Flagler and Gomorrah
Sheriff Staly very considerately gave me a call the morning after the end of the world to ask if I needed a Baker Act. It was close, I told him, but I wasn't quite there yet, and that authentic champagne I bought in case Harris won isn't going to drink itself.
It's not like I didn't see it coming. Five days before the election I predicted the outcome down to the electoral vote count , which is proving nauseatingly accurate. It's like when you're at a dying beloved's bedside. You know exactly what's about to go down. It's no less shocking when it does. The finality doesn't spare you the stages of grief in an inescapable loop that looks to be at least four years long.
At least we have experience. The scars and scabs from this once and future performer's first four years are still oozing, so this is more like a return to Gomorrah. I still have the demolition to report, and thankfully my jazzy beloved's bluest eyes and that new laminate I need in FlaglerLive's office are enough to pull me from the ledge. Besides, the outcome of local elections will affect us at least as much as anything that happens nationally. With that in mind it's worth taking stock of our local political landscape post-apocalypse, because it's a whole lot better than Gomorrah and, ironically, almost entirely Republican.
You can start with our five constitutional officers–the supervisor of elections, the clerk of court, the sheriff, the tax collector and the property appraiser–none of whom faced an election, none of whom needed to: if all politicians followed their lead, Flagler County would be the Disney America theme park Disney thankfully never got to build near Manassas battlefield in Virginia 30 years ago.
Curiously, to me the two other biggest winners are also two politicians who were not in the election.
The biggest winner on the Palm Coast City Council is not Mike Norris. It's not either of the two others who won seats. It is Theresa Pontieri. It is her Council now. Norris will learn quickly that if she is not the de facto mayor, she is at least what remains of the dam between chaos and continuity, at least when she's not dynamiting the dam with moratorium-branded TNT. She sometimes rushes ideas to the dais before they've been stress-tested. Careful: that's what sunk Mayor David Alfin. The council has never been so poor in institutional memory. Pontieri's two years will have to do, but she's a quick study, she can analyze and synthesize masses of turgid government documents into comprehensible everyday prose for us to understand, and she knows the stellar value of the city administration. She'll be its biggest champion. The administration will need it (Norris is already worrisomely chasing after employee lists from HR), at least until a new manager is appointed. Depending on whose imprint the appointment will bear, we can only hope that Gomorrah won't be Palm Coast's sister city after that.
The other big winner is Derek Barrs, the former Florida Highway Patrol chief who lost his bid for a school board seat then won it back through the DeSantis express. I would not have wanted Barrs in place of Janie Ruddy, who defeated him and will take the place of Colleen Conklin. Ruddy may not have experience on the board, but she has more knowledge of the district and of education than all the other board members combined. She is as close to a Conklin 2.0 as we could have hoped for. The board needs its Conklin, whose balls of steel and high-road grace will be missed just a tad less with Ruddy in place.
That said, since someone had to replace Sally Hunt on the School Board–and what a blessing that was even for us heathens–and the political reality made a hard-right pick inevitable, DeSantis's choice is nearly ideal. Barrs will immediately give the board majority what it has lacked for the last two years, if not four: an sense of command and professionalism that Will Furry simply could not pull off (though he's getting better). Barrs is conservative but doesn't strike me as a dogmatist. He seems to me impatient with ideological shenanigans. In that sense, the Barrs frame of reference may be less DeSantis than those constitutional officers I mentioned earlier. If that's the case, the School Board will be a much duller place, to everyone's advantage, starting with Superintendent LaShakia Moore, who's had to carry this board's dignity too long. He can now sit back and focus on running the district instead of arbitrating an asylum.
At the county commission, we now have two women–Leann Pennington and Pam Richardson– who between them liberated the county from its most corrosive political showboats. The commission lost two good men in Dave Sullivan and Donald O'Brien, but it keeps getting more productive under the leadership of Andy Dance. Kim Carney, the former Flagler Beach city commissioner, will introduce an element of insurgency, just as she did in Flagler Beach, but every local board needs its insurgent as long as it doesn't get incendiary in the Danko-Mullins mode.
Finally, three cheers for Jules Kwiatkowski who, nearing 90, managed yet again to win re-election for the fifth time to the East Flagler Mosquito Control District. For the second time he beat the disbelieving Perry Mitrano, who chairs the Republican Executive Committee but still can't lick a Democrat older than the Social Security Act. Jules (last names aren't worth the trouble after 80) is now one of just three Democrats out of 34 elected seats in the county, not counting fiefs like Grand Haven or our little Monaco known as Marineland. Jane Mealy in Flagler Beach–also a child of the FDR years–and Ruddy, who could be Jules's great-grandchild, are the others. Not that it matters. Flagler may be redder than blood, but in many respects it's not so much a one-party county as a post-party county. The ideologues, those disturbed and disturbing bores, are the true minority.
All in all, we're in a lot better place than Gomorrah. So keep that Baker Act unit on stand by Sheriff, but while I may not be able to drink that champagne to Harris for now, I'll drink to Flagler.
Pierre Tristam is the editor of FlaglerLive. Reach him by email here . A version of this piece airs on WNZF.
