Overcoming numerous unsubstantiated accusations about the Flagler County Cultural Council by Mayor Mike Norris, the Palm Coast City Council on Tuesday appeared ready to let the volunteer organization continue administering the city’s $100,000 cultural grants program for another year. It did so in the wake of friction between the City Council and FC3, as the cultural organization refers to itself. The word “probation” was never mentioned. The City Council’s posture implied it.
“I support them administering these grants for at least one more year,” Council member Theresa Pontieri, who represents the city on the FC3 board, said. “And let’s see. Hopefully, these issues will not repeat themselves.”
The City Council agreed to the extension by consensus, and is expected to formalize the decision by vote at a meeting later this month.
FC3 is a local culture-coordinating and advocacy non-profit. It is about three years old, and doesn’t have much work to its credit yet, its one-year-old agreement with the city aside. FC3’s decision in June not to award a grant to the Palm Coast Historical Society triggered sharp dissatisfaction on the City Council, including from Pontieri. It caused internal conflict at FC3, including the trespassing of one of its own members. And it led to FC3 being required to operate under the sunshine law–meaning that it would thenceforth have to operate in the open, like a government board–which it had not done previously, though through no fault of its own. (See: “How Peter Johnson’s ‘Bullshit’ Trespass Led to Sunshine on FC3 Cultural Board and Its Accountability to Palm Coast.”)
“It’s safe to say we had a few hiccups. But I also understand that FC3 has made some stark effort to improve the process, improve the program,” Pontieri said.
The council contracted with FC3 last Oct. 1, offloading management of the cultural grants to FC3 because the process was very time-consuming for city staff. The annual process distributes grants of several thousand dollars each to a dozen or more cultural, performing or educational non-profit organizations such as City Repertory Theatre, the Palm Coast Choral Society the Flagler County Historical Society.
Julia Truilo, FC3’s treasurer, described the extensive process to the council (“200 free hours of service in the last year”) and previewed the next round, whose grant application window opened on July 14.
“I don’t think there’s anything that we have done aside from the argument–the personal arguments–that you referred to that has been in any way unprofessional or wrong,” Truilo told the council.
Though the council was discussing its contract with FC3, Truilo was not allowed to address the council as anyone other than a member of the public limited to three minutes, which would never happen with, say, a consultant, an engineer or an executive whose agenda item was being presented to the council. At the same meeting, for instance, a representative of USTA Florida who was merely seeking a management agreement with the city was granted unlimited time to present.
Truilo offered to answer questions. Norris moved on to the next speaker–Raesa Pabst, president of the Palm Coast Historical Society, who criticized the FC3 board president.
“This is an organization that was supposed to be writing grants for our community and creating income for our community with the nonprofits,” Pabst said. “They have yet to do one grant, get one grant for Flagler County or for Palm Coast, for anything. So my suggestion to you is, why are we instilling in them this kind of $100,000 of taxpayers money?” Pabst claimed the City Council did not defend her after FC3 gave her “two black eyes,” a claim Pontieri rejected, citing the statements she made in Pabst’s defense at a June council meeting.
As with all recommendations from advisory boards, the council retains the authority to reject or modify any grant recommended by FC3, reject a recommendation or add a grant FC3 did not recommend. In sum, “the city retains complete control and final decision-making authority over all financial aspects of the grant program,” Parks and Recreation Director James Hirst said.
The City Council got over the stumbles with the organization. Norris did not. He prefaced his remarks by saying they’d be “stark.” It was an understatement.
“I think FC3 has been a complete failure for the city of Palm Coast,” he said. “I have never seen hyper partisanship and pettiness on a non-partisan organization that can’t follow simple Roberts Rules, and I will not support renewing this contract at all.” Roberts Rules of Order are customarily the handbook of meeting procedures.
Norris wanted the cultural grant process to be handled by “our bureaucrats in the city.” He called FC3 “partisan, petty hacks,” repeated the accusation, calling FC3 “strictly partisan,” but did not specify. He was also critical of city grant money being awarded to the Flagler County Historical Society.
