Update: The afternoon of Sept. 3, Palm Coast announced that the first community meeting, or town hall, on the charter review will take place on Sept. 29 at 6 p.m. at the Southern Recreation Center, 1290 Belle Terre Parkway. It will be the first of four, one in each district.
When the Palm Coast Charter Review Committee met for the first time on Aug. 25, the five committee members appointed by the Palm Coast City Council were surprised to hear from their moderator that they would not meet again to discuss the charter until over four months later, in January.
They would then meet six times and turn in their proposed charter revisions to the City Council by March 31, a hard deadline. The Council has to go through its own process with the proposed changes, or amendments, before voting to place them on the Nov. 3, 2026 ballot. That work has to be completed by late August.
“That means that basically, in two months, you’re expecting a committee to make changes and agree on all of the changes to our city constitution,” Council member Theresa Pontieri said. “I don’t think that’s acceptable.”
Pontieri was responding to Michael Martin, one of the five appointees, who addressed the council Tuesday evening and asked that the committee get started this month. “I want to make sure that everybody on the committee has a chance to speak their opinion,” Martin said. “I want to make sure that we listen to the public and we take their ideas and include [them] in our discussions, so we can give you the best report.”
Some of the members were even surprised that they needed a moderator. They appointed Donald O’Brien, the former county commissioner, chair. O’Brien has chaired public panels before, ably and with a light hand, favoring informality and discussion over rigid rules and ceremony. The approach moderator Georgette Dumont was proposing sounded more formal, verging on the stifling.
Dumont said the process would start with two community town halls in October, two in November, with no meetings in December due to the holidays. It wasn’t clear why there would be no meeting in September.
“It’s our understanding that the consultant is going to go out and get data from the community meetings,” Interim City Manager Lauren Johnston said, “hearing firsthand from our residents about what they would like to see changed in the charter, and then bring that back to the committee so that the committee could form what needs to be changed in the charter.”
That approach excluded the charter committee itself as a source of ideas and proposals, making it purely reactive to whatever the town hall meetings might produce. But committee members see themselves as more than stenographers of the public will. And judging from the last time the city conducted a charter review, in 2017 when the five members of the City Council sat as the review committee), and from last week’s inaugural meeting, the town halls drew very little attendance, some of it more cranky than thoughtful.
Martin took his seat on the committee armed with reams of prepared documents, or charter rewrites, he wants to discuss with his colleagues. He sees that work as necessary, time-consuming, and involving the committee itself, in conjunction with the public’s ideas, not to the exclusion of either. He sees no reason why the town halls and the committee’s meetings could not happen in the same months.
The city clerk, Kaley Cook, is working on scheduling the town halls “as early as starting this month,” Johnston said. But not the committee meetings. Johnston said the moderator settled on that process as “the most impactful.”
Pontieri said the two approaches can happen simultaneously, “with our appointed members that we as council who are elected, decided would be best to make these decisions for our city, meet and talk about the changes they would like to propose, and then perhaps those can be collated.” She agreed with Martin: the meetings must start sooner, saying the charter has “a lot of issues.” She asked for the committee meetings to start in October.
Mayor Mike Norris noted that O’Brien as chair can “work it out” with Cook. When he asked whether the committee had been given a timeline, Marcus Duffy, the city attorney who attended the inaugural charter review meeting, said that “the only feedback that was provided to the consultants was that, Hey, we should maybe have meetings in December.”
In fact, O’Brien had proposed moving the process up to start in September to “buy some time on the back end,” just as Martin had wondered “why we we have to wait until October, November, to do the town hall meetings. Why can’t we do them starting next month?”
“That was just a time plan that was put out there,” Duffy told him at that meeting. “We didn’t know you guys’ schedules. We didn’t want to start scheduling stuff without knowing what you are able to do. So it’s up to you as a committee to decide what you like to do, but that was just kind of a shell plan.” He said the town hall meetings could be held earlier than October as long as public buildings were available for them.
Had it been left up to the committee, the schedule would have been different than what it was tasked with, since Dumont was setting out that schedule rather than soliciting the committee’s wishes.
With such a short timeline, council members themselves were showing some nervousness about the committee being able to do all its work with imposed constrained. “We’re going to have a lot of proposed changes that have to be workshopped,” Council member Ty Miller said. “I agree with pushing it forward. They can work in parallel with the community outreach to get the feedback from the residents and still be meeting to kind of storm through that process of what changes.”
The mayor saw it as clearly: start now, he said. “They should lean as far forward as possible, and start getting that public input and start hitting it hard, because we’re right around the corner from election year,” Norris said. “There’s a lot of work. It’s got to be done, and it’s got to come to us. So we have a lot of work to do.”
And it’s “too important a process to rush like that,” Pontieri said.
Concerned Voter says
Well, it could be that by late October the other three quarters of Palm Coast’s population finally shows up… perhaps the most important group to these local Republicans.
Just hope some of these folks have been paying attention and know what’s at stake here. This doesn’t seem like a case of business as usual.
Doubt it.
Just an opinion.