At Residents’ Meeting Over F-Section Footpath, A Lot of Venting, and Hope for More Sustained Organizing

A planned 10-foot-wide path through the F Section, toward Matanzas High School, is neither long nor winding. At least not geographically. But the plan has turned into the Palm Coast City Council’s thorniest project of the year, and it’s still growing thorns, if not potentially spawning opposition organized with broader ends in mind.

Even though the council has voted to approve the path twice in two weeks this month, the plan continues to provoke recrimination from residents and counter-plans to still attempt to sway the council.

The day after the Palm Coast City Council unanimously voted to approve the path, under high-power Florida Power and Light lines, Matanzas High School students and Palm Coast government officials presented the plan to an audience of about 75 at the high school’s Pirates Theater. That was at the beginning of the month. The plan drew bitter criticism from residents, who recalled how they had thwarted the plan for that very path in 2008, but have been denied a sidewalk along Old Kings in the same area, which would accomplish the same goal.

The meeting led two council members–Heidi Shipley and Steve Nobile–to reverse course and attempt to rethink the plan. They didn’t want to kill it, but to urge the city to more seriously study the alternative of a sidewalk along Old Kings Road instead. They succeeded in restarting a conversation. City Manager Jim Landon provided two potential costs for that alternative path. But within two weeks of the Matanzas meeting the council again voted to deny halting work on the FPL path. The vote this time was 3-2.

That left residents wondering what to do next.

Tonight’s meeting was the first answer, though after its organizers framed the issue and invited participants to speak–there were about 30 people–the meeting quickly turned into more of a town-hall style grilling of Nobile, who had taken the mic to explain how the money to widen Old Kings Road will be secured, and why it’s taking so long. But the questions kept coming, and at times grew more confrontational–not against Nobile, but against council members who had voted for the FPL path. Nobile ended up playing defense for his council, careful not to second guess the vote or to fall to decisively on one side or the other of the issue, and he took pains to defend the council when residents went as far as criticizing the council for not caring about safety.

“I will not let you say that about those people. They are not not concerned,” Nobile said. “My colleagues on the council made their decision, they made their decision from their perspective, they’re not bad people, they’re not trying to hurt you.”

He added later: “I’m not trying to push a position here. I’m trying to push participation. The more we get engaged with government, the more we understand, and the more we understand, the more they start listening to us.” (Shipley also attended the meeting.)

But Nobile also clarified: “I’m not arguing my colleagues’ decision. I’m arguing the information we got to make that decision.” That information, Nobile said, was incomplete, because it did not include the path’s costs for lights and possibly for security cameras–costs that presumably could raise the price of the path to the point of making the cost of a temporary Old Kings Road sidewalk more feasible, even if it is to be torn up when Old Kings Road is widened. Nobile was also critical of the timing of the original Matanzas meeting. “It’s not the decision, it’s the process that got us to the decision,” he said, a criticism of the city administration’s handling of that process.

He was particularly critical of what appeared to have been a deceptive way to list the path’s construction under the more general annual street-resurfacing plan across the city, which did not make it clear that the path was neither a street nor a resurfacing project, but rather a resumption of the work halted in 2008.

Much of this evening’s meeting was a chance to vent, particularly about fears that the new path will not be safe but will rather be a magnet for trouble or bullying. But there were few clear answers or options to go forward on alternatives, including another meeting on the issue.

“In my mind we live in America, we live in a place of opportunity, of hope, of being able to be flexible,” said Jacqui Keough, one of the meeting’s organizers. “You can’t just accept things and say, hey, c’est la vie.” She added: “what is the point of keeping the city clean and beautiful if the residents are not happy, if the residents are not safe, if the residents are moving because they say hey, I can’t deal with this anymore.”

Some of the residents in the audience this evening wanted a special meeting of the council–or a revival of the matter for a third time. Nobile said it’s unlikely that the council would agree. But that became the most concrete idea the audience could seize on, though Keough, looking beyond the path issue, several times attempted to organize the group for what she described as grass-roots efforts beyond the FPL matter, “in all sections of the city.”

Most people in the audience filled out her sign-up sheet as Nobile continued to explain, citizens’ academy-style, how the group could most effectively make its case to the council. “We need a lobbyists, in other words,” someone in the audience said.

“It’s got to be a concerted effort. You can’t have 10 different efforts,” Nobile said. “Get engaged and push the agenda. Push it.” But soon Nobile lost patience for the grilling the pelting of questions and critical comments continued and voices, his among them, rose. Keough then took back the mic to encourage the audience to channel energies toward better organization. “Let’s try to turn it into our advantage, turn it into a plan, turn it into a cause, turn it into an effort where we’re not just yelling into the wind,” she said. It’s how grass roots groups organize. “This is not the last meeting. This is the first. The first of many,” she added.

If that plan grows legs, it may spell political rouble for the council. But absent driving forces and causes, sustainable community organizing is notoriously ephemeral.

“We will email you our plan and what we think we can do,” Keough told the audience as the meeting was breaking up. The only certainty was that all present still do not want the FPL Path.