The shiniest-new Palm Coast City Council since the city’s founding took a page out of the long Jon Netts era as it voted to restore a second monthly workshop to go along with the two monthly meetings it’s held nearly since the city’s creation in 1999. It’ll need it: the council, with just one member barely exceeding two years’ service and everyone else a rookie or close to it, collectively is the least experienced in the city’s history, though its meetings since November have been efficient and productive, and surprisingly less mercurial than its predecessor.
The decision Tuesday is part of a relatively modest rewriting of council procedures prompted less by its experience (or the lack of it) than by its members’ wish to be more accessible and engaging with the public, and in one case, in a change in law.
As during the Netts years–he was the city’s longest serving council member and mayor–the council will alternate between workshops and “business meetings,” where it votes on items previously workshopped. That second workshop had been eliminated during the years of Milissa Holland’s mayorship. That resulted in progressively heavier workshop agendas and longer business meetings. when workshopped items hadn’t been fully vetted. The one difference with the Netts era will be that, when the new schedule begins in February, one of the two workshops will be scheduled at 6 p.m. Previously, all workshops were scheduled at 9 a.m…