- November 17, 2024
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Things can get nasty in the field for a code enforcement officer in Palm Coast. “It can be brutal out there,” Supervisor Barbara Grossman said. “We’ve had people show us guns, we’ve had animals let loose on us. One individual tried to pull an officer out of his vehicle. And then there are people out there that say, ‘Thank you.’”
Palm Coast’s Code Enforcement Section enforces more restrictions, and does so more proactively, than the neighboring municipalities of Flagler Beach and Bunnell, or unincorporated Flagler County. Its code enforcement section has 13 employees to Bunnell’s one, the county’s two, and Flagler Beach’s one employee and a volunteer. And, unlike the county or other municipalities, Palm Coast’s code enforcement relies heavily on its officers making rounds, looking for violations: Each officer drives every street in the city at least twice per month, Grossman said, racking up 600-900 miles per month per city vehicle each.
At the heart of the difference is a matter of philosophy that some residents love and others can’t stand. Palm Coast, unlike its neighbors, is a community whose formation owes much to the efforts of a single company — ITT — which once owned the land and sculpted a community with a particular look, bound together by a set of codes that dictate house-paint color; fence height, color and material; and what types of vehicles may be kept in local driveways and for how long. Less restrictive than homeowners associations’ codes but more restrictive than those of the surrounding cities, Palm Coast’s codes give the city a particular look and sense of identity.
“If you ask me why I moved to Palm Coast, I’m going to tell you it’s because, at that time, it was very nice,” said Grossman, who moved to Palm Coast in 1992, before the city’s incorporation. “It was a clean city. I mean, if you go to Orlando, or you go to Jacksonville, I think one of the first things you notice is signage. Signage everywhere. As you go down our main parkway, you see that it’s clean, it’s preserved. Those are the things that I think brought people here. It’s a nice place to live.”
Palm Coast Garden Club member Jane Villa-Lobos moved to Palm Coast in 1998 in part for its beauty, she said. A retired Smithsonian botanist, Villa-Lobos spends hours caring for a lovingly landscaped yard — her bromeliads alone number in the hundreds — and she’s sometimes reported unsightly code violations.
“I like that there are rules, so we don’t have people’s RVs and boats parked in their driveways, and people servicing their cars,” she said.
‘This is beautiful’
Palm Coast Mayor Jon Netts chose the city for its appearance, too. The story is one he tells often. His wife’s parents had retired to a Florida community — he won’t say where — in the ’70s, and he came down from his home state of New Jersey to visit them. He wasn’t impressed.
“I remember going back to New Jersey saying, ‘My God! That is the ugliest, tackiest thing I have ever seen. It is awful.’” He couldn’t help generalizing to Florida, “And I went back to New Jersey and told everybody how terrible it was there.” Years later, one of his friends retired and announced a decision to move to Florida. “And I said, ‘Oh, Bob, what a terrible idea,’” Netts said. But it happened, and the friend invited him to visit. He did. “He picked us up at Daytona, and he drove us up in the car, and I said, ‘Wow, where are we?’ And he said, ‘Palm Coast.’ And I said, ‘This can’t be Florida. This is beautiful.’”
Netts served on the Code Enforcement Board after the city’s incorporation — ultimately becoming its chairman — before running successfully for City Council and later being elected mayor.
“I guess I’m as guilty as the next guy in saying: ‘I like what’s here. Let’s keep it this way,’” he said, “Now, there’s always this balance between private property rights and public rights. Some people say, ‘Well, I can do anything I want.’ No, you can’t. It’s kind of where you draw the line.”
Code enforcement has long been a hot topic here, coming repeatedly before the City Council. “If there’s been one recurring discussion that has been at City Council, it’s been these kinds of code enforcement restrictions: What should we allow, what shouldn’t we allow, allowing for the appropriate balance between private property rights and community rights,” Netts said. “It’s a judgment question. It’s not a hard and fast rule, where you can look it up in the dictionary and say, ‘Aha. Here’s where you draw the line.’”
‘It’s all about choices’
The Palm Coast ethos — tight restrictions, policed by neighbors and by a cadre of officers — isn’t for everyone.
Bunnell City Commissioner Elbert Tucker lives on the county’s west side, out in Bunnell farm country near County Road 305. A tall, rangy man with an Old Florida accent, he wears jeans and leather cowboy boots to work at his insurance office at the intersection of C.R. 305 and C.R. 302, and lives a rural life with few restrictions. He can’t imagine living a city life — the closest he ever came, he said, was a stint in the Army on a base where the officers required soldiers to keep their lawns cut and watered.
After a day at work, he shows off a metal barn, built on his agricultural property back around 1985.
“If you were to build this building in Palm Coast, you would have impact fees that cost you more than what this barn cost,” he said. “There were no permits needed for this barn. That’s by statute. Not by local law — it’s by the law of the state of Florida. Here’s what the thinking is: If a person’s going to build something here, they’re not going to build it so it’s going to blow away.”
He’s also adding a carport to his home, a process that requires a single, one-time fee and no onsite inspections, he said.
“We don’t need permits for every little thing, so we don’t need to keep going back and forth to Bunnell, to ask, ‘Can we do this? Or can we do that?’”
Of course, the carport isn’t visible to any neighbors. Nor are Tucker’s three tractors, or the blue ’84 pickup truck he’s working on in his driveway.
