m the one that actually made that motion for rollback last year, so I don’t disagree with the rollback concept,” Alfin said, though in actuality his motion was to be the first of two steps: his second step was to propose a utility tax that would have made up the lost revenue, which, with Danko leading the charge, didn’t fly. So the city was left with $2.7 million less than the the budget the administration had prepared. This time Alfin was more cautious, though he’s leaving the way open for still going to rollback by September.

To an exasperated Klufas, Danko pressed his point. “The bottom line is we set the expectation with the millage rate that we approve, that determines the amount of funds, but we can’t micromanage every single department. It’s why we have a CEO, that’s why the CEO has VPs and department heads,” Danko said. “I think our goal is again, to set the expectation just like any board of directors in any corporation in America would do. And they would say to their CEO and their VPs, you get X number of dollars today, and now you have the responsibility of determining where those needs are.”




Of course, the city does not have a CEO, nor does it have vice presidents, and Palm Coast is not a company. It’s not a business, though a few of its departments–utilities, stormwater–are expected to operate like a business. Nor is it in business to make money. That applies even to the departments that are operated like a business. It has a city manager responsible for managing public funds under the oversight of a board representing the public whose tax revenue is being spent–not made. There are no dividends other than the services and quality of life residents expect.

The council isn’t micromanaging by giving that direction, but in this case it let Danko get away with conflating direction with micromanagement, thus ceding him the rhetorical advantage, however foreign from reality it happens to be. Elected officials at times use the CEO rhetoric either to sound like business-minded board members or, as in Danko’s case, for political reasons tied to his approach on the setting of the property tax rate at rollback. He defends that setting by arguing that the city manager, like a CEO, ought to be given an overarching directive–a tax rate–within which the rest is up to her. It resonates with simplistic views of government that dispense with most of government’s responsibilities in favor of a top-down corporatist view.

Even that assumption on Danko’s part is untenable. Without policy guidance that calibrates one department’s priorities over another, a city manager could then decide, say, to fund code enforcement at the expense of parks and recreation, or the fire department at the expense of cops, and so on. The council doesn’t let that happen. It has its “Strategic Action Plan,” for example (which Danko paradoxically sees as appropriate). It accomplishes much of that calibration and is nothing if not a measure of managing government on the public’s behalf.

Alfin briefly sought to school Danko, who’s never served on a public policy board before his election to the council. “I will just say that the number of board meetings that I’ve attended over my 50 years that you do need to have some feeling for the underlying assumptions,” Alfin told him. “You can throw caution to the wind and say you have a city manager. Go do it. I’m not sure I’m comfortable with that.”

Pontieri was more direct: “What’s important is that we set the policy as council members. So everything that staff does should be furthering our policies in some way, shape or form,” she said, referring specifically to certain positions the administration was seeking to fund, and was asking the council to fund. That’s not micromanaging, Pontieri said. “In my mind when I look at how we’re spending our money, I think that we need to be spending it only if it’s directly connected to what we as elected officials by our residents said we want our policies to be, because in effect that puts the power in the hands of the residents because they elected us to set policies, and then we are directly funding those policies.”

Pontieri had seconded Danko’s motion for discussion only, but withdrew it. He did not get another second, and his motion died, enabling the council to adopt the more modest tax rate reduction.