Setting Aside Transparency Concerns, Flagler Beach Commission Reaffirms Support for $420,000 Dumpster Project

The commission had voted on the expansion two weeks earlier even though all but one of the commissioners said they did not know they were voting for an expansion of the dumpster pad. The expansion will further block the view of the ocean from the boardwalk and add costs to the project, because it will require additional pylons and other structural costs. But it will also render the dumpster area safer for employees and less hazardous as a structure, which right now appears to teeter on the brink of collapse.

Commissioner Eric Cooley asked for the project to be brought back up for discussion in light of the discovery that the earlier vote had been carried out on incomplete information. But there was no subsequent vote at the end of Thursday’s long discussion to make any changes. By then a majority of the commission was convinced by Ray Barshay, owner of the Funky Pelican, and City Manager William Whitson, that the expansion was necessary and beneficial to the city, especially in the long term.

Whitson summed it up this way: “We have a tenant who is operating a successful business. They’re an asset to the city. It’s our facility. My building official and my fire marshal are telling me that there are unsafe conditions and the plans have been out there, available, discussed with previous boards, this board,” Whitson said.

“That’s not true. Do not say that they were available and discussed with the board. That is false,” Cooley said.




Cooley protested that the expansion was slipped through the commission was surprisingly little transparency. But there was little appetite among other commissioners to make that an issue. So they put stock in other, uncontroversial aspects of the project–that the city has a responsibility to its tenant, that the current pad is hazardous, that the investment is worth it–to defend their approach.

One figure weighed heavily in favor of the restaurant: the business now contributes some $140,000 a year to the city, according to Barshay, a nearly fourfold increase from when its previous owner–when the place was known as the Pier Restaurant–paid $3,000 a month in rent.

“What do you need to do to make it right and make it work?” Barshay told the commission. “And I think that’s what we developed in that plan, so that it would be large enough to work for anyone, whether we were there at some point in time or maybe we’re not the tenant out there. It’s a building that you guys should have and should be really considering having a building for the future, whatever it takes whatever it requires, because it’s a great situation out there for the city. I think we’ve been a good steward of being in there.”

Barshay at one point compared himself to Job, the biblical character assailed by every possible calamity in the world who nevertheless persevered with patience. He said the commission has been discussing repairs to the pad for years, going back to when the restaurant changed hands and barshay took Commissioner Jane Mealy on a tour, including to see the foundations of the pad.




“I understand not wanting to spend volumes of money. I get it, and I want to be sure that everybody understands–the audience, anybody in the community at large,” Barshay said. “This isn’t doing anything for us. It is making the facility safe.” He said he spent over $1 million to improve the building–$700,000 on the physical building, the rest on its interiors–when he took over a decade ago. “The city now gets probably going on $140,000 a year out of the building. Now I’m not trying to pat myself on the back but I want people to understand that it really has changed and things aren’t [what they were] eight years ago.” It was actually almost 10 years ago.

He was later more blunt: “But if you do,” Barshay said of a retreat on current expansion plans, “you’re short sighted. I’m going to tell you that you’re short sighted.”

That’s all fine, Cooley said, but it wasn’t the issue: Cooley’s dispute wasn;t with Barshay but with the city manager and the administration.

“Everybody gets that what is there is not acceptable,” Cooley said. “ I had a problem with the way this entire thing was brought forward. When we even as much as approve a simple house to be in tourists commercial, we get house plans, publications, copies of postings that were done. We have a stack sometimes this thick so we can ask the applicant: Are you okay with potentially moving next to a bar? And that’s it, the thing is done. We were given almost no information on this. We didn’t get the contract. We didn’t have the plans until the day before the meeting.”

He continued: “That’s my issue. Is how can we make an informed decision when we don’t have any information or making a half million dollar uninformed decision because we don’t have any information. So now here we are with a little bit more information because we had to dig it up. We still haven’t been given a packet on this. We had to get it because we weren’t given it. Oh yeah, we get all these other big sections of stuff. Why was this incomplete? I have a huge problem with that, especially over half a million dollar decision.”




No options were presented to the commission, he said. The increased space would “accommodate an increase in the operation,” Cooley said. “That is not our taxpayers’ burden. We are to supply a dumpster area for a dumpster. That’s it.”

Barshay has been pressing the city to allow–and possibly contribute to–an expansion of the Funky pelican’s kitchen, and the business does use the dumpster pad for storage of such things as chemicals, oils, propane tanks. All commissioners, however, have been adamant that while they would not object to a repaired pad–and now a pad expanded by about 50 percent-they will object to city funds being used to underwrite an expansion of the business itself.

“Okay, well, I disagree with you,” Commission Chairman Ken Bryan told Cooley. “I mean, that’s why we’re up here and we can have disagreements. And I meant we can all agree to disagree. Because, you know, I go back to the history of the building itself and I wasn’t here at that time. But I just wonder, was it ever meant to be a dumpster in the first place? I mean, where did it actually pick up the name dumpster space?”

Mealy recalled how she stopped going to the old Pier Restaurant a decade ago. “That restaurant was a horror show,” she said, “and Ray has made it into a clean, good smelling i guess bar and restaurant with wonderful food.” Mealy cited the much-improved income as “an important thing to contemplate.” She said some members of the public “probably think we’re a bunch of jerks. We are not a bunch of jerks.” But the project had to be put off for various reasons, and now it finally had a bidder, with construction ahead.