- October 5, 2024
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Palm Coast and Flagler County's government officials are at odds with one another again, this time over state road construction money. (They've recently disagreed about ambulance placement and fire rescue issues and upgrades to an emergency radio system.)
City Manager Jim Landon said at a City Council workshop May 31, and in emails to the City Council, that the county had "killed" $600,000 in state grant money for right-of-way acquisition for the Old Kings Road widening project by refusing to sign off on the money, which would have been funneled through the county.
The county responded — emailed information to the local press in response to Landon's claims at the city workshop before the workshop was even over — that the city had miscalculated the project costs by $1.2 million and that there were legal provisions to the $600,000 state grant that prevent it from being used the way the city wants to use it.
"Flagler County cannot be pressured by the City staff to improperly take and apply this partial grant funding in violation of State law to hide this mistake," Flagler County Administrator Craig Coffey said in a statement emailed through the county's public information office.
All of the city-county wrangling probably won't ultimately matter. The city will probably still get state money for the project — possibly even more than $600,000, state transportation officials told local officials in emails.
The issue was this: The city wanted to take state money that had initially been offered for right-of-way acquisition for the Matanzas Woods extension project, which was coming in under budget, and instead use it for the Old Kings Road project, which was expected to come in over budget. The Florida Department of Transportation agreed to that.
But the $600,000 had been offered through a program called the Small County Outreach Program, which is for county roads, and County Attorney Al Hadeed advised the county administration that the Old Kings project did not meet the legal requirements for the grant: Matanzas Woods is designated as a county road, but the part of Old Kings Road the city wanted to use the money for wasn't.
There is a deadline to accept the money. It has to be allocated by July 1, and the city's and county's elected boards would need to sign an interlocal agreement for its use by June 17, or the city loses its chance to get that money for this fiscal year. County officials didn't want to sign, concerned about a legal issue.
FDOT official Frank O'Dea, in a May 26 email to Landon, wrote, "I explained to Mr. Coffey that if the county had concerns about the legality of the agreement, they should not sign. I do not have sufficient information to know if the county’s legal concerns are valid, but I must trust that their legal counsel is giving them sound advice."
But there was "good news," as Coffey described it in the header of an email to County Commissioners: "City/SCOP Funding - Good News!!!":
O'Dea told Coffey that "he understood and assured me that the SCOP funding in question could be rolled over and that they would find another way to fund they City’s right-of-way gap, potentially all of it," Coffey wrote in the email.
That email got back to Landon, who wrote in an email to the City Council, "It is hard to believe that the Flagler County Administrator believes that losing a $600,000 State grant for our County is good news."
Coffey hadn't said that the loss of the grant was "good news." He'd simply used the words in the header of an email that described the likelihood of the state funding the entirety of the city's project costs, despite the issue with the $600,000.
And a few paragraphs down in the same email in which he'd complained about Coffey's use of the words "good news," Landon used them himself.
"But now for the really good news," Landon wrote. "I called Mr. O’Dea with FDOT after receiving his email below to discuss our options. He had already started working on other funding possibilities that we could use that would circumvent the need for County approval. He indicated that if we were able to get City Council approval in June, that he would be able to fund our entire ROW acquisition for the widening of Old Kings Road this fiscal year in the amount of approximately $1.2 million."
