Its 17-year relationship with the same law firm ending, not of its own choice, the Palm Coast City Council on Tuesday unanimously opted to negotiate a contract with the Douglas Law Firm of St. Augustine, a 12-attorney firm established 10 years ago, with offices in several northeast Florida counties but just now expanding to Flagler Beach.
The firm was among four that responded to a request for proposal. The others were Vose Law Firm, GrayRobinson and Fishback Dominick Attorneys. Fishback dropped out before the council’s decision on Tuesday, a decision the three remaining firms’ free structure made for the council: Douglas is proposing a $30,000-a-month fee, or 120 hours of work at $250 an hour. Extra hours are billed additionally. GrayRobinson was proposing a $58,000 fixed monthly retainer, while Vose was proposing $75,000.
Douglas Law Firm and GrayRobinson were the only two firms that responded to the Flagler County School Board’s request for proposals as that board is also in the process of replacing its attorney of 17 years, after firing her. But three was reluctance among some school board members to go with Douglas because one of its attorneys, Marcus Duffy, has close ties to Flagler County. The board wants to avoid such ties, seeing them as another potential conflict. The city council’s choice of Douglas for representation may push the school board further away from that choice for that reason, as the city and the school board’s interests occasionally intersect.
Duffy was among the three attorneys who pitched the firm’s proposal to the city in a special workshop in February. “I did move here before the freshman year of high school. I graduated from FPC and I met my wife here,” Duffy told the council, referring to Palm Coast. “So this is kind of a very passionate thing for me. My kids still call Palm Coast home because this is where they would visit their grandparents when I was in the Air Force. So this is also a service to my community, if given the opportunity.”
Duffy presented alongside fellow-attorney John Steinmetz and Jeremiah Blocker, the managing partner. Blocker served on the St. Johns County Commission for a four-year term that ended in 2022, including as chairman, an experience he cited as giving him “familiarity with that on both sides of that, having been an elected official, and also being a legal adviser,” he told the council, “really trying to put ourselves in your shoes and make sure that we’re available and accessible.” He noted: while the firm is experienced in land use, “we do not represent developers.”
Steinmetz and Blocker are listed as representing the Clay County School Board, and Steinmetz represents St. Augustine Beach and the St. Johns Airport Authority. But that’s the extent of the firm’s representation of elected bodies–a limitation that concerned two of the school board members here. Duffy would be the principal attorney representing Palm Coast. Duffy will be working with one of his firm’s paralegals, Samantha Simmons.
“We want to be accessible to all your guys’ needs, any type of issue that comes up before this board,” Duffy said. “We are capable of doing anything that you need. We have a commitment to this community.”
The firm just opened an office in Flagler Beach as it builds a “substantial number of clients” in that city, Blocker said, describing Douglas as a regional firm. “We want to be involved in Flagler County. We want to support the local government here and that was really the motivation.”
City Council member Theresa Pontieri looked at the last two years of legal bills to the city as she mulled her decision. The bills have been around $30,000 a month, though the city has an annual budget for its legal expenses of $685,000, up from $550,000 in 2022. That includes other legal costs billed separately, such as litigation and collective bargaining negotiations.
“So it seems to me that the Douglas firm is pretty on par with that proposal. From my understanding, the legal services that we’ve been getting have been top notch in my opinion, but to at least make sure we’re remaining within that budget it wasn’t necessary from my standpoint to reach out, the other proposals were just vastly higher.” The Garganese, Weiss, D’Agresta and Salzman law firm of Orlando, and more specifically, Bill Reischmann, then Neysa Borkert, had represented Palm Coast.
Pontieri reserved special compliments for the Vose firm–a firm that’s represented the Bunnell City Commission since 2013–but she said as the city moves west, she was concerned about potential conflicts of interest. She had a similar concern with GrayRobinson (the firm representing Palm Coast in the ongoing litigation against splash pad contractors). Council member Ed Danko had conversations with individuals at Douglas and was “very impressed with their attitude and their their basic understanding that they work for us.”
It’s not clear whether Council member Nick Klufas would have gone with the Douglas Law Firm had he been the first to speak. Being last to speak, after all other council members had lavished praise on Douglas, Klufas said he had “no problems really,” with Douglas, “as long as we’re all on board going with the same attorney services. I think that’s probably the best outcome for all of us.”
Mayor David Alfin directed City Manager Denise Bevan to prepare a contract consistent with the city’s previously issued request for proposal. The council will review the contract at the next business meeting.
An F-Section resident who said she had 26 years of government procurement experience criticized the council’s process, oddly, because it was conducted in the open. “I’ve never seen a presentation done publicly. Everything’s supposed to be behind closed doors,” she said. That’s accurate as far as administrative procurement is concerned. It is not accurate when elected bodies hire their executive or their legal representation. “This is a very separate procedure. It’s the two positions that we actually control,” Danko said. “So it’s slightly different than what it would be if we were sending this out to bid for garbage.” (He was not making a snide comment: the F-Section resident had made a critical reference to the city’s 2022 decision to contract with a new garbage hauler, FCC Environmental, after a procurement process.)
Presentations by candidates and interviews by the council for the top executive job or for legal representation are conducted in the open, as required by Florida law, as they have been by all local governments for decades–until the recent exception of the Flagler County School Board, which routinely takes a cloudier view of Florida’s Sunshine law. (See: “Palm Coast Searches for Its New Attorney In the Open. School Board Chooses Secrecy.”)
“Every step of this process has been in the sunshine, in a public meeting, including presentations,” Alfin said. “There’s been nothing, no part of it that was not available to the public at any time. So I just like to go on the record and make sure that’s clear with everybody.”
Dennis C Rathsam says
Funny how the council all preach shop in Palm Coast….Do your business in P/C…. But we will get someone from ST Auggy