- April 17, 2024
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Four candidates for Palm Coast mayor faced off in the nonpartisan Flagler Time Bay Club's Palm Coast Mayoral Forum at the Palm Coast Community Center the evening of June 23.
Although all six candidates — David Alfin, Kathy Austrino, Carol Bacha, Doug Courtney, Cornelia Downing Manfre and Alan Lowe — had been invited to participate, Lowe and Austrino declined.
Questions posed by a panel of community members asked candidates about their background, vision for the city, experience handling large budgets, and their position on a handful of local controversies, including how to expand local mental healthcare initiatives and whether the city should change its code to allow for the parking of commercial vehicles n residential driveways.
One question mentioned the "divisiveness" and "grandstanding" on the current council, and asked candidates what they'd do to restore a more civil approach.
Alfin's assessment of the current council was blunt. He said he'd attended the previous day's council meeting. He wasn't impressed.
"I’m here to say that the City Council is broken. There’s just no other way to describe it," he said.
He said he'd been a soccer referee in the past. Watching the council members at that meeting, he said, "I saw two players on the left, two players on the right, and a reluctant referee — in the name of the city attorney — sitting in the center."
He added, "There were important issues to be discussed yesterday, and the group — the team — was unable to perform, really, in any way. The role of mayor is to be a leader of that group. I intend, through collaboration, consensus, to earn the community's confidence — to unify and to work forward on the important initiatives of the city of Palm Coast."
Candidate Carol Bacha answered the same question by saying the city should "bring more people into the process."
"We need to establish within our city more hands-on for every department, so that we can have a trained volunteer core with continuing education that doesn't result in the efforts that the community can bring by downgrading their professionalism," she said. She gave some examples of successful volunteer projects, but ran out of time without explaining how they pertained to the Palm Coast City Council.
Courtney said he'd like to see a council roundtable.
"Let's sit down and talk about what we're doing and why we're doing it, and lets' have a discussion about why we're having such bad times back and forth," he said.
Some contention is good, he added.
"Sometimes I wonder if the have the reason we have all that going on recently is because we have a group full of alpha males, and nobody's listening to anybody else," Courtney said. "And I also wonder at the same time if maybe a couple of those people should apply for the position of city manager, not city council member — a couple too many of them want to tell the city manager what to do, tell the city staff what to do, how to do it and when to do it and they don't have that right."
Downing Manfre, replying to the same question, said she's a trained mediator and negotiator.
"The people that serve on this council right now, I applaud them for stepping up to be on the council," she said. "We can work together. There always would be problems. This is the great American debate. But ... we're being voted into office to find the solutions and work collaboratively."
See the candidates' answer by using the links in the box at left.
