Sheriff Staly Cautions Palm Coast Mayor Norris on Mystery Claims: ‘We Just Don’t Go on Witch Hunts and Innuendoes’

Flagler County Sheriff Rick Staly said today that Palm Coast Mayor Mike Norris is welcome to report an allegation of a “quid pro quo” involving him and suggesting an attempted bribe from a developer, but cautions that “we just don’t go on witch hunts and innuendoes,” or “fishing expeditions,” and that in any case the way Norris has handled the matter so far has likely undermined any effective investigation.




“People are welcome to report what they believe occurred,” the sheriff said from Tallahassee in an interview with FlaglerLive today. “We will review it, and if it rises to the level of a crime, in this case I will probably conflict out, because the Sheriff’s Office has a contract with the city.” He would forward the case to the Florida Department of Law Enforcement or the State Attorney’s Office. But he was skeptical about the allegation as presented so far in public, twice.

As of midday today, the mayor had not reached Staly.

Norris at a Palm Coast City Council on May 1 and again on May 6 alleged that a developer he would not name approached him with a “quid pro quo” (a request for a favor in exchange for some kind of bribe), asking Norris to approve Palm Coast’s pending Comprehensive Plan without amendments. The Comp Plan is the city’s long-range vision of itself. It maps out long-range development in broad outlines. The council approved the plan on second reading Tuesday evening, with Norris dissenting, though Norris and the council had already voted on it on first reading a few weeks ago, and Norris had said nothing about the “quid pro quo.”

Norris did so at the two May meetings immediately before the council was on both occasions to discuss issues related to the independent investigation that found Norris to have violated the city charter and repeatedly behaved unprofessionally with city staff, making it seem as if he were deflecting from the issue at hand. He alluded to sworn statements that were related to the quid pro quo, which was connected to the “western expansion,” the city’s plan to develop the thousands of acres west of U.S. 1.




That left little mystery as to Norris’s developer: two developers were interviewed as part of the investigation of Norris, Jeff Douglas of Douglas Properties, whose land holdings are in the older part of Palm Coast (Douglas Properties donated the land City Hall sits on, for example, and at one point controlled the totality of Town center), and Paul Rice, the director of real estate development for Raydient, whose parent company owns the near totality of the land that would be part of the westward expansion.

Norris wanted to discuss the allegation in a closed-door meeting with the council, supposedly because speaking about it in the open would violate a state law requiring confidentiality. No such confidentiality requirement exists in law, as City Attorney Marcus Duffy told the mayor. It is likelier that Norris did not want to speak of the allegation openly, or mention the developer’s name publicly because that might have triggered a defamation lawsuit against him and the city.

When he failed to get the council’s and attorney’s support for a closed-door meeting on May 1, he agreed to bring up the matter in the open on Tuesday, only to demur again, saying he would contact Staly instead and go the law enforcement route.




Staly in his nine years as the county’s top law enforcement officer and its consistently most popular elected official, has had no patience for individuals, politicians especially, attempting to rope him into their political labyrinth, let alone those looking to burnish their grievances’ credibility with his coattails. Norris was not likely to hear what he wants to hear from the sheriff.

“Any time you make an allegation like this public, it’ll hurt future investigations, because your target has been warned,” Staly said. What Norris should have done when the alleged quid pro quo took place, the sheriff said, was report it immediately–to law enforcement–at which point investigative means would have kicked in, untainted by public statements. Even then, the matter as described by Norris is problematic because it appears to rely on what one person said and what another heard, with Norris citing a person who appears to be his wife as one of his witnesses.

“Generally a spouse would be predisposed to support the husband,” Staly said, “so what they say has less standing unless you can verify it with hard proof. Two people against one, with no corroborating evidence, it would never get prosecuted.” The standard, he said, is evidence that holds up beyond a reasonable doubt.

So far, Norris’s claims, like many of his public statements, his behavior, his contradictions and his growing paranoia, have raised more doubt about his motives than they have appealed to reason.