In a Surprise, Committee Plans Full Rewrite of Palm Coast Charter, Not Just Amendments. Council May Differ.

Palm Coast’s five-member Charter Review Committee in an hour-long inaugural meeting Monday at City Hall appointed former County Commissioner Donald O’Brien its chair, heard a briefing on open records and the Sunshine law from its emphatic moderator, Georgette Dumont, and outlined its work plan for the coming months. 

There were surprises, both in the tightly controlled approach of the moderator and in the committee’s expected final product: it won’t be a set of amendments to the existing charter. It’ll one document–a whole new charter, making the process not so much a “review,” as billed by the council and the charter itself, but a rewrite. That was not the approach verbalized by the City Council when it launched the review. Nor was it a direction Interim City Manager Lauren Johnston provided the moderator, a city spokesperson said today. 

The existing charter calls for a “review”  at least every 10 years, not a wholesale rewrite. 

Absent specific amendments, it’s not clear how the proposed changes, if part of a new document, would be submitted to voters on the 2026 ballot, since the entire charter cannot be part of that ballot. The only other time the city conducted a charter review, in 2017, the result was three amendments, while the document itself remained mostly unchanged but for scrivener edits. 

The meeting was very lightly attended, in part by the usual conspiracy-minded gadflies who buzz at most City Council meetings, and in part by alternate committee members. An alternate would be appointed in case an existing member were to decide to quit. 

Dumont before the meeting made a point of introducing herself and briefly chatting with every person in the audience. For that, she only got a little grief from one of those audience members, who raised questions about Dumont’s pay and role in the public-comment segment at the end of the meeting. 

O’Brien, taking up a public role for the first time since he ended an eight-year tenure on the Flagler County Commission last November, said he likes to chair meetings with a light hand, favoring the informal. He doesn’t require anyone on the panel to ask for recognition before speaking, as some board chairs do. “If you want me to recognize you, I will, but I think we’re all adults here, and I think we’ll have good, formative ideas and discussion.”

So he may have been surprised by the unnecessarily rigid if not stifling format Dumont said the committee will follow(she did not propose it for discussion, but rather stated it as fact): “Each person will have an opportunity to speak once,” she said, “and then when everybody has had their opportunity to speak once, if they so wanted to, then a person can speak a second time. So this way, we can make sure that everybody is getting input.” 

The approach does not seem to lend itself to a discussion, placing Dumont in the role of a controller rather than a facilitator and making O’Brien’s role superfluous. 

“Now, if you all want to change these, this would be the time to say that you’d like to change the structure of the meetings,” Dumont had said by way of prefacing her meeting rules. But she’d said it quickly and immediately moved on to those rules, never returning to the option of alternate approaches–or even opening up her suggestions to discussion. The dogmatism was startling for a moderator so disarmingly congenial. 

Committee members asked more questions about public-comment segments than about their own deliberations–how much time to give speakers, whether to let them go over time, how much time to let meetings stretch (Michael Martin, one of the committee members, prefers a hard stop after three hours.) 

The panel is to take up each charter article in turn, systematically, focusing the discussion in segments, exclusively on the article in question. 

As Dumont provided a general overview of the charter, it became apparent that the committee would do a complete rewrite of the document rather than propose specific amendments. That, too, may be a surprise to City Council members. 

“We don’t take votes at the meetings, we do consensus,” Dumont said, “and the votes take place at the back end, once we go through the whole charter, and then you can see it in its totality, and it’s changed by change that gets voted on.” 

“That becomes one document to deliver to the city council?” O’Brien asked. 

“It’s a document as a whole,” Dumont said. It isn’t clear where she got that direction. It is not from the City Council. There were no further questions on that score. City Attorney Marcus Duffy, who was present, did not intervene. The City Council may have other ideas. 

Committee member Michael Martin was under a similar impression. “We’re going to look at the entire charter, and change things, or add things. It’s a comprehensive look at the entire charter,” Martin said in an interview this morning. He said it won’t be an entire rewrite, with some sections of the charter that may not need changing. But it’ll be a different document. “I actually want to add both a preamble and a citizens’ bill of rights.” He added, referring to city staff and his preference for frequent meetings starting in September, “I’m not sure they’re ready for me–I’m going to introduce some things.” He said he has 18 to 20 pages to introduce. 

But O’Brien today clarified that what he meant by “one document” was the document containing the proposed amendments, not the rewrite of the entire charter. “We would present one document with the amendments,” he said, seeing the committee’s mission as the council did. More than that would be “making of it more than what it is,” he said.

The committee’s work must be completed by March 31. Its recommended amendments are then sent to the City Council, which may accept the committee’s work in whole or in part or amend it. The resulting proposed amendments will be on the Nov. 3, 2026 election, though in what format (if it is a new document rather than specific amendments) remains unclear. 

There will be four town hall meetings, one in each of the city’s four voting districts in October and November, for the public to contribute its ideas. The committee will be present but will not conduct any business. “I would be at all these meetings, facilitating them, and I will be reiterating at the beginning of each meeting that this is about the charter,” Dumont said. “It is not about ordinances. It’s not about something that was passed that you didn’t like.”

Jeannie Duarte, a candidate for a City Council seat who earlier this month claimed the city’s utility was trending toward encouraging cannibalism, and whose court filings a circuit judge has called “nonsensical,” was among the handful of people who addressed the committee–o question Dumont’s pay and the timing of the review, which she said should not take place before 2028. She was incorrect: the charter provides for a review at least every 10 years, but the council may call for one earlier. 

Duarte returned to the charge at this morning’s council meeting. She claimed that “a little bird whispered in my ear that this moderator was hired for $250 per hour with a minimum of $12,000.” Though Duarte may, like St. Francis, speak bird language, a bird did not disclose the moderator’s contract. FlaglerLive last week published the moderator’s letter of introduction and terms, which call for a $250-an-hour rate plus mileage, and an estimated cost of $12,500 for the duration of the contract. 

“It’s really not necessarily customary to hire somebody, especially in this economic time of stress, to be a moderator for such a group,” Duarte claimed, inaccurately. She then went on to claim that the moderator “Works for a Jimison law firm, or something similar to that.” The reference was to Jimerson Birr, the law firm Council member Theresa Pontieri, whose seat Duarte is seeking, previously worked for before establishing her own firm with partners. 

Dumont does not work for Jimerson Birr. She is the director of the Master of Public Administration Program at the University of North Florida and runs her own consultancy, Civic Solutions (not to be confused with the Ladera Ranch, Calif., urban planning firm of the same name, or the Civic Solutions Group, a multi-state consultancy on public service.) 

The next-scheduled meeting has not been set. It will be a town hall meeting for public input.

The Charter Review Committee members and alternates are as follows, by Council member appointments:

• Mayor Mike Norris: Patrick Miller (alternate: Chantal Preuninger)
• Ty Miller: Michael Martin (alternate: Donna Stancel).
• Theresa Pontieri: Perry Mitrano (alternate: Donna McGevna).
• Dave Sullivan: Donald O’Brien (alternate: Karen Sousa).
• Charles Gambaro: Ramon Marrero (alternate: Greg Blose).