Despite Extension, City Manager Opening Draws Just 38 Applicants; Only 1 Managed a City of Palm Coast’s Size

Only 38 candidates have applied to be Palm Coast’s next city manager. Less than half the applicants (17) have previous city manager experience. Only a handful of those have managed a city with more than 50,000 people. Among the three, only one has managed a city with a population close to Palm Coast’s 107,000 (the current city manager of Edison, N.J.)

The general quality of applicants is not stellar: top-flight candidates are not beating down the city’s door. If the council is to look for candidates with previous city-manager experience, it will for the most part have to take a chance on candidates hoping to leap from smaller managerial jobs into the city’s bigger job. The council would take an even bigger chance if it were to give the job to someone with no city management experience: Flagler Beach tried the approach twice in the past decade and regretted it.




The number of applicants is 16 fewer than when the city conducted a search with the same recruiting firm in 2019-19, when it drew 54 applicants (and ended up hiring Matt Morton), and 53 fewer than when its own administration conducted a search in 2021. That search was flawed as most applicants thought the city was looking for a “manager,” not a “city manager.” The council junked it and named Denise Bevan its permanent manager.

Bevan was fired last March, prompting the new search. Lauren Johnston has been acting city manager since. She has no interest in a permanent appointment. She has not applied for it. Nor has anyone from within the city–or from any local government. The dearth of applicants may reflect some hesitancy among top-flight candidates to apply for a job in a city with an unpredictable city council, though four of the five members of the council are new, and the veteran on the panel, Theresa Pontieri, had opposed firing Bevan.

Nine applicants are applying from Florida, also an unusually low number, three of them from Palm Coast, including Jim Manfre, an attorney and the former Flagler County sheriff who has repeatedly applied to be manager in local cities, with no success. The other Palm Coast applicants are Anna Gibson, who describes herself as “a proud resident of Palm Coast for over ten years” and a n IT professional, and Morris Stowers, who runs his own insurance company and bought a house in palm Coast last year, moving from South Florida. Chris Edwards of Daytona Bach, the former economic development director and community redevelopment agency director for New Smyrna Beach, is also applying.




The opening drew a few odd choices–a middle school teacher, a police commander, an elections office worker, an accounting clerk, and a construction manager. Only eight applicants are women. Most who have managed cities have down so in small towns or townships. Several are currently unemployed after resigning or getting fired. City and county managers have notoriously brief tenures of a few years since they are at mercy of the political make-up of elected boards, and tenures often end simply because a manager no longer clicks with a new majority. In some cases of course, the separation goes beyond politics.

Applicant Patrick Comiskey had been the city manager of Mount Dora (population: 18,000) from 2021 to January 2024 when he was suspended then fired after an internal investigation blistered his tenure there. The investigation cited numerous city policy violations, including malfeasance and neglect of duty–and recommended his firing.

Sharon Kraynik, Mount Dora’s former human resources director (she had resigned a year before he was fired), wrote in a memo about the investigation: “I felt that this report was riff with whining, either misunderstanding or all out lies, and a lot of hearsay. This is coupled with the investigator interjecting her own opinions and asking leading questions. I found numerous untruths in the report and incidents where a situation was taken out of context and made into something it was not.” Comiskey doesn’t mention the controversy in his introductory letter or his resume, but includes the Kraynik and other memos or letters that she some light on it, from his perspective.




Applicant Scott Moye had been the county manager in Ware, Ga. (pop. 36,000) when, according to a local press report, he “abruptly resigned October 14 behind a closed-door, executive session of the commission that lasted nearly three hours. Neither Moye nor commissioners commented on the departure, which was effective immediately. Moye remained, on the payroll until December 31.” Georgia does not have Florida’s open-meeting and open record laws, which would prohibit closed door meetings involving personnel issues or the non-disclosure of decisions to fire or allow a top executive to resign.

Strategic Government Resources, the Texas-based company conducing the search on Palm Coast’s behalf, solicited the candidates in December. The application window was to close on Dec. 29. Apparently without the City Council’s knowledge or approval, SGR–which did not provide the applications until Wednesday, though they had been requested since early January–opted to extend the application window on its own.

“SGR extended the application deadline for the position in response to a number of prospective candidates that we were in contact with around the holidays to enable them to finalize their application materials,” SGR’s Doug Thomas wrote the city manager and the human resources director on Jan. 15, “and I still have one candidate that I am awaiting feedback from later today about his possible interest in the opportunity. Given that we ended up rescheduling the Applicant Triage/Selection of Semifinalists meeting with the Mayor & City Council to January 28th, we believe it was in the best interest of the City to continue to allow as many candidates who we had been in contact with to apply for the position leading up to that meeting. If SGR receives an additional application, we will send that information to you separately.”

The council is expected to draw up a short list at that Jan. 28 workshop. The applicant list is below, with each resume linked from the applicant’s name.

