As Mayor Norris Misrepresents Ethics Complaint Dismissal, Council Focuses on Charter and Governor Action

The Florida Commission on Ethics tossed out a complaint filed by four Palm Coast City Council members against Mayor Mike Norris, citing “legal insufficiency.” Norris had said as much in a social media posting last Friday and at a town hall meeting Monday, misinterpreting the order as a victory. 

The Ethics Commission reached its determination in a closed session last Friday and announced it early this afternoon, after the order was signed. ” No factual investigation preceded the review, and therefore the Commission’s conclusions do not reflect on the accuracy of the allegations of the complaint,” the order states. 

To the council members, the ethics commission’s decision is one more reason to revise the city charter to add disciplinary clauses that would enable a council majority–or a supermajority–to deal with a rogue or derelict member. 

The order does not address the validity of the complaint. As with many such complaints, the commission determined it was not within its jurisdiction to investigate. The commission investigates conflicts of interest and misuses of public office for public gain, neither of which Norris is accused of. It does not investigate misconduct outside that scope, such as violations of local charters or hostile misconduct. 

The council filed the ethics complaint in May after it censured Norris in April for violating the city charter and other misconduct, making him the first elected official in the county ever censured. An independent investigation concluded that Norris attempted to fire the acting city manager and chief of staff in a closed-door meeting, a clear violation of the charter, demeaned staffers, and created a hostile working environment.

“The allegation fails to identify, in a factual, nonconclusory manner, any special private capacity benefit” that Norris may have drawn from seeking the resignations of the staffers, the order found. As for the misconduct allegations, “because they do not appear to be based on the Complainant’s personal knowledge or information other than hearsay, no investigation can be conducted concerning them,” the order found, in essence setting aside the sworn statements about the misconduct because they were not Pontieri’s own. It also found the misconduct unrelated to any personal gain on Norris’s part.

“The investigation results still stand; unfortunately our charter did not anticipate and provide a remedy for a member of the council knowingly violating the charter,” Council member Ty Miller said. “However, I accept the committee’s decision and look forward to getting back to the job at hand.”

Council member Theresa Pontieri said she will be pushing for charter amendments that address the “poor behavior” and “destructive behavior” of council members.  (Pontieri last week took issue with Norris claiming that Pontieri had herself filed the ethics complaint even though it was a collective effort. Norris was relying on the commission’s determination that since municipalities are not among the agencies that may file ethics complaints, “this complaint will be treated as having been filed by the Complainant in her private capacity.” As vice mayor, Pontieri was seen as the lead signatory.) 

Norris is taking the dismissal as a victory, now that its decision to file the complaint can be made to look like a strategic misstep. The outcome enables Norris, however inaccurately, to interpret it as an invalidation of the council’s charges against him, fueling his and his partisans’ contention that he is facing a cabal.

“That’s fine, but he’s been saying that about the judge and everybody else,” City Council member Dave Sullivan said, referring to the way Norris has disputed and ridiculed a circuit judge’s order against the lawsuit Norris filed to boot Council member Charles Gambaro off the council. In that decision, Circuit Judge Chris France found Norris to have had no standing to bring the lawsuit and the city to have acted within the charter in appointing Gambaro. 

Norris continues to claim Gambaro is an illegitimate member of the council, and has since associated Sullivan, who was also appointed, as part of the same cabal. 

“Facts are facts,” Sullivan said of the incidents that led to Norris’s censure and to the ethics complaint. “We had investigations done. We had people who said what they said under oath. There’s a lot of stuff in the public record. We’ve taken the action that seems appropriate at this point in time.” 

When Norris was censured for the second time, after he was found to have lied to the council about not being advised about his lack of standing to sue the city, the council followed up with a letter to Gov. Ron DeSantis, asking the governor to suspend Norris. It was another risky move. Should the governor decline to remove or discipline Norris–and he is much likelier to decline than to fulfill the council’s request–the damage to the council would be in proportion to Norris’s sense of restored legitimacy. 

“We’re going to get different views,” Sullivan said. “I don’t feel we’ve done anything wrong or improper and the things we’ve said in our ethics complaint and our letter to the governor are factual, backed up, and I think we’ve done the right thing.” Like Miller, he stressed that the ethics commission’s decision had nothing to do with the merits or the facts of the complaint. 

Norris did not miss the chance to crow even before the commission publicly announced the order. At his town hall on Monday, Norris held up what he said was a copy of the ethics complaint.

He claimed not to have received the mailing from the Ethics Commission until July 11, and blamed City Hall staff for sitting on it until then. He’d been on a long vacation in late May. “I didn’t receive this until 11 July, because apparently it got lost in the city,” Norris claimed to a crowd of over 150 people. “And it says right here, placed on your desk. ‘No one’s looked at it,’ after it had been opened and resealed.” There was laughter in the crowd. “So almost two months, when I got back I didn’t even know of an ethics complaint, I haven’t been notified.”

City Hall staff did not sit on it. It received the envelope on May 19. The envelope was opened, as is every piece of mail that comes to City Hall, for scanning, as a public record. When staff saw the word “confidential” written on a document, the contents were not scanned. The envelope was resealed. Kendra Ianotti, the executive assistant to the city manager, wrote a note on the envelope and stamped the date of receipt. 

“It was put in his mailbox with a note in the front of it on May 19th, and that’s stamped on the front of the envelope,” Brittany Kershaw, the city’s director of communications, said. Mark Strobridge, the sheriff’s chief of staff currently working as interim assistant city manager, said he saw Norris pick up the envelope “a couple of weeks ago,” and saw Ianotti’s note, but did not read the note. 

So while the mayor, for whatever reason, picked up the ethics commission’s envelope in July, he was falsely accusing city staff of not delivering the envelope until July 11, and falsely intimated that the package had been inappropriately opened. He did not explain mail protocol and public record scanning to the crowd, letting his audience laugh with the assumption that his mail had been snooped on, then misplaced until July 11. 

Norris’s version of events continues a pattern of mischaracterizations and what his colleagues have termed outright lies that have shadowed his pronouncements on and off the dais since his election last November. 

At the town hall, Norris said he had not had the chance to respond to the ethics complaint–“my 10-day limit to respond to the ethics complaint had come and gone,” he said. 

“Five days after I finally got it, I called up to the Ethics Commission. I said to the coordinator, I said, Hey, I said, I didn’t receive this ethics complaint,” Norris told the audience, the complaint in hand. “I’m like, I’m not going to change anything. My sworn statement’s in there. She said, Mike, don’t worry about it. It’s already done. Already done. It’s already been denied. Insufficient, legally. Insufficient. That would be made public on Wednesday. They will put that out. They’ve already tanked that.” 

He was right about that.