Ray Stevens and Andrew Warner, the two candidates in the runoff for the District 3 seat of the Palm Coast City Council, faced off on WNZF’s Free For All Fridays this morning in a more focused and spirited discussion than candidates typically do at soporific and rarely challenging forums. The two candidates tangled for 65 minutes over development, their past, their associations, the reason they’re running, and why they’d be a better councilman than the other guy.
Stevens often challenged, attacked and baited Werner while Werner, who–ironically for a school psychologist–continues to have trouble expressing himself clearly and directly, parried, demurred and appealed to a higher road while managing to slip in a few sallies of his own against Stevens. “He’s focused his entire campaign on basically just attacking me,” Werner said. “I focus my campaign on on getting to know people, getting out there in the community, attending events, and doing, doing what I can to get to know what’s important to the city.”
A picture host David Ayres took of the two candidates–the picture at the top of this article–told the story: Werner projected the conventionally cheery demeanor of a candidate more eager to please than explain as long as he gets to play on the team. Stevens was coated in almost spiteful jade–his career in policing was in the shadow of one of the nation’s most notorious prisons: Ossining, N.Y.–and ready to challenge for the sake of challenging, his crustiness sometimes getting the better of him to the point of obscuring his shoot-from-the-hip pragmatism.
Other than Werner’s briefer residency of two years in Palm Coast compared to Stevens’s 20 years–a difference that lends itself more to prejudice than reason in a city where almost everyone is a transplant–Stevens never made clear why he has such animus for Werner, or why he felt compelled to conduct what he called “opposition research” on Werner. Werner described it as “doing an investigation on me, everything in my life, and my family, interrogating people that have donated to me.”
Stevens went as far as questioning the veracity of Werner’s claim that he spends time in Flagler County schools. “Nobody knows him,” Stevens said, “at least nobody that this person who was on the inside made the inquiries and nobody knows.” Stevens, of course, did not say who “this person who was on the inside” was, making his accusation close to scurrilous when referring to an organization with 1,600 employees, not counting contractors, most of whom will not know each other, the less so if the contractor is working remotely.
Werner handled the accusation sardonically: “Sometimes at school, they do take your kid to school with you, and they can see what you do during the day,” he said. “I would propose maybe take a Mr. Ray Stevens with me to school one day, and he can come and follow me around. And just because his friends don’t know who I am, I mean, what he’s accusing me of is lying. So Mr. Ray Stevens, I don’t know if they let you in the door, but you’re welcome to come to school with me in the morning on Monday if you want to and see what I do be a fun exercise for both of us.”
Werner has in fact been remarkably cagey about his employment, refusing, after repeated questions in his FlaglerLive interview, to say who he worked for, never saying so in forums, and not even answering the Observer’s question about how long he’s lived in Palm Coast. Today he was pressed on that question. (The show was co-hosted by Palm Coast Observer owner Brian McMillan, while McMillan and Ayers fielded questions from FlaglerLive’s Pierre Tristam and WNZF’s Rich Carroll.) Werner again answered generally: “I worked in school in Hawaii, and I worked in a school in the Midwest, but when I came here, initially I was going to work in the Flagler County schools, but I ended up taking a remote position. So I work through a contract company that I provide services to schools, predominantly in the Midwest. I also do some contracting work here in Flagler County.”
Ayers had to ask him to specify who those companies are. Only then Werner answered: “Okay. So there’s a group called the Stepping Stones Group, and they they hire people all over,” he said, dropping in a snide aside against Stevens for having investigated all that. “I’ll go ahead and say that my position is, you know, my paycheck is paid by–it’s called the Stepping Stones Group. And I think the corporate office is based out of somewhere out in East, I think in Massachusetts. But what they do is they contract people all over the country. My particular position is in a very shortage across the United States, so that’s why they provide virtual services, and that’s what I do.” He said he evaluates students through various types of testing, including IQ tests “to see if they qualify for certain services that may help support them in schools.”
