Alan Lowe is back in the running again for Palm Coast Mayor. This is his third bid for the seat of mayor, fourth time running for a position on City Council. We sat down with Lowe to get his answers to many of the big hot ticket items facing the City of Palm Coast today. Read his interview below, our questions are in bold, followed by his answers.
Why choose to run again? It’s your third time running for mayor, so why run again? Well, it took a lot of thought to get there. I’ve lived in Palm coast now 41 years, and it has given me an amazing life. The opportunities that I’ve got here; I’ve always felt I need to give back. But I think what we really have a problem with now, is a lack of leadership, and we really need to pull the community together with the leadership. There needs to be a bridge between the people of Palm coast and the government itself, and I see a divide, and I think I can be a bridge to bring it together.
What would you say are some of your qualifications? Well, I was a swimming pool contractor for many years here in Palm coast. My dad was a builder, and I worked for him, so I understand; not that I agree with all the development that’s going on at all. But I understand the building side of things, so I can understand that. I’ve been to city council meetings and stood up at city council meetings, for several years now, and I feel I have a good understanding of the way things work. I have a good understanding of what the city was and has become, and I have leadership qualities that will allow me to bring things forward.
What would you say are some of the bigger issues that Palm coast is facing? I think one of the, well, we have two really important issues. One is, we have an aging infrastructure, and we really haven’t done any budgeting as far as having escrow accounts or whatever to put money aside to be able to deal with repairs, improvements and refurbishing. We are replacing with new equipment that’s an extremely important one. Just yesterday we had a water main blow up on Hardgrove Grade in the industrial park, and they had to tear the road apart and everything to get that fixed. That’s a result of aging infrastructure; on top of that our state representative and current speaker of the House in Florida, Paul Renner; turns out he won’t be there and he’s represents us here in Flagler County. He won’t be there anymore after this term runs out. Governor Desantis, who also used to live here in Palm coast or Flagler County, he’s termed out, so our two really big, strong connections to go for grant money and appropriations in Tallahassee aren’t going to be there anymore. So it’s a matter of, again, building new bridges and finding other ways to finance our aging infrastructure and our needs here because we’ll call it, our personal representatives there aren’t going to be there anymore.
Development is obviously a really big issue with a lot of residents here in Flagler county. And a lot of people say that it is not a sustainable pace. So if you’re elected, how do you plan to kind of bring that back into balance? I understand what the residents are saying because I’ve seen the changes here myself. Over 41 years going from a population of around, I think it was 5000 when I moved here to cresting 100,000 now. I’ve seen the gamut of the whole thing, the speed and so forth of which our development is happening is shocking a lot of people. And our current leadership has said that if we don’t keep expanding, the city will die, basically. And it’s because we never diversified our economic income. Our economy here is based almost strictly on development, construction, those are the big jobs. That’s where all the money’s coming in. People have previously put forth that we should put a moratorium on building to stop it until we can catch up with infrastructure and get things put back together again. The problem with that is, if we stop the construction now, we put hundreds, maybe thousands of jobs out of business. Investors will leave, developers leave and the issues with the infrastructure, and how do we find money and all that just gets exacerbated. My thought is, what we should do is perhaps have city staff come up with a number of how many permits are sustainable per year.
What are some ways you plan to get that caught up without inflicting a lot of damage to people’s taxes? Well, one thing that we haven’t done, but I see during an election year now, the current leadership is doing it, is increasing the impact fees, increasing the cost and so forth of developers. For the new incoming construction and build. I don’t believe that the expansion and the so forth and the added wear and tear to our current infrastructure should be paid for by the residents that live here. We should maintain what we have, but expansion and so forth should be paid for by the people that are coming. I hesitate to say it, but we have some really old infrastructures that need to be replaced and we might need to change our thought pattern from increasing the number of amenities that we have in Palm coast and maybe put that on hold for a little while and be able to redirect some of those funds to replacing water mains, fixing swales and taking care of our stormwater that’s flooding everything now. The sewer treatment plants, we’re going to need a new sewer treatment plant soon because we’re getting ready to reach maximum capacity, which means they won’t be able to issue permits anyway, so we need to increase fees and redirect funds without increasing taxes.
Do you agree with the way the city is handling the flooding issues with infill lots? Okay, first off, the city, in my opinion has given a lot of lip service to the issues. And in some cases has gone out and done some things so that it looks like they’re really on it. But we need to make a priority of it because we’re damaging property. And the reality of it is that I don’t know who it was that decided to allow homes to start being billed a foot, two foot, three foot higher than their neighbors. I don’t know exactly who it was that decided that that’s a good idea. But it obviously has been a terrible idea, and one of the quick solutions for upcoming builds is just don’t allow that. Keep each house at the same level so they don’t flood each other; then we need to find a way to fund and go backwards and fix the ones that were allowed to be that way. It’s on the city because the city allowed it to happen, even though the statutes say you cannot shed your water from your property onto your neighbor’s property. I don’t believe the city’s gone far enough yet to fix the issues, because the issues are continuing to happen. So if it were me, I’d go back to whatever your neighbor’s heights are, those are the heights you have to be. If your neighbors are being flooded, if it’s in some kind of flood area and the neighbors are flooding out all the time then you have to look out at it on a one to one basis. And maybe one house has to be a little bit higher, but the swales aren’t being maintained, and it’s not because of the swale crews. It’s because we don’t have enough of the swale crews and that goes back to more funding and so forth that we need to get to improve it. So, I would stop the increased height of the new builds on the infill lot. I would be come up with some kind of funding to go backwards. And obviously, we can’t lower a house that’s already been built, but create swale pump stations. Whatever we need to do on people’s properties to shed that on the infill lot property, not the neighbor’s property, because it’s not their fault; to shed that water forward to the front swale and have it carried away and stop the flood.
Transparency is one thing many residents have spoken up about at city meetings; how do you plan to bring more transparency to the city council if elected? When I ran against Mayor Holland, I said we need to have town halls that are done throughout the city, not in one specific area, not like just at the community center or whatever, but we need to have town halls throughout the city at different venues. Different businesses that can hold enough people, so that, as I mentioned earlier, there can be a bridge between the public and the government. I believe transparency is a big issue, and obviously people were caught off guard with the Denise Bevan firing. By the looks on her face, she may have been caught off guard to it. When it came down at that moment, I was there as well, but I think that we have to do a lot of work with communication between the government and the people. I wouldn’t even be opposed to having, like, a cable tv, local cable tv channel specifically that airs the city council meetings and other goings on and announcements and so forth specifically related to the city government, so that people can tune in and see what’s going on and try to increase transparency that way.
Alan Lowe’s campaign website is coming soon, but you can find out more about him on his Facebook page.
