Palm Coast Council’s Pontieri: Why I Reject Mayor Norris’s Flawed, AI-Generated Austerity Budget Proposal

Last week Palm Coast Mayor Mike Norris proposed to his colleagues consideration of what he called an “austerity budget” in response both to potential reductions in property tax revenue due to the pending constitutional amendment significantly raising homestead exemptions, and to the slowdown in property valuations, which is also reducing revenue.  The following day FlaglerLive published the mayor’s proposed resolution in full, including its disclaimer that it was a “shell” proposal for City Manager Mike McGlothlin and City Attorney Marcus Duffy to develop into a more formal resolution.

Norris at today’s council meeting criticized the publication of the proposal. “I sent them that as a shell document so we could try to mold it for our city,” he said. “We’re not trying to reinvent the wheel. And I was going through it and–do you want to do up a draft resolution. And that’s all I did. I sent that to Marcus, I said we need to pare it down, and I actually said AI doesn’t know a lot of things about our community or our systems of government. So I was just giving us something to go by. All those things on there, really, we’re already doing. It’s just putting  it into guidance from the council what we want to look for. It’s just sad that [FlaglerLive] would publish an email from the mayor to the city manager and the attorney. We have Sunshine laws and stuff, but when we’re talking and just kicking back ideas and stuff, it’s just like fear mongering, and that’s not what the intent of any of that is.”

Norris’s statement is misleading. Last week, he had asked and received consensus from the council to direct Duffy to work on the resolution, which he mentioned sending to Duffy, even though several council members had reservations about agreeing to something they had not seen. Council members themselves had requested a copy of the email after the meeting. As it had become the basis of potential policy and budget discussion, FlaglerLive published it as it would any document that might serve as a foundation for policy direction.

Even Norris spoke today in terms of his document as policy direction: “I have no problem with the state, if they want to take away that [property tax revenue] in it, that’s what the residents want, that’s what the residents want,” he said. “But I do have the plan, and I’m not a person that sits back on my butt and doesn’t look forward and try to lean forward to get ahead of things. So really, [FlaglerLive] took that whole thing out of context, and he’s out in left field, so to speak.”

Norris spoke as City Council member Theresa Pontieri had begun to respond critically to the mayor’s “austerity” proposal. She was twice interrupted. What follows are Pontieri’s full remarks as she had prepared them for delivery, only a portion of which she delivered at the meeting.

I acknowledge the importance of maintaining a conservative and tightly regulated, as well as fully transparent budget. In concept, I fully support discussions on strategies that enhance our efficiency and eliminate wasteful spending. However, I must express my strong disagreement with the mayor’s proposed “austerity budget,” which, I believe, is ill-conceived, poorly written, and, frankly, legally impossible to implement.

The proposed resolution fails to recognize the practical challenges we face each year when forming a municipal budget and does not adequately address the unique needs of our community. And how could it—being written by AI? Furthermore, many of the items proposed neither make sense nor realistically present opportunities for savings. Here are just a few examples:

1. It calls for the merging of finance and procurement. Procurement is already merged with finance.
2. It recommends an administrative four-day work week, while at the same time, recommending those four days be ten-hour work days. I’m no math wizard, but whether we have five eight-hour work days or four 10-hour work days, our employees would still be working 40 hours a week. However, under the mayor’s proposal, we’d have one less day of being open and able to serve our residents, and our employees would be working longer—and thus likely less productive—days. I suppose those who have kids can decide whether they want to skip breakfast or skip dinner with their kids and families every Monday through Thursday, as a 7 a.m. to 6 p.m. work day, or an 8 a.m. to 7 p.m. work day (assuming we’re still allowing them to have a one-hour lunch break) doesn’t afford them the luxuries that a normal 8-to-5 work day allows. As a silver lining, I see the austerity budget does not explicitly take away their lunch hour, so I suppose we can rest easy there.
3. The mayor’s budget calls for the elimination of non-mandated programs, all festivals, and all arts grants. And why wouldn’t an AI-created budget take away these things? Afterall, it’s not human. Chatbots don’t recognize how important events like our 9/11 5K are; our favorite AI buddy, Claude, has no sense of what Touch-A-Truck means to the community; and since the stories of our young authors in the Josh Crews writing program haven’t hit the internet yet, there’s simply no way Grok could know how disappointed our kids would be if we didn’t support that program.
4. Next, this austerity budget calls for fixing roads using a “worst-first plus preservation” policy where we “shift budget to crack sealing and resurfacing vs. full rebuilds.” Well, mayor, we’ve been doing that. I suggested we do that my very first year in office, and we’ve been setting aside $1million each year to do just that. And we didn’t have AI nearly four years ago—I got that idea from good, old-fashioned research and reading about ways to get more infrastructure done with less money. Very vintage of me, I know.
5. Moving on, apparently AI thinks saving a few bucks is worth sacrificing neighborhood safety, as this budget suggests turning streetlights off between the hours of 11 p.m. and 5 a.m. So, if you work the night shift at Wawa, I hope your bright lights work well and that no deer are feeling risky—specifically in our L Section and S Section. And to our deputies patrolling the night shift and our firefighters responding to calls at 2 a.m., I pray your coffees stay full and your eyes wide open. No streetlights for you either.
6. The budget suggests a homeowner association (HOA) park takeover program. I don’t know what that is, but it sounds terrible.
7. And it suggests we auction surplus vehicles from our fleet. We already do that.
8. And that’s far from the only thing this austerity budget suggests that we already do:
   1. It says we should have a dedicated stormwater fee, which we already have.
   2. It says we should move to full cost-recovery pricing for our waste pickup, which we already do. And…this is my favorite…
   3. It calls for increasing impact fees and permit fees to 100 percent cost recovery for plan review, inspection, and infrastructure impact. Well, we’ve done that, and we’re being sued by the Homebuilders Association for it. So, apparently, either Grok, or Claude, or Chat AI didn’t get that memo either.

Finally, I must address the illegalities and impracticalities of attempting to implement this. The proposed budget lists core services that must be prioritized, and while I don’t disagree with the priorities themselves, the fact is, property taxes have nothing to do with water, sewer, road paving and solid waste. Those are completely separate funds from those we use property taxes for. Therefore, you could “austerity” the heck out of our general fund budget, and it would quite literally have zero effect on those services.

Additionally, while we as council give policy direction to staff as to how staff prioritizes city funds, including property taxes, the city manager  and our directors have day-to-day spending authority, which you—mayor—voted to increase the threshold limits for rather unequivocally. In other words, city operations, like days of the week we are open and how many director-level positions we have, are not within this council’s purview. Those operational decisions sit with our city manager.

To summarize, I find this proposal to be impractical, not legally enforceable, and out of touch—not just with reality, but also with the specific needs of Palm Coast. This is a lazy attempt to substitute the use of AI for the hard work it takes to thoughtfully formulate a good budget, and quite frankly, it’s not worth the AI data center energy wasted to produce it.

As we move forward, it is crucial that we take a realistic approach, ensuring that our budget reflects the realities of governing while effectively serving our residents. I welcome the opportunity to engage in meaningful discussions with pinpointed strategies and solutions, rather than general ideas that look good on paper but are not workable in reality. This approach will lead to a budget that is both responsible and tailored to the specific needs of Palm Coast.

For these reasons, I will not be supporting this resolution. I fully support taking a hard look at our budget, making tough decisions as to where we have to cut back, trim down, spend less, and be more efficient. And I’ll be looking for ways to do this while maintaining the quality of life our residents have come to enjoy. But this…is not the answer.