- November 18, 2024
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A lawsuit filed in June against the County Commission by a group calling itself the Flagler-Palm Coast Watchdogs does not belong in circuit court, Judge Dennis Craig ruled as he dismissed the case at a Thursday, Sept. 4 hearing.
But the matter isn’t over: Joshua Knight, the attorney for the Flagler-Palm Coast Watchdogs, said in court that he plans to file a new suit, with new facts. Knight had wanted Craig to allow him to amend the lawsuit he’d brought in June, rather than require him to file a new one.
But the amendment would have changed the facts of the case. Finding that improper — Craig told Knight in court that the new facts seemed to be “apples and oranges compared to what your original complaint is” —Craig dismissed the June lawsuit with prejudice, meaning it cannot be brought again in its current form.
The dismissal was a jurisdictional matter. County Attorney Al Hadeed had argued that the case brought by Knight belonged in the Florida Commission of Ethics, not in circuit court. Craig, at the Thursday hearing, agreed.
The complaint filed in the June suit said that County Commissioner Barbara Revels had an undisclosed conflict of interest when she voted with the commission in favor of buying the old hospital building on State Road 100 for a new Sheriff’s Operations Center location.
Revels holds $100,000 in shares of Intracoastal Bank and has a line of credit with it, and the bank’s president, Bruce Page, is one of three partners who owned the hospital property. Revels had disclosed the line of credit and her stock in the bank in annual financial disclosure forms, but she hadn’t mentioned it as a conflict of interest before the 4-1 County Commission vote for the hospital purchase.
The matter at the heart of the new lawsuit Knight said he intends to file is different: Knight’s motion to amend states that Knight “has been presented with allegations that one or more county commissioners involved in the vote concerning the subject property illegally polled other commissioners as to their intended vote,” violating the state’s open government laws.
Hadeed called that allegation “an entirely different cause of action,” and said Knight should not be able to “use a complaint that is founded on no subject matter in the court as a vehicle to conduct discovery in order to assert potential new causes of action."
The Flagler-Palm Coast Watchdogs was created in early June of this year, but its membership beyond registered agent Dan Bozza, a former vice president of the Ronald Reagan Republican Assemblies of Flagler County, is unclear.
Knight also recently represented failed County Commission candidate Dennis McDonald, another Ronald Reagan Republican Assemblies member, in a failed lawsuit against the city of Palm Coast.
Judge Craig, in an order granting the city's motion to have McDonald and Knight pay at least a portion of the city's legal fees arising from that case, wrote, "the court finds that (McDonald) or his attorney knew or should have known that the allegations in the complaint were not supported by the material facts necessary to establish the claims ... which should have been obvious."
Knight said after the Sept. 4 hearing that he plans to file the new lawsuit against the County Commission within a week or so.
BOX: Who are the Flagler-Palm Coast Watchdogs?
Flagler-Palm Coast Watchdogs registered agent Dan Bozza said in an interview that he was the group's only officer, and that it has no formal members in the sense of sign-up sheets or membership dues.
He used the word “we” to refer to decisions the Watchdogs made, but, asked if he could enumerate who makes up the “we,” said, “I can, but I won’t.”
Of the Watchdogs’ attorney’s allegation in court that County Commissioners had illegally polled one another before the hospital vote, Bozza said, “I think they all, at one time, may have been (polling eachother), but I don’t have any proof of that.”
He said he’d decided Commissioners must have spoken privately about the vote “just simply by the way they operate. … They do whatever they want to do.”
Bozza said he’d formed the Watchdogs because he was “Fed up with the way the local governments operate in this county and this city, that either they don’t know what the Florida laws are, or they don’t care.”
He said local government bodies don’t advertise their meetings widely enough ahead of time — he said the county puts a flyer announcing upcoming meetings in the Government Services Building and another in the County Courthouse, and that’s it — and that they “hold a workshop, take a five-minute break, reconvene in general session, and then vote on what the did in the workshop,” not allowing residents adequate time to voice their opinions.
In fact, government meetings, County Commission meetings included, are announced ahead of time on the websites of local government bodies, and the agendas and backup documentation for those meetings are posted in advance.
The Palm Coast City Council holds workshops and general business meetings on alternating Tuesdays.
The County Commission’s regularly scheduled Monday meetings are business meetings, with workshops scheduled intermittently for various issues. Matters that require a vote usually come before the commission at least two times.
For city and county meeting schedules, see palmcoastgov.com and flaglercounty.org.