“The monies and revenues that are in our city should be for activities and organizations within our city,” the mayor said. But the council had agreed to expand grants to organizations beyond city limits, as had been the case many years ago, when the city awarded grants to the Flagler Playhouse, for example. As Pontieri noted, Norris could have brought up those issues when the council approved the previous round of grants. He did not.
He then claimed, somewhat inaccurately, that “we have people in the TDC that are part of the FC3, which there should be no blending of those two organizations.”
The Tourist Development Council is a County Commission-appointed advisory board that oversees the county’s roughly $4.3 million annual tax revenue from the tourism sales surtax, a 5 percent surtax charged on hotel, motel and other short-term rental bills. None of the FC3 board members serves on the TDC.
Five non-voting members of FC3 are each a local government elected representatives, including Council member Theresa Pontieri, and some of them may find themselves serving on the TDC, where they would have a vote, but at the moment none do, with Pontieri’s exception. Her decision to serve on FC3 and TDC was by collective agreement of the council when it parceled out committee and advisory board assignments at the beginning of the year, with Norris’s agreement. Norris has since begged off all such assignments except for one.
The liaison to the FC33 board is Debra Morgan, who is a member of the paid staff of the county’s tourism bureau, which does work with TDC in an administrative capacity. TDC has also granted money to FC3. Morgan, as a county employee, is the liaison because the County Commission designated FC3 as the county’s Local Arts Agency, enabling it to draw down grants more effectively. She served as a voting member of the Palm Coast grants ranking process.
Ironically, Palm Coast’s $100,000 grant is the largest that FC3 manages in any way. Other than TDC money and some revenue from license plate proceeds, it has not been successful at drawing down grants otherwise, or doing much more than the odd seasonal festival or dropping an artistic turtle here and there: its promise is still in embryo.
FC3 holds its meetings at the tourism bureau’s offices at the airport. So while there’s no question that FC3 and the tourism bureau have administrative overlap, the two boards’ voting members do not. One board barely knows or much cares what the other is doing. (See the list of FC3 board members below.)
Norris also claimed, without elaborating, that “you’ve got one member of that board is facing a defamation lawsuit for the things that that’s happened in the past six months.” Nancy Crouch, the FC3 board chair, confirmed what Jay Scherr, the vice chair, said in an email: “I’m not aware of anyone facing a defamation lawsuit, nor do I know what he’s referring to.” A check of the Flagler County court docket reveals no such filings involving any of the FC3 board members.
Pontieri pushed back against the mayor’s repeated accusations as unfair. “I don’t know why you continue to accuse them of engaging in partisan politics,” she said. “We never talk about politics during those meetings. Perhaps you know something I don’t, but at the end of the day, I think we have a group that has volunteered to take a pretty heavy lift from city staff, which we are constantly engaging in ways to try to save monies be more efficient.”
Pontieri also defended the importance of the tourism board, which Norris, in another howler, had said that “as far as I’m concerned, TDC should go away. We should not have a TDC. All that money that goes to TDC should be strictly allocated for the beaches.”
TDCs are established under Florida law to advise county commissions on how to spend tourism tax dollars. TDC appointments are defined by state law. A portion of TDC revenue goes to beach protection. The rest goes to promoting the county’s tourism and offering grants to local governments for tourism-related capital projects.
The FC3 Board:
Nancy Crouch, Chair
Jay Scherr, Vice Chair
Danielle Anderson, Secretary
Julia Truilo, Treasurer
Greg Feldman
Denise Garcia
Lawson Glasergreen
Peter Johnson
Ex-Officio:
TDC Liaison: Debra Morgan
Government representatives:
Palm Coast: Teresa Pontieri
Flagler County: Pam Richardson
Flagler Beach: Patti King
Bunnell: Catherine Robinson (joining)
Flagler County (alternate): Leann Pennington
Leave a Reply