- November 7, 2024
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Jim Landon gets his hair cut at 5:30 p.m. sharp on the first Tuesday of every month. Looking clean cut, he is able to leave the barber and walk into City Hall in his suit and tie just in time for the City Council meeting. He is never early to the meeting, and that is by design. To Landon, this is game time. It’s time to perform.
Keeping a strict schedule and staying focused are among his secrets to success in his demanding role as city manager of Palm Coast, a job he has held since 2007. Prior to coming here, Landon, 60, was a city manager in Oregon, Missouri and Texas; he has 25 years of experience on the job.
“I learned this a long time ago,” he said in a recent interview at City Hall, overlooking Central Park. “You have to have a certain schedule. With the hair cut, time goes by, and it’s like, ‘Wow, I didn’t realize it had been six weeks since I had a hair cut.’”
He also schedules his time for reading and responding to emails: 6:30 a.m. to 8 a.m. every day. “Email is part of your job,” he said. “It’s how we communicate more than any other way right now. So it has to be considered a daily task. What you find is that if you don’t include that in your schedule, it’s easy not to do it. To expect it just to happen is pretty naïve.”
Jacob Oliva, superintendent of Flagler Schools, sees Landon as a mentor, and the two meet together regularly. Scheduling is one thing Oliva has learned from Landon.
“He’s been a role model for me. He’s someone I can call who understands how government agencies work. You can’t put a price on experience.”
JACOB OLIVA, Flagler Schools superintendent
“As the face of an organization, you have to be a people person,” Oliva said. “My day is always in front of other people, but it’s important to schedule time to work the office and get work done. Even getting to email: It’s not an afterthought or something you do at home. You need to schedule time to make sure you’re catching up.”
There’s another reason Landon comes in at the last minute to council meetings.
“I’m very introverted,” he said. “I prefer being in small groups. Professionally, I can be very outgoing, but that’s the job. There’s a difference between the professional job and the personal Jim Landon.”
If he gets to a meeting a early, he said, “I get a barrage of issues coming my way that are not the topic of the meeting. It’s a matter of not being distracted.”
“I’ve been told I have a fairly strong personality, but to do this job you have to have a backbone.”
JIM LANDON, Palm Coast city manager
He prefers to not use notes when he makes presentations and speaks with City Council at meetings, so he wants to stay focused and not forget what he’s trying to convey.
Landon sees himself as a bridge between the City Council and the city staff.
“I have to be a story teller,” he said. “By telling the story, it’s trying to explain something so that people can understand it, and hopefully it’s interesting so that they’ll listen to it. It’s a talent you have to learn — or at least I had to. If all you had to do was look at the engineer’s report and make a decision, that’s easy, but that’s not how this local government business works. It impacts people. It impacts their lives. That’s really what City Council’s role is.”
