Still on Warpath, Palm Coast Mayor Files Records Requests Targeting City Manager’s Communications 

On June 3, Palm Coast Mayor Mike Norris participated in the rededication of City Hall’s council chamber as the Jon Netts Community Wing. Netts had served as a council member and mayor for  11 years before his death in 2021, a tenure marked by an august dignity for the office and arms-length reverence for city staff. 

On June 10, in an unprecedented inquisition into the city’s top staff by its own mayor, Norris filed a public record request, seeking to know every communication–email, text, phone message–Acting Palm Coast City Manager Lauren Johnston has had with Chief of Staff Jason DeLorenzo, local developers, county and sheriff’s officials, local media and others, from the day of his election–Nov. 6–to the present. 

Anyone may file a public record request on any public official, most of whose records, including phone and written communications, are open for inspection. It is unusual–and in Flagler County governments, all but unheard of, if not inappropriate–that an elected official would seek with such sweep what amounts to an interrogative of his own city manager’s administrative paper trail, especially in light of his recent censure for administrative interference and other misconduct. 

Norris attempted to fire Johnston and DeLorenzo in a private meeting earlier this year, a violation of the city charter that resulted in an independent investigation and the City Council’s censure of the mayor: he is barred from interfering with the management of the city beyond contact with the city manager. The censure does not appear to have altered his tactics. It has only redirected them. 

Norris refuses to have all but the most cursory contact with Johnston. Though his request was drafted to Johnston, he emailed it to Kaley Cook, the city clerk. 

Norris, who has repeatedly called the censure and other criticism of his mayorship a “witch hunt,” requested Johnston’s communications and related documents with DeLorenzo, Rayonier Real Estate Development Director Paul Rice, Douglas Properties’ Jeff Douglas and Walker Douglas, County Tourim Director Amy Lukasik, Palm Coast land use attorney Michael Chiumento, Flagler County Sheriff’s Chief Mark Strobridge—now the interim assistant city manager–Sheriff Rick Staly, the Sheriff’s Office’s Brian Finn, who is the city’s liaison with the agency, FlaglerLive Editor Pierre Tristam, the Palm Coast Historical Society Director Reasa Pabst, and Danielle Anderson, who is a member of the Flagler County Cultural Council and runs Flagler Newsweekly, among other responsibilities. 

Several of the names on his list are among those the independent investigator interviewed. Aside from media contacts who are caught in Norris’s conspiratorial web of allegations, it is unclear why other names are on the list, including sheriff’s personnel, though the request was placed a week after Norris learned that Johnston was bringing Strobridge on to be her assistant manager for a few months. Norris had been on vacation for a long stretch and was not consulted on the matter, though he has declined consultations with Johnston for months regardless. 

“I remain at the pleasure of council and accessible to information including the mayor,” Johnston said in a text today. “I have offered to meet with the mayor and assist with any questions he may have but he has not responded.”

Norris’s was a huge request. Cook on June 16 informed him that she’d identified 2,949 records and that it would take about 41 hours to review them all to ensure no information exempt from the state’s public record law was included. The review would be conducted at the hourly rate of $41.96, resulting in a cost estimate of $1,720. (Though allowed to charge the lowest-necessary hourly rate to review records, it isn’t uncommon for local governments to inflate the cost of inordinate requests, both to be on the safe side of an estimate, but also–and not uncommonly–out of irritation or pushback.) 

“Please provide me a cost estimate for just text messages from her city and personal phone(s),” Norris wrote back three minutes later. 

There were some 400 messages that–somewhat improbably: text messages average the length of little more than badly written haikus–would take 6.5 hours to review, at a cost of $273. There were no further exchanges about the cost, and in fact the city confirmed that no records have been pulled since Norris did not follow up. 

In the interim, he learned last Friday that FlaglerLive had requested his requests–we cc’d him, both because he is the primary custodian his own record and as a heads up that we were making the inquiry. FlaglerLive’s record request was limited to Norris’s requests and his exchanges about them only, not whatever records he may have received, though anything he would have paid for would subsequently be available to anyone at no cost, since the city is not allowed to double-charge for a service already accomplished.