- December 13, 2025
As the county continues to grow, overwhelmingly it seems, its history seems to be buried, one lot clearing at a time. I have had a front row seat for almost 30 years to poor county decisions on the buildings it’s built from county offices, courthouses, emergency and sheriff's operations centers. I am reminded of these costly mistakes every year when the tax bill shows up in my mailbox.
The story behind each of these blunders would take a book to describe, but I will provide a timeline of these events so that the public can share my frustration with the questionable decisions of county commissions past that haunt our pocket books today.
1992: The Sheriff’s office was located behind the water tower in Bunnell for many years and had outgrown its usefulness. Its location across the street from the county offices and Emergency Operations Center, which were in double wides near the present county building and within a mile of the courthouse down the street was workable. The county decided to build the new larger Sheriff’s Operations Center five miles west down a long and winding road in a swamp. Completely inconvenient to the public, county government and law enforcement operations.
2002: The county decides to build a new county center, courthouse, board of education center and sheriff’s operation center at a cost of over $70 million.They changed their plans and built a large lightly used Emergency Operations Center instead of a desperately needed Sheriff’s Operations Center. The School Board already had a large building in Palm Coast which they eventually demolished for no apparent reason. The courthouse and clerk’s office were wildly overbuilt. The county center was poorly space-planned and there was inadequate parking requiring a multi-million dollar fix 15 years later.
2012: The county decides to finally build a new Sheriff’s Operation Center and jail and floats a 30-year, $30 million bond to pay for the buildings. Their options for the new operation center were to renovate the old courthouse, convert the lightly used Emergency Operations Center, build a new wing onto the courthouse or build a new building across the street from the courthouse where the dilapidated old sheriff’s office stood.
Originally, they decided to build a new building across the street from the county center. In a last minute deal, they voted to purchase the old Flagler Hospital which had been sitting unused for a decade and which the county had previously decided 10 years before was too expensive to renovate as a county center. The building cost $1.5 million to buy and $6 million to rebuild, equip and furnish. To add on to this bad decision, the county decided not to demolish the adjacent patient wings which were packed with rotting contaminants. The building was built and occupied without any air quality control issues.
In 2017, two years after the completion of the building, the county decided to demolish the patient wings without the required DEP permits and without wetting the building down so contaminants would not go airborne. Several months later, personnel started reporting health issues. Instead of remediating the building, they moved the sheriff’s operation into the clerk’s office. They decided to build an even larger operations center costing $26 million with interest. They sold the previous building for $750,000 incurring a $7 million loss while continuing to pay for the building in the 30-year bond. The building was sold for in excess of $3 million to the buyer with an air quality survey showing no issues.
2018-2022: The county decides that the Sheriff’s Palm Coast district office’s lease in City Market Place was too expensive. They subsequently bought the old Sears building for close to $1million without adequate due diligence only to find that due to a leak in the roof, the building could not be occupied.
Even though the county owned 15 acres around the library which could easily house a new building in a prime location, they purchased an old bank building on Old Kings Road in a difficult location for most of the city to access for over $1 million and spent $1 million-plus to renovate it into a sheriff’s office.
Any of these decisions should be cause for alarm, but collectively they show a pattern of disregard for the taxpayers' money and common sense.
Jim Manfre is a former Flagler county sheriff
