At Tiger Bay, a Smart-Urbanism Expert Gives a Nice Slide Show of Great Cities, But Local Relevance Is a Puzzle

Kathy Reichard-Ellavsky, the former president of the Palm Coast Historical Society and a leading if unrequited champion of arts and culture in the city and the county, was ecstatic at what she’d just heard.

“You are singing my song,” Reichard-Ellavsky told Sandra Baer, The featured speaker at today’s Flagler Tiger Bay Club lunch at Hammock Dunes Club. Baer is CEO of Personal Cities, what appears to be a one-person shop focused on a blend of marketing, corporate coaching and smart-city planning. (The website was not accessible today.) Baer had just run through a list of choice, livable cities. 




“I can’t tell you how thrilled I was to see arts and culture at the top of your list,” Reichard-Ellavsky said, “but I need to tell everyone in this room that you have identified an area that has been typically at the bottom of every funding list, at least in this county, in my six years as a volunteer.” The room, a sold-out crowd for Tiger Bay’s monthly lunch, included many of the local elected officials who vote on what has been very stingy arts and culture budgets. 

“How? How do we get the stakeholders to pay attention to this important matter before our society?” Reichard-Ellavsky said. “I’ve tried and tried. Maybe you as a professional, as someone that they will listen to, but me as a lowly volunteer who works over 30 hours a week for no pay. I haven’t gotten the message out there, please help.” (Palm Coast government last November voted on a plan to charge a small fee on developments of a certain size to generate revenue for public art.)

Baer’s suggestion:  “Do a better job of communicating what’s what’s up,” though Reichard-Ellavsky is not short on communication skills. “You just have to keep it up,” is as far as Baer would go. She had repeated that mantra for much of her talk. 




“I want to talk to you about your opportunity to imagine your community,” she had told the audience, noting she’d been working with cities for a quarter century. “Every community around the world is having to do that, having to reshape, redefine, rethink, what is our city? What makes us proud to live there? Why are we living there?” 

She spoke a lot of buzzy concepts no one would dispute–“the idea is to take action, to have bigger, bolder actions to move your city forward,” or “a smart city is economically vibrant. That means it knows how to make money,” or “it’s a city that hears all the voices.” It attracts talent and encourages it to live here.  “We have to think differently. You have to open your heart and your mind to new ideas.”

She wanted to correct the misconception that a “smart city” is about technology. “Technology is the enabler. It is the underpinning of a smart city,” she said. But when she started illustrating her ponts with examples, it’s as if the room went on a foreign trip, far, far away from a Palm Coast with which Baer did not seem to be very familiar beyond the name. 

Bahrain was first. “You should all go,” she said, pronouncing the name perfectly but mistaking it for a city: it’s a small island country about half the size of Flagler County, with an oil-and-gas-driven GDP of $46 billion (Flagler County’s was $4 billion last year). “I ran a panel session that had tourism, the head of water parks, the head of shopping malls, the head of city operations. They’re all interested in making their city more livable,” she said. It wasn’t clear what Bahrain–or Manama, its capital–could have in common with Palm Coast or Flagler County beside tourism. 




She spoke of the importance of sports and entertainment complexes, though when she asked what can be done along those lines in Palm Coast, she heard pickleball, golf, hiking and–beer (a local sport, obviously). Palm Coast had hopes of crafting a public private partnership to build a $93 million sports complex on its future west side, but that hope was dashed in November when voters rejected an amendment to the city charter that would have enabled it. Put another way: some of the elected officials who’d have applauded Baer were booted off the council at election time by an electorate jaundiced from growth. 

Baer flitted from one subject to another, one slide to another, repeatedly polling her audience with questions that had the most tenuous connection to a talk without a gravity center: “How many of you communicate, and how are you communicating?” “How many of you are on social media?” “And think about, you know, the pride in your community. Who’s proud to live here?”  

Then came talk of Malaga in Spain, a city more populous than Miami with fabulous museums. Melbourne, Australia, a city of 5 million with a fabulous transportation system. Copenhagen, a city of 630,000 with fabulous everything, “the most sustainable city in the world,” in Baer’s words. 

Then came Dublin and something about an art installation at Washington’s Kennedy Center last fall called Dvorak Dreams, a cultural tourist attraction based on the music of  “a very famous composer and an artist out of Poland” (Dvorak was Czech) that would draw people who’d be “mesmerized by this crazy miasma of color and sound. Very interesting tourist attraction, right?” She did not speak of the cost, or the substantial corporate sponsorships necessary to make the year-long project come to life. 




Another slide: “This is where my daughter lives. My daughter lives in Vincenza Italy. Anybody been there? Near Venice. Anybody’s been to Venice? Yeah, okay, all right. Well, anyway, this is their Christmas sun and light show. A lot of cities have these.” So does Palm Coast, but within its means. 

So it went, as Baer then wrapped up with more generalities no one in the audience had not heard before, often in the same room: “ Listen to other voices, listen to people that you normally don’t hang out with. Get out of your silo,” she said, in essence echoing one of the principles of the Tiger Bay Club. 

“How many of you have formed a new relationship with someone in the last six months?” Baer asked. “New company, new person, new people. Good. Well, every hand should go up, because the idea is to get out there to be with people that don’t necessarily think alike and learn from them, and listen to them, question them. That’s what’s going to change your city. Embrace the uncertainty.”

If it’s one thing Palm Coast embraced at the last election, it was that, while a mayor cut out of Baer’s utopian playbook was unelected. Kathy Reichard-Ellavsky, may have to keep looking for answers elsewhere. 

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