- October 30, 2024
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Fighting a public perception that the city government isn’t business-friendly, Palm Coast’s city staff is working to make it easier for businesses to open in Palm Coast.
“We should be looking at ... the value of the company that’s coming in, and also making sure we’re working with them as a partner,” Mayor Milissa Holland said during a council workshop March 10, “Not necessarily as, ‘OK you’re just another number that’s coming in.’”
As part of the city’s “Business Friendly Initiative,” city staff worked for several months to identify areas where the city's commercial permitting and application process is cumbersome or confusing for business owners. The city has been streamlining it, and is now assigning staff members to serve as point people to guide businesses through the procedures.
The city is calling that guided process “BRX,” for “Business Review Extreme.”
It’s intended to solve a number of problems city staff identified — among them, limited follow-up from city staff and a lack of designated city staff person to assist individual businesses, combined with historically heavy-handed compliance procedures, according to a city staff presentation.
City staff also found some areas where city requirements are more stringent than the state building code — for instance, the city requires new certificates of occupancy in cases in which the state doesn’t — and expects to ease those requirements.
The city is now partnering with SCORE, the Service Corps of Retired Executives, which offers mentoring and workshops at the Business Assistance Center, according to the workshop presentation.
Palm Coast hired City Manager Matt Morton in March 2019, and he has not yet had a formal performance evaluation from the City Council.
But his employment agreement requires one annually, and on March 10 the City Council considered options for evaluating him.
Morton presented council members with a sample performance evaluation form to consider.
Mayor Milissa Holland noted that the city had previously not used a formal process for evaluating its manager.
“Thank you for being a city manager that welcomes a public discussion by your five bosses,” Holland said. “I am very much in support of this.”
The seven-page sample form has six pages worth of checkbox-style rating items for dozens of individual performance measures organized under four headings: Assisting council with is policy-making role; internal administration, external relations, and personal accomplishments. Each section has a box for narrative comments.
A separate narrative response section makes up the final page, and asks five open-ended questions about the city manager’s performance. The council will discuss it in a future meeting.
