The Only Certainty for Palm Coast’s Next City Manager: Council Majority Hiring Him or Her Will Soon Be Gone

As the Palm Coast City Council seeks to hire its next city manager–its sixth in seven years–it is again repeating a pattern that has undermined confidence in the process, either for the council or the eventual candidate, thus giving the better candidates pause even though the last opening for the job drew 112 applicants. The council may yet succeed in hiring one of them by fall. If it does so, the candidate will be sure of only one thing: that the majority hiring him will vanish in less than a year.

It has been a year and a half since the Palm Coast City Council–a very different council–fired City Manager Denise Bevan, replacing her with Interim Lauren Johnston. 

The previous council, four of whose five members are no longer in office (Theresa Pontieri is the exception), opted to hire a consultant, SGR, to recruit for a new manager. The search did not begin until late fall. The four new council members, including mayor Mike Norris, had had no say in the search method. 

A few exceptions aside, the applicants in SGR’s first round were so unimpressive that the application window was extended. The council, in significant internal turmoil, short-listed five names. Then the short-listed applicants started dropping out, one of them–the leading candidate–preferring a posting in one of the most remote villages on the planet, in Alaska, over Palm Coast. 

The last two candidates standing were interviewed. Neither could muster a majority of the council’s vote. The search ended in ignominy. The council started over from scratch, this time asking its own Human Resources Department, headed by Regina Fuller, to lead the recruiting and to catalogue the applicants. 

The position was readvertised for 90 days. The opening drew 112 applicants. The council had its first crack at them last week. But as the process has dragged, once again, by the time a city manager candidate is chosen–if one is chosen–that candidate will have new bosses and new uncertainty within months. 

Pontieri is running for a County Commission seat. Council member Charles Gambaro is running for Randy Fine’s congressional seat. Council member Dave Sullivan, after what will be almost a decade in elected office, just doesn’t want to run again. Gambaro’s and Pontieri’s primary–assuming Pontieri draws an opponent (rumors are flying about an old County Commission hand challenging her)–is in less than a year next Aug. 18. There’ll be competition for the candidates’ attention, both of whom also have full-time jobs. 

That leaves Norris and Council member Ty Miller, who combined have less than two years’ experience in office. Norris’s year, if mostly from self-inflicted wounds, has not been conducive to learning the ropes at City Hall. He’s looking for a city manager more aligned with his break-it-to-fix-it style. He may even get a council majority more to his liking if just two of the three open seats align with him, giving him a murmuring incentive to wait until then to hire a manager instead of going along with one chosen by a lame-duck majority. 

The current majority is looking for a manager more like Johnston, who likely would have had the job if only she’d applied. She’s not interested. She sees the writing on the wall: it’s never stayed there long since 2018, when the imperious Jim Landon was fired. Norris wanted Johnston gone. She’s willing to continue as interim. Depending on the latest crop of applicants and the political realignment ahead, she could end up yet again being the council’s default choice to wait out the unsettled 14 months ahead. 

If not, the next city manager will have yet again been the sort of candidate desperate enough to grab the job, knowing that his or her council majority will have vanished almost as quickly as the moving truck. It’s not usually the best kind of candidate to be left with. 

That was the unspoken context of last week’s city manager hire discussion, the City Council’s first since the last hiring debacle in May. 

This time, the council’s minimum requirements were a bachelor’s degree (not a master’s degree) in public administration and related fields, at least eight years as either a city manager or a department head, or military leadership, or a background in municipal utilities, plus credentials from the International City/County Management Association (ICMA). 

HR Director Renina Fuller prepared a comprehensive spreadsheet that broke down the candidates’ profiles. 

The opening drew 112 applicants, 64 of them from Florida. Ninety had bachelor’s degrees, 69 had master’s.

Despite the broader allowances and the long application window, only one candidate had ICMA credentials (three had state-specific equivalent certifications). Just twenty-two had managed a city or a county, most of them in smaller venues, 39 had been department heads (a relatively low number, considering the pool), and 17 had military leadership experience. 

Norris and Pontieri agreed: a candidate would have to have at least three council members’ votes to move to the next round. Miller was willing to rank them and come up with the top 25. Gambaro had eliminated 110, leaving just two. He’s not interested in the rest. (Norris has over 30.) Pontieri could not be part of the discussion: the meeting had stretched into the afternoon, she had another commitment, but she’d made her point earlier. 

They agreed to what Miller called “a starting point.” The five council members are turning in their top 25 choices (if they have that many). Any of the candidates who have three council members’ nods will then presumably be moved to the next round, though Fuller will not–may not–do more than tabulate the five council members’ choices and present them at an open meeting. She may not rank them, as that would be considered part of a council meeting, which by law may not be done outside of a public meeting. 

Still: at next week’s workshop, on Sept. 9, the council would settle on a list that could have up to 25 names, narrowing the list down to the top eight or so by September 23, based on Johnston’s approach. Those eight or so candidates would be required to turn in more extensive profiles, though it wasn’t yet clear what those profiles would be. They could include self-video presentations, for example. Gambaro also wants the last eight to be background-checked.