Is McGlothlin Going Full Monty?
We’re in the middle of writing a three-part series wrapping up Cascades, and part one tells the story of the land. One question in it was still open: which piece was “the hook”?
It’s about 44 acres, the piece council cut out of the Cascades land-use plan at its first meeting of 2024. The ordinance and the maps from that night would settle it, so we went to get them.
The City’s agenda for that meeting is online. The Cascades item is in it, a three-page cover memo that lists ten attachments: the ordinance, the request for a rehearing, the staff report, the maps.
None of them are in the file that sits on the City server.
Then the page numbers caught our eye. The memo is printed as pages 107 through 109, and the next page in the file is 166. More than fifty pages of the packet sit between them, and not one made it into the file.
We checked the other Cascades meetings and found the same gaps. To rule out bad copies, we downloaded all five agendas again, fresh from the City’s site. Same files, same gaps.
Across five meetings, the eight Cascades items are missing . Council and the planning board had those pages in front of them. They never went online.
Truth is, we’d brushed past this once before. Back in the summer we asked the clerk for a single page missing from a Cascades item. She sent it, and mentioned it was . We never stopped to ask why the full agenda packet wasn’t online.
For years, that’s just how it worked here, for every item on every agenda. The public got the cover, and council got the book.
Not anymore.
Since April, the City posts the whole packet, the same one council reads before it votes. That was City Manager Mike McGlothlin’s call.
“Residents shared that having access to the full agenda packets was important to them, and we listened.”
— Mike McGlothlin, City Manager · City of Palm Coast announcement, April 2, 2026
Whatever you think of the City Manager, this one goes on his side of the ledger.
What’s crazy is that the old way actually took more time and effort.
When , we learned the full agenda packet was built first, and the public version was cut down from it. So staff was keeping two versions of the same packet.
Think about doing that job. Before every meeting, staff built the whole packet for council, then cut a smaller one for the rest of us. That’s a long way from the sunshine, and nobody goes into public service hoping to work that way.
The City is in rough shape. We’ll be paying for decisions made in the Alfin, Danko and Klufas years for a long time, and for a lot of developer-friendly calls made long before them. The loop road alone moved a developer’s bill onto taxpayers.
Maybe we’ve turned the corner.
Consider the from the fight over westward expansion. They probably weren’t meant for public eyes, but a copy found its way to us.
These comments sound just like what people were saying at the mic.
The jury’s still out. But at least now the jury has the whole book.
— Johnny Diamond · PalmCoastStorylines.com