Neighbor trouble in Tucker’s neck of the woods might involve a neighbor’s cows entering his lawn through an unlatched gate, a scenario that happened to Tucker recently. He was in his kitchen one morning when he looked out the window and saw them in his front yard. “They were all over, grazing the grass,” he said. He hasn’t cleaned up the cow paddies yet; he’s waiting for them to dry.
He’s waiting for drier weather to mow the front lawn, too. “I mowed this grass last Saturday, I believe,” he said. “And if we were in Palm Coast, somebody would turn me in because it’s already grown up too high.”
But out here, who’s looking?
It’s that kind of scale — the vast size of the tracts of land — that makes the rules governing unincorporated western Flagler County so different from those in a city like Palm Coast, said Flagler County Commissioner Nate McLaughlin, a Palm Coast resident whose district includes the rural west.
“Out in the unincorporated areas, especially on the west side of the county, it’s primarily agricultural land,” he said. “There’s a lot of distance between the homes. You tend not to be an annoyance to your neighbor if you park your motor home or whatever. In Palm Coast, you have higher density, and therefore a different level of requirements.”
It’s an issue in which there’s no right or wrong, he said.
“It’s all about lifestyle choices. Ultimately, it’s like the whole reason that Palm Coast became a city was for a higher level of service than what the unincorporated areas had at the time. And that’s not only fire and safety, but also includes your land development and your code enforcement. And how strict that goes is really up to the citizenry. The citizenry really chooses what they’re willing to live with and what they’re not.”
Flagler County’s diversity, McLaughlin said, gives residents a variety of opportunity to chose how they want to live by picking where they want to live.
“I think we do our due diligence, and choose the lifestyle that we’re looking for,” he said. “There are people in New York City that wouldn’t dream of living anywhere else, and people on 100 acres of unincorporated that couldn’t dream of living anywhere else. And that’s the beauty of America. That’s really the patchwork quilt that makes up our nation, and it makes us Flagler County. We’re such a diverse community. So there really is, in Flagler County, the opportunity for people to live the lifestyle that they want to live. It’s all there. It all about choices.”
And in between the two extremes is Flagler Beach, where residents might get cited for leaving junked cars in their driveway, but have more leeway in matters like home color choices or fence styles than Palm Coast residents do.
“I think we’re pretty liberal,” Flagler Beach City Commission Chairwoman Kim Carney said. “I’m happy with where we are. I get very few calls about code ordinances or neighbor problems, or a complaint. I think we deal with them expediently. … We do a lot of oral or written notifications before it goes to citation, so I think people get trained or they get educated on the first go-around, and hopefully it gets cleared up then. But I don’t see a lot of people battling the city over a code issue.”
Enforcement
In Palm Coast, not everyone’s happy about the city’s numerous code restrictions.
Many residents commenting on Facebook on a Palm Coast Observer story about fence code changes called the codes too strict, and wrote letters to the editor calling the restrictions “unreal,” “ridiculous” and “onerous.”
One man, Al Horn, wrote a letter saying he’d moved to Palm Coast and received a code violation notice about an overgrown lawn before the shipping container with his lawnmower arrived. He went out and bought a new one and mowed the lawn, and now has two mowers.
Code Enforcement Supervisor Barbara Grossman said the city will make allowances for cases like that.
“It’s communication,” she said. If the city knows there’s good reason a person isn’t in compliance, it can work with them.
She gave an example: One homeowner with a water-damaged house has had a pod in their driveway for months to store their belongings while the work on the house continues. The resident told code enforcement officers, who’ve defended the person when neighbors complained.
She said that the violation process that can result in a fine usually doesn’t. “Normally you would receive a courtesy notice. It could escalate to a warning notice … and if you still were not in compliance, then you would be scheduled for the next available code board,” she said.
Even then, she said, a charge against a first-time offender would likely be dismissed if it was resolved before the hearing date, and most hearings don’t lead to a fine. The board heard 561 cases last year but issued just 81 fines. (Those who appeared at the board still had to pay a $50-$70 administrative fee.)
Still, she said, there are people who have a bone to pick with the Code Enforcement Section. One man who was cited decided to get back at the city by calling in 5,000 violations over a six-month period. Code enforcement officers are supposed to respond to each complaint within 24 hours. “We were running ragged. It was horrible,” Grossman said. “Fortunately that individual has left our area.”
And officers don’t dare knock on a resident’s door to talk to them about a complaint. Too dangerous.
But most residents seem to be open to staying in compliance, and many like the city’s tight codes, Grossman said. In fact, about 60% of the cases come from neighbor complaints. Overgrown conditions and commercial vehicles in driveways are the top complaints.
For the city’s staff, City Spokeswoman Cindi Lane said, “There’s really no downtime. There’s always another report to look into. There’s a line waiting.”
This past Sunday, Grossman said, there were 17 complaints submitted through the city’s website: about a pod left in a driveway, a trailer in a driveway, trashcans visible, overgrown conditions and erosion into a saltwater canal. They came from the B-, L-, Z-, P- and C-sections.
Residents want their city to look nice, Grossman said.
“I think the beauty of Palm Coast is that we are a pretty city,” she said. “We do have our code of ordinances. I just think that it’s a nice place to live. Yes, they have rules. But I think that’s what brought us all here.”
