It started two years ago with a public “demand”–well, a demand from one particularly strident member of the public and a few of occasional but less committed echoes–for a forensic audit of the entire Palm Coast city budget. The demand rested on specious claims of rampant “corruption” at City Hall.
Allegations about “the nasty underbelly of our city government” were never backed up with so much as one example. The crier’s calls for whistleblowers to come forward were never heeded. The FBI never showed.
The City Council initially agreed to a forensic audit. Within days, it realized the budgetary and accusatory folly of it, backtracked, and eventually agreed to an audit at least somewhat redundant to those already taking place every year, but with a more impressive name. The council–four of whose members had not been part of the 2023 delirium–agreed to an “entity-wide risk assessment” and put the national risk-management firm Plante & Moran on the job.
$50,000 later, Plante & Moran presented its findings today. It brought to mind the old cliche, without irony: there’s nothing to see here. Move along.
Plante & Moran Partner Matt Bohdan put it in words: “We did not see anything throughout our assessment that stood out as particularly alarming or unique relative to other municipalities,” he said.
The findings were so much like a whimper, at least compared to the cataclysmic accusations of two years ago (and yet another one today) that Mayor Mike Norris perfectly seized up the near-uselessness of the exercise when he thanked the firm for its work: “Thank you for your time. We really appreciate it. We will keep you in the Rolodex if we need you again.” (Council member Dave Sullivan just called it a “waste of time” in a brief conversation after the meeting.)
The firm interviewed administrators across the city and studied documents. Bohdan and Plante & Moran manager Briana Solorio walked the council through its findings. Their most urgent findings? The “political climate,” and how “the frequency in which there can be changes between council, changes in council,” Solorio said, “that is something that can happen with each election cycle.”
It was not exactly breaking news.
Also: “asset management.” The city’s aging infrastructure, its rapid growth and its limited capacities to manage it all makes it difficult to track its assets and safeguard its infrastructure. Put another way: the city is not keeping up with infrastructure demands, a reality council members and the administration deal with every day, and speak of at almost every meeting. It’s not clear why a risk assessment was necessary to rephrase the obvious in less penetrable language. Same goes with the third “risk,” titled “public services,” and summed up as “Gaps between community
expectations and operational realities create challenges.” The firm found that the city’s Palm Coast Connect and CD Plus, its online interactive platforms, “track and respond to citizen inquiries and issues,” and that “Investments in crews, tools, and field tech have boosted service response.”
Another risk: “Negative public perception of City leadership, services, or decisions damages trust and engagement.” The firm did not note the irony that the negative perception is often created by the very same people who clamor for a “forensic audit,” fabricate tales of corruption, and make baseless, at times slanderous accusations about city staffers. The city itself, its communications led by a busily cheery Communications Department, has never been at fault of creating a “negative public perception” or lacking transparency. (Council dynamics and the mayor’s war with the city, now apparently in an undeclared truce, have been another story.)
It seemed like $50,000 was a heavy price to pay to be told what the council already knew.
There was what sounded like a potentially concerning finding, logged under IT “vulnerabilities.” But it may have been a misnomer. “There are technology systems in the city that have limitations, leading staff to performing manual work arounds,” Solorio said, “and these gaps do reflect decreased efficiency in some instances and increases the risk of error, especially where manual processes may be required.”
Norris asked for an example. It would not have ranked as the sort of “vulnerabilities” typically associated with less-than-vigilant IT departments: “We had heard a few comments around workflows is not being efficiently set up to move a work order through the process,” Solorio said, “which just requires additional effort, time to follow up and make sure that work order gets communicated to that next person in the step.” That, of course, is not an IT vulnerability but a more pedestrian, and resolvable, workflow issue. It won’t get Palm Coast’s IT networks hacked or ransomed.
Norris pressed: “What about other systems? Are there any more examples?”
“We also noted some inefficiencies around performance evaluations and the human resources department,” Solorio said. “Currently, there is manual tracking around evaluations…” and so on.
Norris, perhaps losing patience with what amounted to straw-grasping at that point, interrupted, wanting to know if there were more serious issues to worry about: “I’m sorry, what about our major systems in utilities, as far as water treatment, wastewater treatment, any of those, any technology gaps there?”
There were none.
The city also has “staffing challenges” (as do all local governments, and the firm’s recommendation is to do a “deeper dive” into pay.
When Bohdan agreed with Council member Theresa Pontieri that most of the findings are in line with norms across municipalities, the vice mayor said: That’s really important, because as we’re looking at this and we’re trying to figure out where our pain points. What I’m ascertaining from this presentation is that we have essentially the same pain points that every other municipality is faced with. And if that’s the case, we need to look at what financial resources we’re going to put towards addressing issues that every other municipality has to tackle.”
Context, Pontieri said, is essential. The presentation included bar charts with alarmingly red bars that ranked the city’s vulnerabilities. “When you just look at this bar chart and you’re not taking it into context as to what other municipalities face,” Pontieri said, “you think, oh my gosh, we’ve got political climate issues, we’ve got asset management issues, we’ve got IT and security infrastructure issues, when in reality, it doesn’t seem like we specifically have those issues. It seems like municipalities in general are susceptible to many of these issues. And so we need to not look at these in a vacuum, but really look at the forest of what all municipalities are faced with.”
Pontieri welcomed the suggestions the firm proposed with its findings, but cautioned against singling out issues that may not be particular to Palm Coast.
“I’m not sure the refresh is required,” Council member Charles Gambaro said. “The vice mayor kind of captured it well. And saying there’s, there’s no fire that we need to address right now.”
Bohdan was “open to working with the city” on further steps, perhaps hoping for an extension of the contract, which is not to exceed $60,000. Norris’s Rolodex thank you came soon after.
For one member of the audience, it was as if she’d van winkled through the hour-long presentation to rip immediately afterward, in familiar language: “I want to demand a forensic audit, not the yearly superficial” audit, said Chantal Preuninger, one of the council’s more loyal audience members these days and an alternate nominee for its Charter Review Committee. She then inaccurately claimed the city had refused the governor’s “doge” audit, and that the city was “half a billion dollars in debt.” While the city’s utility department carries substantial debt, it is not more common than not for utilities, public or private, with most of the city’s debt resulting from bond issues. She also made a vague, unsubstantiated claim about councils past or present who “might get some special benefit from builders.”
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