Applicants for Palm Coast City Manager, 2025

The Applicants	Current Location	Current Job	City Manager Experience
Abby O'Neill	Cleveland, Ohio	Human Capital Systems Director, Dodeca Systems Consulting	No
Adam Winston	Cleveland, Ohio	VP of governmental affairs, MetroHealth Systems, Ohio	No
Andrew (Drew) Willison	Washington, D.C.	Attorney, Oldaker & Willison	No
Anna Gibson	Palm Coast	Graduate Assistant, Gonzaga University	No
Antonius Barnes	Lynn Haven, Fla.	Middle school teacher	No
Bradley (Brad) Gotshall	Lower Paxton, Pa.	Township manager, Lower Paxton (pop. 53,000)	Yes
Brian Bulthuis	Clermont, Fla.	Not employed. Was Cleremont, Fla., city manager until December 2024.	Yes
Brian Geoghegan	Naples, Fla.	Public safety manager, North Naples Hospital	Yes
Cesar Garcia	La Marque, Texas	City manager, La Marque, Texas (pop. 19,600)	Yes
Christopher (Chris) Edwards	Daytona Beach	Not employed. Was New Smyrna Beach's economic development director until 2024.	No
Cynthia (Cindy) Raleigh	Palacios, Texas	City manager, Palacios, Texas (pop. 4,374)	Yes
Daniel (Danny) Coviello	Landsdale, Pa.	CEO, Goliath Engineering Technology	No
Darren Coldwell	Page, Arizona	City manager, Page, Arizona (pop. 7,300)	No
David (Dave) Smolenski	Venice, Fla.	Administrative commander, Venice Police Department	No
David Strahl	Crest Hill, Ill.	Interim human resources manager, City of Crest Hill (pop. 21,000)	Yes
Denise Fitzgerald	Pittsburgh	Township Manager, Scott Township, Pa. (pop. 17,700)	Yes
Dicran (Rick) Keuroglian III	Georgetown, Colo.	Not employed. Was town administrator, Georgetown, Colo., until Nov. 2024 (pop. 1,260)	Yes
James (Jim) Manfre	Palm Coast	Attorney in private practice	No
Jerome (Jay) Wilverding	Stockton, Calif.	County administrator, Stockton County, Calif. (pop. 320,000)	No
John Vonglis	New Rochelle, N.Y.	Founder and chair, NANO Nuclear Energy (since December 2024)	No
Kara Boyles	Elkhart, Ind.	City engineer, South Bend, Ind.	No
Matthew (Matt) Rebuck	Whispering Pines, N.C.	Director, North Carolina Department of Public Safety Training Academy	No
Melissa Davis	Atlanta, Ga.	Interim deputy commissioner, Atlanta Department of Public Works	No
Michael Reese	Maplewood, Mo.	Not employed. Was city manager, Maplewood, Mo. (pop. 8,000), until 2023.	Yes
Mitchel (Mitch) Hammes	Colorado Springs, Colo.	Voter Services Manager, Arapahoe County, Colo.	No
Morris Stowers	Palm Coast	Founder and CEO of Dolphin Direct Insurance.	No
Patrick Comiskey	Mount Dora, Fla.	Not employed. Was city manager of Mount Dora, Fla. until Jan. 2024.	Yes
Patrick Jordan	Clarksville, Mich.	County administrator, Ionia County, Mich. (pop. 66,000)	Yes
Paul Trombino	Greeley, Colo.	Public works department director, Greeley, Colo.	No
Redmond Jones II	Iowa City, Iowa	Not employed. Was Deputy city manager in Iowa City from 2021 to 2024.	Yes
Richard Hough	Fort Atkinson, Wis.	Public works director, Walworth County, Wis.	No
Robert (Rob) Boswell	Manor, Pa.	Accounting clerk, North Huntington Township, Pa.	No
Robert Hemminger	Iowa Colony, Texas	City manager, Iowa Colony, Texas (pop. 15,000)	Yes
Ryan Sherman	Rochester, N.Y.	Construction manager	No
Scott Moye	Waycross, Ga.	Not employed. Was County manager, Ware County, Ga. until October 2024.	Yes
Sonya Alves-Viveiros	Edison, N.J.	City manager, Edison, N.J. (pop. 106,000)	Yes
Tracy Roles	Ada, Okla.	City manager, Ada, Okla. (pop. 16,600)	Yes
William (Bill) Lawrence	Leesburg, Fla.	Town manager, Lady Lake, Fla.	Yes

Note: The resumes are presented here as submitted to Strategic Government Resources, Palm Coast's recruiter for the city manager search, and turned over to the city and to FlaglerLive. The candidates' current location is based on the candidate's listing of his, her or their hometown. When not listed, the location defaults to the candidate's current job location.