Stevens disputed Werner’s claim that he’s “attacked him personally in any way.” He said he’s analyzed Werner’s campaign donations, which he said “is not an attack. It’s information that the voters should have.” He then sought to make a distinction between one type of campaign donation and another, as if there were differences. To Stevens, there are. The contributions to Werner are targeted with a single aim in mind, he said: to buy his votes in favor of the so-called westward expansion.
More disturbingly: Stevens did not deny contacting–and apparently pressuring–a couple of donors to the Werner campaign. Steens said he’s known the woman for 14 years and has had numerous email exchanges with her. He did not explain why he felt compelled to do so. Here’s that particular exchange between the two candidates:
That was the exchange that led to Stevens’s tirade against Werner’s PAC support.
“These are PACs, real estate and development PACs that are targeting and looking to buy three seats on the city council,” Stevens said, referring to political action committees, “and it’s all revolving around the so called western expansion, patriotic name, reminiscent of the in 1845 of manifest destiny. This is not manifest destiny. This is to turn multi millionaires into billionaires, and they need three seats, and he’s one of them, and that’s why. And if you look up who’s behind the PACs, and if you read the article online by AskFlagler, he did the research perspective.” He added: “This is not because they believe in his philosophy and what a great guy he is. They expect something. And you don’t donate $35,000 in cash and mailings to somebody and not expect something in return. Period.”
As at the Tiger Bay forum on Sept. 25, Werner did not challenge Stevens’s claims, though they’re not quite accurate. Stevens said his figures were based on Werner’s publicly available campaign finance documents. So far, Werner has taken in just over $11,000. But Stevens is right: the bulk of it is from development-focused political action committees, with few individual donations.
Werner is interested in growth’s effects on the city’s infrastructure. “On the second day that we have the city council meeting that I get in,” he said, “I would like to do to ask the rest of the council if they’d be interested in doing a big evaluation of our infrastructure, finding out where the big needs are, how many years out we are from certain things, of needing major repairs, so that way we can prioritize and plan.”
Of course, the city administration has done that, and has presented those plans. It has done it with roads. It has done it with utilities. It has done it with parks. It has done it with its own public works needs, among other analyses. At almost every turn, the council has either discounted the analyses, challenged the priorities, or cut taxes in such a way that it’s hampered the administration from keeping up with infrastructure demands. At next week’s workshop, the council will again face major infrastructure choices, including a significant step toward expansion of the city’s wastewater capacity, which is critically needed–and now mandated by the Department of Environmental Protection.
Werner’s answer may have been intended to show a candidate ready to get to work. Instead, it showed a candidate out of touch with the council’s very recent history, which Werner does not appear ready to change: while Stevens said that raising taxes may in some cases be necessary, Werner continues to insist that that will not be the case.
Toward the end of the show Stevens was asked about his continuing association with Dennis McDonald, the background GOP operative who rose to prominence running for local elections he’s never won, filing frivolous and maliciously false ethics complaints against local officials, getting declared in contempt by the Attorney General over unpaid fines, and running up those fines, with interest, past the $100,000 mark (they are still owed). In this election, McDonald worked to close at least one of the two Republican primaries for the County Commission by fielding a write-in candidate with no intention of running an actual campaign. Stevens and McDonald were fellow-members of the Ronald Reagan Republican Assemblies a decade ago (it disbanded in 2016), the far-right group that did likewise in 2012 races before some of its members morphed into what became a local Trump club.
“I know Dennis McDonald for 15 years. I haven’t been to his house for dinner, and he hasn’t been to my house for dinner. Are we friendly? Yeah, we’ll have lunch sometimes,” Stevens said. “Do I listen to what he has to say? Yeah, well, just because I become elected, or once elected to the City Council, I have to terminate some friendly relationships, I think that’s unfair. I’m not anybody’s messenger. I can’t be bought. I’m not for sale. And to sum it up, no, I will not terminate a friendly relationship.”
