The Palm Coast Yacht Club is giving up on the Holiday Boat Parade, a local fixture for 41 years. The Yacht Club cited burdensome costs and too many obstacles and expectations from the city, all of which have taken the fun out of running it, its organizer says. The Palm Coast City Council today signaled its willingness to take it over and run it as a special event. But it would have to be approved through the coming budget process.
Sarah Ulis has organized the parade on behalf of the Palm Coast Yacht Club for the past nine years, growing it into one of the largest–if not the largest–holiday parade in Florida. Ulis’s devotion to the event kicked off in January and built up over the year with recruitment, publicity, coordination and whatever else it took to herd scores of decorated boats down the Intracoastal Waterway.
Soon after this year’s parade, Ulis resigned. Palm Coast government, she said, was becoming too burdensome to work with, too unreasonable with demands for fees, permits, schedule changes and sheer lack of attention or appreciation for the event. And because the city, Ulis wrote boaters on Monday, “did not appear to see the Parade as a gift but rather as an inconvenience. The financial strain on the Yacht Club to pay for the Parade and the considerable challenges to navigate the City’s increasingly complex rules and regulations, codes, and permit processes, which seemed puzzlingly to mutate every year, has meant the end of the Yacht Club’s involvement with the Parade.”
But it’s just as unquestionable that the Yacht Club could no longer afford to carry the parade on its own.
On Friday, Ulis and Yacht Club Commodore Candyce Schmidt met with Palm Coast Mayor Mike Norris and Acting City Manager Lauren Johnston to discuss the end of the Yacht Club’s involvement. Their original intention was not to hand over the event to the city. But that was the outcome of the meeting: Palm Coast government will be the organizer of the boat parade from now on.
“It simply became a financial drain,” Ulis said in an interview today. Half the club’s income was getting spent on the parade–$5,000, according to the mayor–because of “prohibitive” fees imposed on the club. “Combined with my resignation, there was no one willing or able to take on my duties. The first logical thing to say was: we can’t afford this.” But it wasn’t just the costs. It was the obstacles Ulis encountered at the city. “Every year it’s a different story, every year I have to explain the parade, every year I have to talk to different people, there was no continuity of information.” It was, in sum, “no longer a joy to do.”
Palm Coast City Council member Theresa Pontieri received Ulis’s email. “That was pretty disheartening for me to learn,” Pontieri told her colleagues at the end of today’s council meeting. “I don’t know what the future of the boat parade looks like because of that. But I think Mayor,” she said, addressing Mayor Mike Norris, “based on your words from this dais before, you would probably agree: I think we need to do anything and everything we can to not only try to repair that relationship, but also to make sure that we have a as good, if not better, boat parade in the coming years, as we’ve had in the past.”
Johnston summarized the substance of the meeting on Friday. She said it was determined that the parade “could be a city-run event,” since the Yacht Club was no longer able “due to the expenses for running a special event and the time commitment and all of the volunteer hours.” Johnston said the city would work with Ulis “to make sure that the event still had its character and its charm, and she has a lot of contacts with the boat owners that would want to participate. But it was at their pleasure that they’re just not wanting to be in the business of running the parade anymore.”
Ulis in the interview this morning said there was “some mischaracterization” in the way the Yacht Club’s decision was portrayed. Ulis said she would happily continue to organize the event and at no point felt overwhelmed by its size, the commitment it took or the volunteer hours she devoted.
The city wanted the Yacht Club to pay a fee for using the canals, even though the parade does not use the canals and uns mainly down the Intracoastal Waterway, which is not in the city’s jurisdiction. She said the city required the sort of amenities that go along with special events, including portable toilets and safety measures, neither of which the club had provided in the past, or could now afford, especially since the attendance is always scattered on shorelines. The city also wanted the club to pay for watercraft liability, which would be very expensive. “There’s no way we can quantify the number of people who come to see this. First of all it’s in the dark, you can’t do that. And we can’t charge admission,” Ulis said.
Ulis has been adamant about neither charging admission nor charging boat-registration fees, as most other boat parades do, because that to her would be absurd. “I’m absolutely fanatic about that, because it should be free. Every other boat parade that I know of charges a fee,” she said. “I think it’s silly. It should be just for the fun of it.” But to Ulis, the city misunderstood the meaning and purpose of the boat parade. It referred to the parade as a “boat show,” thought the Yacht Club made money from it, and thought nothing of asking Ulis, as then-Mayor David Alfin did, to change the date of the 2024 boat parade, so it would not clash with the city’s own Starlight Parade in Town Center, even though boat parade schedules are dictated by tides.
It’s not a given that the city will take over the parade. The council must approve of the idea. If it does, the city will run it as a special event under its aegis, drawing up a budget that would become part of this summer’s council budget process.
Norris is supportive of the city taking over. He said running the parade on $5,000 isn’t enough. “With our resources, as far as advertising, getting sponsorships, even discussed a contest for annual Christmas ornament for the boat parade that we can market within the city, our small business owners and stuff like that,” Norris said, “I think it’s grown beyond the Yacht Club, and they’ve disengaged. And I saw that one comment online, and I thought it was a bit disheartening, because I don’t think that was our discussion at all. We think we mutually agreed, and they suggested that they can’t handle it anymore.” He said the Yacht Club did not understand what it took, cost-wise, to run a special event. But he was unequivocal: “They gave up the boat parade.” The item Norris saw online was Ulis’s letter to boaters, which had been posted on Next Door.
“That’s good to hear,” Pontieri said, “because I will tell you from what I did see online, it looked like it was not a very amicable decision, which was super disheartening for me to see. So if the situation was different than that, that does make me happy.
Ulis said Norris declined to be last December’s co-marshal of the parade as he did not ant to share a boat with ex-Mayor David Alfin or with Randy Stapleford, the commissioner representing Flagler County on the Florida Inland Navigation District. But Norris participated in the parade from another boat. He said today that the boat parade will grow and will be planned accordingly, making it an event for the “whole city, county and state, if they want to participate.” Ulis was dubious about the city’s capabilities to run the parade, but she said “it would leave a huge hole in the life of this community to not have a parade.”
Ironically, the city has no boat, Johnston said, though it can work with the Sheriff’s Office, which has always participated in the parade, to resolve that matter. Norris pledged that the lead boat for the next parade will be his own “16-foot skiff with a four horsepower Johnson on the back,” and that the event will be a success.
