As Palm Coast Recruits for a New City Manager, Two Brochures Tell a Tale of the Last 5 Years

A job posting for a new Palm Coast City Manager appeared on a dozen websites on Nov. 22, from Governmentjobs.com to the Florida League of Cities to the League of Women in Government to, for some odd reason, the Texas Municipal League. The posting was issued by Strategic Government Resources, a Texas-based recruiting firm headed by Doug Thomas, the same recruiter the Palm Coast City Council hired in 2018 to replace Jim Landon.

SGR did not have to start from scratch this time. The recruiting brochure it paired with the job announcement it send is in several parts the same brochure it issued in December 2018.




The end result was Matt Morton, a city manager of lightning intelligence whose Covid-era tenure paralleled more tumult than composure, especially on the council, ending days after the resignation of then-Mayor Milissa Holland.

There are notable changes in the new brochure, of course. The listed population in 2019 was 86,516. It is now 107,000. In a lapse of attention on SGR’s part, Palm Coast Data still appears in the new brochure, as it did in the old, though the company is no longer among the city’s “major employers.” At last check it was barely a storefront in a Bunnell strip mall. The new brochure removed Moonrise Brewery, though the school district still serves the same “approximately 13,000 K-12 students” it did five years ago (and 15 years ago).

BJ’s Wholesale Club and the Promenade under construction in Town Center are new items in the brochure, which also pays closer attention to current demographics than the old one did, as if to underscore that the median household income is $71,663. (The Census Bureau puts the figure at $68,800 in 2022 dollars. Perhaps the brochure adjusted for inflation to bump it up a little.)




Here’s a striking difference between the two brochures. In 2019, the annual budget was “approximately $143.7 million, including a general fund of $37.4 million, with an ad valorem millage rate of 4.6989.” This year: the budget is “approximately $421.5 million, including a General Fund of $61 million with an ad valorem millage rate of 4.1893.” But the 194 percent increase in the overall budget masks enormous increases in the utility, stormwater and garbage funds, all of which reflect the addition of 21,000 residents along with substantial price increases.

The brochures differ considerably in the “challenges and opportunities” section even though growth management and infrastructure and economic diversification still top the list. Workforce housing remains a challenge for the city, as it was in the 2019 brochure, but it’s gone from the newer brochure, as is the focus on replacing the city’s public works facility or the development of Town Center as an “innovation district” and an “opportunity zone.” Instead, we see “Western expansion” and–no surprise–a “Newly Seated Governing Body,” a polite paragraph about how four rookies are running the city for the first time in its history (the founding council in 1999 had the benefit of several members who had served on the Palm Coast Service District board.)

The new brochure does not include an arresting challenge that Thomas made explicit to the council last month: ” Literally, there are 10,000 baby boomers hitting retirement age every single day, and that’s going through 2030,” Thomas said, “so you’ve got what I describe as a pig in the python with these elder senior employees, kind of working their way into retirement. And when you look at the Gen X, the millennials and Gen Ys, there’s not enough population group to fill all the slots of those exodus of those employees. So you, like many of our local governments, are facing an exodus of senior, talented, experienced, tenured employees. And how do you replace that knowledge base? And how do you size your organization appropriately going forward?”




That’ll be up to the new manager.

The new brochure’s page on the “idea candidate” has all the qualitative generalities of the old one, but with more qualities added in. The old brochure stopped at 376 words. The new one is 600 words long, a reflection of what may be a much more hands-on council. The word “political” never appeared in the old brochure’s “ideal candidate” segment. In the new, “The candidate will be politically savvy but never political and embrace transparency in government operations.” The new brochure also has a description required of the new manager that did not exist in the old one: “emotional intelligence.” It’s not defined, but a Yale University definition sums it up as “the ability to read our instinctive feelings and those of others. It also allows us to understand and label emotions as well as express and regulate them.”

As for education and professional requirements, the two recruiting brochures are almost identical: “The selected candidate must hold a bachelor’s degree in public administration, business administration, or a related field; a master’s degree is preferred. A minimum of eight years of progressively responsible experience in a city manager’s office managing and administering a municipal government and/or as a department head is required. Any combination of education and experience that provides the required knowledge and skills will also be considered.” The new one merely goes on at longer length.

One council member wanted to make sure the city didn’t hire “someone who’s been fired five times in the last two years,” though it can be difficult to find managers with no experience of being fired. Thomas cautioned: “Managers are often hired and fired with enthusiasm, but rarely by the same boards,” he said. “So recognize there will be managers that go through transitions. We’ll help you define whether there’s something that’s criminal, moral, unethical, versus those that just went through a transition because of politics, and it’s just kind of the nature of this business.”




Council member Ty Miller was concerned with continuity: “The city has experienced a lot of turnover, so looking for a candidate that’s here to stay,” he said. Thomas said the average tenure of city managers these days is five to seven years, though Palm Coast has had five managers and interims since Landon, who had held the job 11 years. ” That’s a bit of a challenge. We’re going to have to overcome that going forward. But in the same token, you definitely want some stability in this position.”

Michael Czymbor, who is working with Thomas on recruiting (he retired as city manager in Hardeeville, S.C., last month, after nine years there), summed up SGR’s aim this way: “What you’re going to find with our group is we’re going to be there, everywhere, every day, helping you [find] not the most qualified, but the person that best fits your needs.”

SGR is giving Palm Coast a 12-month guarantee. If the manager Palm Coast hures decides to leave within a year, SGR will restart the recruiting free of charge.




The salary for the new manager is not part of the brochure. Thomas recommended against even including a salary range. But in his presentation to the council two weeks ago, his snapshot included current salaries of $190,000 in one case, $215,000 for the city manager in Deltona, and $230,000 in Largo, a city smaller than Palm Coast, while the city manager in Daytona Beach just got a raise that placed his salary just under $300,000.

Council member Theresa Pontieri is looking for fuller figures that include the entire compensation package’s cost–with benefit and retirement included. That can push costs to close to double the salary figure. That prompted a question from Council member Charles Gambaro about what sort of “golden parachute” the manager would have. “We need to really take a hard look at that golden parachute as well to make sure there’s just not completely out of control,” he said. Gambaro appeared not to be aware of the Florida law that limits severance packages for all public employees, including city managers, to a maximum of 20 weeks.

Thomas, himself a city manager in Lakeland before he started working for SGR, acknowledged that the process so far has been “abbreviated,” both because of timelines and because of a new council being seated. The aim was to issue the job posting before Thanksgiving, and to have applications in by Dec. 29.  Unlike the 2019 process, SGR did not hold a public session to hear from Palm Coast residents about the kind of manager they want.