Hear the full show below.
Samuel says
No to any Republican candidate, had enough of the Trumps lies and corruption.
Willy Boy says
Good ole Ray! This guy is a bad penny and should not be elected to any government position. He is a true muckraker with questionable morals. This wanna-be sheriff has been soundly defeated in past elections at the county level. Let’s send him back to Ossining, N.Y.! Any friend of Dennis McDonald is not a friend of mine.
Joe D says
Fortunately I own my retirement home in Flagler Beach, so the Palm Coast City Council election doesn’t TECHNICALLY affect me. But as we’ve all learned in the past, the situations in one of our County jurisdictions DOES affect life in other jurisdictions. Look at the Beach conditions, or the MASSIVE proposed Westward Expansion. Not to mention waste water and storm water management, and road infrastructure.
Unless you are going to drive in and out of Flagler Beach only using A1A, overcrowded County road systems go through ALL of our local jurisdictions. In one week I found myself having to drive into Palm Coast 7 times!
I know the candidates we have are choices Palm Coast must make, but are these candidates the BEST that Palm Coast has to offer? The City Council makes financial and life altering decisions every day, not only for now, but can set policies affecting ALL our Communities for years to come. I would like to think that our choices of candidates would be the CREAM of the CROP.
Unfortunately given the general negative and severely polarized political climate, I can see why many more qualified applicants don’t want the subject themselves (and their families and friends) to almost 24/7 exposure of the most private areas of their lives…I know I wouldn’t want to deal with it, I’m sure many other interested citizens wouldn’t want to deal with the current political climate either, even if they feel they have something to offer in the way of COMMUNITY SERVICE.
Still I’m hoping for the best…as long as there is SIGNIFICANT voter turnout.
Josh Fabean says
To me one of the more important parts of the interview was left out of this summary. Ray Stevens and defended the fact that he is harassing people who donate to Andrew Werner. Andrew mentioned Ray has contacted his donors, and Ray defended it by saying he emailed a widow and he doesn’t know why she felt intimidated and felt the need to contact a lawyer over it.
FlaglerLive says
You are correct. That segment should not have been left out. The article has been updated with that segment, including an audio clip of the exchange. Thank you for pointing it out.
Jim says
Is it too late for a third candidate?
I like living here in Palm Coast. I like the weather, being close to the beach, local restaurants, my neighbors (most of them…) and many other things.
However, clearly there is either something in the water, or how hot and humid it can get here, or something else unidentified that causes the craziest of our citizenship to run for public office. Here we have another Trump Republican ex-cop or a guy who is all for continued expansion all the way to Daytona Beach as our candidates and can’t articulate what he does for a living (is he ashamed?).
I’d rather just see the seat remain vacant.
Backslapping Commission says
WERNER: THE MAN DOTH PROTEST TOO MUCH, METHINKS:
Andrew Werner who is running for District 3 City Council seat
should be totally transparent about his former employment and
the states he lived in from the beginning of his campaign for
office. In his recent radio podcast with candidate Ray Stevens,
Werner was evasive and opaque and stated that he was under
attack. As a school psychologist, “he seemed to have difficulty
expressing himself clearly and directly.” In the postcast, he seemed
extremely concerned with evaluating the city’s infrastructure needs
which was already evaluated and which he was obviously unaware
of. From his responses Werner sounds like a man who has a lot to
hide. Otherwise why would he be reluctant to answer basic questions
about personal nformation that a candidate should be required to
submit. His interest in improving infrastructure seems like a cover
to hide his real plans to increase the building of homes by a candidate
who is heavily backed by realtor and developer interest. We believe that
Werner revealed alot about himself by what he REFUSED to reveal.
And it’s not that good for the future of the Palm Coast Community.
Nathan says
Don’t your have an 83 year old widow to get revenge on, Ray/Dennis?