Double-Edged Resolution Calling on Mayor Norris To Do Better Falls Short at Flagler GOP After Sharp Debate

In a remarkable display of the polarizing effect Palm Coast Mayor Mike Norris is having within his own party–and the party’s own internal strains– the Flagler County Republican Party could not agree on a double-edged resolution about Norris at its monthly meeting last week. 

The voice vote was not a failure of support for Norris, exactly. It spoke more about the party, its fractured membership and its complicated relationship with Norris. 

The resolution in its earliest version was a statement of outright support. “In one of the revisions, it said the REC supports Mike Norris. The REC never voted on support of anything. So I asked them to remove that,”  REC Chair Perry Mitrano said. The party was not about to take that unquestioning position, as if Norris’s recent unraveling at the City Council had never happened. 

Rather, the two-part resolution as it was eventually crafted with the REC board’s input was about supporting the voters who put Norris in office and their message–the reason they put him in office–to “root out corruption,” in Mitrano’s words. “Continue your campaign promises, that’s what the resolution was,” he said. 

But in what some of the mayor’s more zealous supporters took as a poison pill, it also called on Norris to accept being censured by the Palm Coast City Council for his misconduct. In other words, to acknowledge his errors, live up to his responsibilities, and to be professional about it. 

“I think Mike could be a better mayor, and I think he really could do a good job,” Mitrano said. “He has some skills that he could utilize. It’s up to him to figure out whether or not he’s prepared and ready.”

The resolution was not written by the board, but revised with the board’s help, Mitrano said, particularly for the addition of the clause on Norris acknowledging the censure. “It’s not my resolution. It’s not my board’s resolution,” Mitrano said. “It was someone that wanted to support Mike, but at the same time say to him: please do better at being a mayor.”

The resolution was projected on a screen for the audience of around 80 to read and debate, and a debate followed. Six people in the room at the June 11 meeting were interviewed for this article, including four on the record, all agreeing, with minor differences, with Mitrano’s characterization of how the resolution came about and how the discussion and the vote unfolded–and how Norris conducted himself at the meeting. It was not elegant. 

(Norris texted FlaglerLive last Saturday, asking, “You want an interview?” FlaglerLive asked when. He never answered.)

Norris “just ranted for ever” against it, one person in the room said, describing how “everybody was really taken aback by it.” 

“It’s almost the same bit of information we get at every meeting, when he wants to argue his point,” Mitrano said of Norris. “It’s not about that. It’s more about he gets himself defensive, in a way that kind of doesn’t come out with an answer. It’s the only way I can put it.”

City Council member Dave Sullivan said Norris “didn’t want anything to do with the resolution.” And although Sullivan agreed with the spirit of the resolution–and has called on Norris to accept being censured and move on–he strongly disagreed with the REC getting involved in that sort of thing, calling “the whole idea of a resolution a mistake.” It’s not a good idea for the party to get involved with partisanship in matters already decided on a non-partisan board, he said, referring to the council’s actions. He was not alone. 

“I wish they hadn’t brought it up,” Ed Fuller, a party member who frequently addresses local government boards, said. “We don’t have to defend that guy. That’s his own responsibility.” Fuller had one suggestion for the group that night as he stood up to speak: Let’s pray for Mike. He needs our prayers. That’s our support.” 

Another person in the room described what followed as illustrating the rift within the membership, with a small, shrill minority on one side the person described as “emotionally irrational,” “very loud” and “off kilter,” and the larger membership as more measured. A very similar dynamic is on display at City Council meetings during public comment segments. 

The two groups don’t get along, the person said. As for Norris, the person described him as delivering “a typical Mike speech: ‘we’re going to get them,’ or whatever.” The mayor repeated conspiracies and criticisms of the city he serves, and staunchly opposed the resolution. He was not taking responsibility for the censure, he told the assembled. 

County Commissioner Leann Pennington confirmed that previous or current Democrats on the city council or at the city administration were discussed critically, but not just by Norris: a member of the REC board also brought up one such name in one was one of the more bizarre reflections of the paranoia Norris has projected, suggesting that the mere presence of Democrats, even in administrative roles, is anathema–a position largely rejected even within his own party. 

Norris has had a running animus for Jason DeLorenzo, the city’s chief of staff, who was one of the people Norris attempted to fire, violating the city charter. Norris named DeLorenzo that evening, and called city staff “thin-skinned millennials.” 

“We brought it to the body for a vote,” Mitrano said. “The body discussed it. It was a lively conversation. But at the end of the day, it was denied. That’s it.” It was a voice vote. “I did a verbal. And it was more No’s than there were Yes, so it was clearly more. It was clearly audible.” Had it been close, he said he’d have taken a vote by ballot. 

Mitrano said  “Most of the audience, some of the audience–I can’t say how many, really, I don’t know–wanted it to be in total support. But the resolution wasn’t in total support. It was in support of all the people that voted for him, and we’re expecting him to do the job, but we’re also expecting him to be a good mayor.”

In the end, members had more reasons to reject the resolution than to accept it. Norris and his partisans opposed lending any credence to the censure clause. Moderates like Fuller and Sullivan and others were opposed to that kind of resolution in principle. “It’s not our place” to be taking sides, one person said, happily joining Norris’s opposition to reach the same result. “Whatever his reasoning was,” that person said, “it was the right decision. It might’ve been not the right way to get there.” 

That does not necessarily mean a majority of the membership doesn’t want a more professional mayor: several–including a party member who now refuses to attend REC meetings, calling them “a circus” driven by Norris’s partisans–speak as Fuller does: “His behavior–I don’t think you ask an organization to support when your actions are questionable at best,” Fuller said. “That’s not what we’re there for.” 

Mitrano spoke as if regretting letting the resolution get as far as it did. “What I will never do again is bring a document to the board and ask for us to modify the document to include anything in a resolution,” Mitrano said.  “I’ll never, ever, ever take someone’s resolution and decide that we need to modify it. We talked to the person that wrote it and said that we think that the penalty that should be discussed is the censure, and we also want to remind them that he needs to act like a conservative Republican, and that goes for all elected officials.” 

But even then, Mitrano said, it had nothing to do with the mission of the REC, which he summed up as having three goals and nothing else: To register Republicans, to elect or re-elect Republicans, and to raise money for the party. The resolution, he said, failed on all three counts. 

But the party chairman maintains that, resolutions aside, the message to Norris stands: “I’ve already gone up to the podium at the meeting,” Mitrano said of city council meetings, “and say to him that we need you to act like a better mayor. I said it. I went up there to say it as the chairman of the party. So I’ve said it to him, and I’ve said it in public. So it’s not like it’s not been known.  There’s no reason why you can’t be the mayor. Do your job as the mayor.”