- November 17, 2024
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The local Tea Party tried to get the message out, imploring members to come to a May 19 Palm Coast City Council meeting and speak up in support of Councilman Steven Nobile, who faced resistance from other council members when he pushed for a review of the city’s charter last week.
But despite the effort — and an emailed message with an opening line that read, “Steve Nobile, our member and City Councilman for Palm Coast needs help!” — the audience at the meeting was largely empty, undermining Nobile’s statements that “the people,” as he put it repeatedly during a previous meeting, want such a review.
Tea Party member Steve Wolf spoke in support of a review, calling it “part of a healthy governmental practice to expose the charter to public review on periodic basis.” It has not been reviewed since the city’s incorporation 15 years ago. One other member of the public spoke in support of a charter review, as did long-time resident Vince Liguori.
But that was it.
There was no large crowd of people gathered to press the council to review the charter, a fact that Jack Carall — a resident who’s attended council meeting so diligently that the council held a special celebration last year for his 90th birthday — picked up on it in his public comments.
“You said ‘the people’ want it,” he said, addressing Nobile. “Well, I don’t see the people. When somebody wants something, they come in with the orange shirts, the green shirts, the blue shirts, and they ask for it. Now you’re telling me that, you’re saying that the people want it, but I don’t hear the people. I don’t see the people. They got two people that have gone up — that’s out of 56,000 people. … Let’s see a face, and let’s see somebody come up and say, ‘This is what I want.’”
Carol Mikola, a resident who has been a sharp critic of Nobile’s supporters in the Tea Party and the Ronald Reagan Republican Assembly of Flagler County, also spoke, saying that although Nobile “gave the impression a charter review is a big issue among his constituents … from his first day in office up until that meeting last week, he had not received or sent one email from anyone about the city charter.”
That assertion came from a records check though the city clerk’s office, which has access to all council members’ official city email addresses. Nobile, as of May 18, had received two emails at his official email address about the charter issue, but both came in after the previous week’s council meeting.
Mikola, who hadn’t attended the previous meeting but said she’d read some of the council’s dialogue about the charter in the Palm Coast Observer and on FlaglerLive.com, also criticized the way in which Nobile had addressed the matter.
“There’s nothing wrong with asking for a charter review, absolutely nothing wrong,” she said. “There’s also nothing wrong with the mayor and council asking questions. However, I would have expected that any council member bringing this up would have done some research on the topic and would have been willing and able to respond to other council members without getting ‘agitated.’”
She was referring to Nobile’s manner during the meeting last week, which had prompted Councilman Bill McGuire to ask Nobile why he was “agitated.” Nobile had replied, “I’m agitated because we’re trying to leave the people out of the process of them making a decision on their charter for how their government works. That’s what I’m upset about.”
This week, after Mikola’s statements, Councilman Jason DeLorenzo said he thought Nobile’s passion had been mistaken as agitation. Nobile said that was true; it was just his way of speaking, he said.
“When you come to my house, you think everybody’s fighting, but it’s really just a conversation,” he said.
City Attorney Bill Reischmann, responding to a suggestion by Liguori that the city lower the threshold for residents wanting to petition the city for a charter review from 25% — the percentage required by a line in the charter which states, “At least 25 percent of the qualified electorate of the city shall have the power to petition the council to propose an ordinance or to require reconsideration of an adopted ordinance, or to propose an amendment to this charter,”— to 10%, the requirement listed in state law, said that the state law requirement of 10% would already take precedence.
That was misreported in last week’s edition of the Palm Coast Observer, and elsewhere, which stated that the charter requirement of 25% took precedence.
The 25% applies to ordinances, Reischmann said, but not to amending the charter.
Nobile suggested a charter review to amend that line in the charter to bring it into accordance with the state law, since “people in Palm Coast are being misled by reading the charter, and by our current media, who read the charter.”
Reischmann replied that a full charter review isn’t necessary to change the offending line: The city could do that through an ordinance and an election, as it did when it changed its elections from odd-numbered years to even-numbered years, he said.
Nobile, in his comments at the end of the meeting and in reply to Mikola and Carall, said that when he speaks to constituents, he doesn’t vet them by club or party affiliation.
“When I talk to people, I don’t ask them what member of what club they are. I don’t ask them if they’re a Democrat, I don’t ask them if they’re a Republican, I talk to everyone. …I’m here to represent all of Palm Coast,” he said.
Turning to Carall, he joked, “Jack, I’m getting your phone number, so all the phone numbers I get I can forward to you, so you can hear what I hear.”
Nobile suggested the city change the times for council business meetings — which now alternate between 9 a.m. and 6:30 p.m. — so that they’re always in the evening, to make it easier for working people to attend.
But he didn’t continue to press the charter issue.
“I still do not understand the reluctance for allowing for what a very large majority of cities already do on a regular basis, which is a charter review, which is done by the residents of that particular city. That’s all I have,” he said.
