- November 7, 2024
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The city’s radio show was supposed to start March 4. The idea was that the city's mayor, Milissa Holland, would host a weekly, half-hour show about city issues on WNZF, and the city would pay $10,000 to Flagler Broadcasting for 40 weeks of airtime.
But it may not happen after all: City Council members weren't told about the show beforehand, and some said they weren't happy about the idea, or the fact that they'd learned of it only after it was mentioned by the station's general manager during a show the previous Friday, and became the subject of a news story on the local news site FlaglerLive.com.
Discussing the issue during the city's regular Feb. 28 City Council workshop, council members blamed the city's manager, Jim Landon, for not telling the council about the radio show proposal earlier, and two council members got into a spat about whether the show would be a proper use of city money.
"When I heard this ... I couldn’t believe you would do this without bringing it up to the council," City Councilman Steve Nobile said to Landon at the council's Feb. 28 workshop.
Nobile was the council's most vocal opponent of the show. He said the problem with the idea was not the money, per se, but the fact that the Landon hadn't told the council about the show beforehand, and that the show would be giving the mayor a platform that other council members didn’t have, with the city paying for it.
The mayor, like the rest of the council, is an elected official, and exposure can influence voters.
Holland said she'd never intended for the show to be a platform to give her opinion, but had planned to use it to talk about city events and educate local residents.
Nobile said that even if that were the case, residents would still perceive it as "the Milissa Holland show."
But Councilman Nick Klufas disagreed with Nobile, and Nobile raised his voice and lashed out at Klufas.
"It’s going to give undue credit ... to one member of the council, and that is not proper," Nobile said.
"She is the mayor," Klufas countered.
"Doesn't matter," Nobile replied.
"It does, though," Klufas said.
Nobile said it did, raising his voice. Klufas asked him why he was yelling.
"Don’t shush me," Nobile replied. "Say what you want to say. I’ll talk how I want to talk."
"No, we’re going to have an adult conversation. Lets’ just converse," Klufas said.
Nobile sighed. "The little baby 20-year-old is going to tell me were going to have an adult conversation," he said. "Say your piece, and let me say my piece, and don’t tell me how to talk."
Klufas is 28, and the council’s youngest member.
They continued, each asking the other "are you done?"
"Oh, Christ," Nobile said. "You know what? I’ll stop yelling. Now finish your thought."
"You were speaking about — you were yelling —” Klufas said.
"Holy (profanity)," Nobile said. "I am against this. This is not proper. This will be the Milissa Holland Show, and that’s how it will be perceived by the people, and that will give undue credit to a single council member, and we're going to be paying for that. So this is all a bad idea.”
Nobile said the city could have its spokeswoman, Cindi Lane, host the show, or have someone else host the show and invite each council member come in for an appearance, but shouldn’t have it hosted entirely by any one council member.
The radio show wasn’t on the City Council’s agenda for the Feb. 28 workshop, but Landon had raised the issue in his comments near the worksop’s conclusion after local resident Vincent Liguori asked about it during the workshop’s public comment period.
Landon replied defensively, calling FlaglerLive’s reporting “misinformation” but not pointing out anything in the story as factually incorrect. (See the sidebar at left for details.)
Liguori’s questions, Landon said, “just highlights, in my opinion, all the misinformation out there all the time, and how something that we do day in and day out now is twisted, and people who are misinformed go and blog about it.”
Landon said that the idea of the radio show was that it would be a way to reach residents about what’s going on in the city. He mentioned some of the ways the city spreads information about local events: Posting information in the City Hall lobby, on the city’s website, fliers and more. Sometimes the city buys radio advertising, he said, and it also buys advertising space in the Palm Coast Observer.
But, Landon said, “It doesn’t matter how much we try to let people know what we’re doing; it’s difficult to try to get the word out to everybody.”
Landon explained how the idea of the radio show had come about: The radio station, he said, had approached Holland about doing a regular show. Holland brought the idea to Landon, and said she would be willing to host it.
Landon discussed the idea with city staff members. Flagler Broadcasting said it would give the city a discount if it paid for 40 weeks, instead of month-to-month. Landon negotiated down to a price of $10,000.
That’s not enough money that the issue would be required to go before City Council for a vote. The money would come out of the city’s recycling fund — money that the city gets back from waste contractor WastePro after WastePro sells the city’s recycling waste — which is expected to bring in about $101,000 this year. The show seemed like a positive thing, a way to get more exposure for the city about events and about safety issues like preparing for fire season or hurricane season, Landon said.
“This would be another avenue,” Landon said. “And how it becomes a negative is beyond me.”
Landon said he thought that impression was due to “misinformation.”
But he did acknowledge some fault — saying he’d made a mistake and should have spoken to the council earlier — though he qualified his statement by calling it Monday-morning quarterbacking.
He also said he had planned to come to the City Council, for ideas for the show.
Nobile wanted clarification.
“You were going to talk to us after it was done here, about what we should put on the show,” Nobile said.
“I think that’s probably fair as to where we were at, yes,” Landon said. “And that’s where I’m saying we made the mistake.”
Landon said the issue was not a done deal. A Flagler Broadcasting flier for the agreement for the show listed it as being on Sundays and starting March 5, not on Saturdays and starting March 4, as the city had preferred. No contract had yet been signed.
“And now that some negative people want to try to make this negative, and then twist it as if it’s something it wasn’t, we don’t have to go through with it,” he said. “Maybe it isn’t a good idea.”
City Councilwoman Heidi Shipley said that when she'd asked Landon about minor issues before, he'd always suggested bringing them to the council. She couldn’t imagint that if she'd said she wanted to do a radio show, Landon would have told her to just go ahead and do it, and then talk to the council after the fact
"I felt as though that never would've flown for me,” she said. And if people weren’t getting the message with all the other ways the city has put information out there, she said, spending another $10,000 to have a radio show seemed like a waste of money.
Klufas said that whenever Holland has been on the radio in the past as a guest, there have been constructive arguments about public issues. And that $10,000 total, he said, broke down to $250 per week.
City Councilman Bob Cuff said he thought the entire conflagration about the radio show was much ado about nothing.
The criticisms of the show seemed to be driven by the idea that the city would effectively be spending $10,000 a year to give the mayor 30 minutes a week of free campaign time, he said
“That was the perception, and that was the outrage,” Cuff said.
And any time a news organization highlights a single figure about city spending, Cuff said, that can incite public anger. He mentioned seeing someone at a recent city event with a rubber ducky that the city had handed out — one of the little tchotchkes stamped with a city logo and passed out at official events. If a newspaper ran a story “breathlessly announcing” that the city had spent, say, $250 on rubber duckies, Cuff said, 150 people might comment on their website that the city was “spending like drunken sailors or something.”
“I think it’s easy to highlight what, to me, is a relatively small amount of money,” he said. “That’s not really the point. It’s the public perception at this point. … I think it’s a good idea, terribly presented.”
The city’s staff will draw up various options for how the radio show could proceed, and present those possibilities to the City Council for a vote at its regular March 7 meeting.
