“Coward.” “Bully.” “Dictator.” “Abysmal.” “Shocking.” “Conspiracist.” “Ego.” “inferiority complex.” “An embarrassment.”
Those are some of the terms Palm Coast City Council members used today to describe their colleague, Mayor Mike Norris, just before a pair of unanimous votes extraordinary for their reach and intent–one to formally censure him and express the council’s no-confidence in him, one to forward a formal complaint to the Florida Commission on Ethics. If sustained, the council intends the complaint to be the precursor of a request to Gov. Ron DeSantis to remove Norris from office.
Whatever the outcome at the Ethics Commission, it is difficult to see, absent a Damascus Road-style conversion, how Norris can now emerge from a self-imposed labyrinth and reclaim a role he’s all but abdicated while trampling colleagues and the city staffers a mayor depends on to functionally understand the city he claims to serve.
“In my assessment, in a very short amount of time in office, the mayor has managed to divide this council, divide our community, and tarnish the image of this great city,” Council member Charles Gambaros aid as a preface to is motions.
The votes came at the end of an eight-hour workshop on unrelated issues. They were the result of an independent investigation that found, among other misconduct, that Norris violated the charter by unilaterally summoning City Acting City Manager Lauren Johnston and Chief of Staff Jason DeLorenzo behind closed doors and demanding their resignation, without the council’s knowledge or approval. (Neither acceded to the demand.)
The investigation suggested that Norris showed malfeasance in that and other acts of interference with the administration. The investigation also documented a pattern of boorish, insulting and demeaning conduct by Norris toward senior staffers, several of whom he also wanted fired.
Norris did not show up for today’s meeting. Efforts to reach him by the vice mayor, by Johnston and by at least two reporters failed, leading to hints of concern among council members even as they excoriated his conduct in recent weeks. Vice Mayor Theresa Pontieri chaired the meeting, seamlessly, though she has been the de facto mayor since the April 10 State of the City event, where Norris unraveled in a screed of conspiratorial paranoia and renounced what would customarily have been his role to lead the event.
Pontieri stepped in and improvised with striking command and grace, in essence rescuing the event from viral embarrassment. It was only one in a series of abdications by the mayor: he’d cleared his office the previous day, and today he did not show or inform anyone of his whereabouts.
“We’ve seen that the mayor has not been doing the business of the city since this started,” Council member Ty Miller said at the end of a long statement deconstructing Norris’s method of profanity-laced dissembling and defiance despite warnings that he was violating rules, or basic decency standards. “And so if he’s not doing that, what is he doing? Why is he here?”
Norris’s chair bulked in its empty grayness between Miller and Pontieri on one side and Sullivan and Gambaro on the other, so that every time they spoke to each other, they had to speak across the gap, amplifying to what extent the mayor’s absence was more than physical.
The empty chair seemed to spur Gambaro on. One of Norris’s lines of attack had been to claim that Gambaro’s appointment last fall was illegitimate. Gambaro had been prepared to pair the censure with the immediate request for removal to the governor. But the council followed his censure motions with a lengthy, deliberative discussion that led Gambaro to change course.
“Today is like a textbook example of how we should be conducting business, working together, debating issues, compromising,” he said. “That’s the only way we’re going to get anything done, right?” He was not exaggerating: the sequence of the council’s discussion on the Norris votes, however tense and distasteful, was conducted with singular deliberation as council members made their points, countered, shifted, suggested, and finally came to a compromise, all without the kind of short-fused slights, bitterness or rudeness that had often punctuated tense council debates in the last few years.
The manner of the discussion implicitly vindicated the council’s decision to appoint former County Commissioner Dave Sullivan to the District 3 seat last week, because it was ultimately Sullivan’s experience and political savvy that put the brakes on Gambaro’s motion for a removal, and offered a more due-proces oriented path.
Sullivan did so after detecting Pontieri’s hesitancy to go as far as Gambaro wanted to go. Gambaro had Council member Ty Miller’s support. Pontieri wasn’t opposed to a removal request. But she wanted to give Tallahassee attorney Adam Brandon, who conducted the investigation, a chance to present and explain his findings to the council. She also wants to give Norris a chance to address them before the council takes the unprecedented step of calling on the governor to remove a fellow-council member–what even Gambaro described as the “nuclear option.”
“I don’t think it would be wise for us not to have a unanimous vote on that,” Sullivan said. He did not want to see Pontieri in dissent. Before getting to a removal letter, he said, the council should hear from Brandon, but it should also file a formal request to the Ethics Commission, whose findings could provide the necessary ammunition to then follow-up with a request to the governor.
They each spoke in turn with that strange mixture of eloquence and disgust, and with the occasional lapse, almost inevitable in those circumstances, into defensive self-righteousness. They rejected public suggestions–by Norris or by his supporters–that he alone has advocated for residents, or that he alone had raised alarms about development or developers.
They repeatedly described Norris as acting in his own self-interest and against the interests of the city, though as that last segment of their meeting lengthened, it risked turning into a public flogging in absentia. But the council members had themselves held their tongues as they’d been subjected to Norris’s social media misrepresentations and to his supporters’ lectures for weeks. They’d endured his attempts to cast himself as a martyr as he accused them of a witch hunt, then they became increasingly aware of the extent to which he demeaned city employees, including some of its most prized and beloved.
They had a lot of bitterness against Norris bottled up. They left little in the bottle. And both votes were unanimous.
“This truly is a sad day. It’s a tragedy,” Ed Fuller, who had attended the entire meeting, said near the very end of the meeting, before he turned to Johnston, the city manager, to address her words another speaker moments earlier had addressed to the entire senior staff in back of the room: “If you’re looking for leadership, ladies and gentlemen, you don’t need to look any further. You are incredible. When it comes to you, you’re a peddler of hope, a vision of moving things forward, in unbearable circumstances, and it’s so unfair. You took that job for one and one purpose only, to lead the city, to make it better. And look what happened. I can’t put it into words how I really feel, but I want to apologize from the bottom of my heart. What an example of leadership you have shown everyone here.”
And on Thursday, two candidates interview for the city manager job.
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