- December 4, 2025
Dear Editor:
A cohesive City Council provides a sense of stability for the community. It sends a message that the city is well managed and its leaders are focused on problem solving rather than creating them.
Palm Coast does not have that and hasn’t had it for over eight months. A prolonged sense of City Council rancor and instability has prevailed instead. Our mayor’s misdeeds have led to council missteps. Serious and unprecedented distractions and conspiracy theories have become the norm resulting in a severely divided council and community. Profound chaos has replaced any sense of unity and even rational behavior.
The onset is clearly attributable to the mayor’s actions and behavior early on, but the council’s reactions were at times ill-conceived. The council should have stopped while they were ahead with two unanimous censures, a unanimous vote of no confidence and a big win against the mayor’s frivolous lawsuit against the city.
But their missteps were the Ethics Commission complaint, which was a long shot at best as is the current request for the governor to suspend the mayor. Given the facts and well documented evidence supporting the mayor’s problematic behavior and misdeeds are and will remain solid, and the mayor’s lawsuit was handily defeated, going further was seemingly not well thought out and it was overkill by the council.
Will there ever be a cohesive council? Was the mayor’s bad behavior just an anomaly? Don’t count on it. He’s a destabilizing force. It’s who he is. It's baked in. And although there were misdeeds and missteps by all, the mayor remains the origin of and bears responsibility for a now fractured city council.
Margaret Minutaglio
Palm Coast
