He tends to make his listeners cringe from his lack of self-awareness. “I didn’t get to talk much this weekend at home so I’m trying to make up for it,” Hanns said at a meeting.Īnd in a classic from 2016, during a discussion on library construction: “And I will get to the point–in a moment.”ĭon’t expect that kind of long-windedness, humor or Everyman geniality from Mullins. “I’m very pleased that we don’t have to put in a numbers system like they do at Publix deli,” he said at the end of an unusually brief public comment period. “I’ve looked at the clock and Swamp People isn’t on until 10 o’clock, so we have time,” Hanns once said at a hearing on the tax rate. Hanns, who served 24 years as commissioner and at least twice as chairman following the Cromwellian reign of Jim Darby in that chair, was long-winded as storytellers are, by good nature and self-deprecating wit, not narcissism and grandstanding. The last time the commission had a long-winded chairman goes back to 2014 and the George Hanns era. “I don’t see it as a separation, and that’s where we differ,” Dance said.
And so I absolutely respect that that needs to occur.” Is it something that I keep in mind if I’m in that position to tone back? Absolutely. I’ve never said that I’m speaking for anyone else up here on this commission. Do I understand that I’m sitting in that seat and I’m speaking–I’m speaking for me. I just don’t know how that’s feasible based on the track record.”Įvading the point, Mullins reached for equivalency, as if his behavior was no different than anyone else’s: “I think all of us could sit here and say we don’t like a certain thing that the other one does,” Mullins said. I’m just not sure how Joe can separate those issues and represent the commission in addition to all the other social media postings. People address me as such and I behave that way in the public knowing that. When I’m out in the public, I’m a commissioner. “My reservation is really with the online banter,” Dance said, “because there’s really no separation as I see it as an individual and as a commissioner. It’s one of five, so I would be honored and I would love to take my part in it.” “It is something I’m interested in and I do feel like that we should rotate it,” Mullins said. O’Brien, who’d scripted his remarks, asked Mullins before the vote if he wanted to be chairman, given Mullins’s other commitments–and referred to the emails that had packed his account in opposition to Mullins. Hansen got four votes, with Dance in dissent. Dance nominated himself, saying it’s been protocol in the commission’s history to elect a commissioner in his or her second year in a leadership position. Sullivan nominated Hansen for vice chair. Mullins had called Hansen, who has had health issues, a “ fat sonofabitch” on the dais during a commission meeting. Commissioner Andy Dance nominated and voted for Greg Hansen, who also voted for himself. O’Brien voted for him, and Mullins voted for himself. The two commissioners who had twice refused to censure Mullins for brazen attacks on fellow-commissioners and constituents now saw fit to elevate him as the representative of the county.Ĭommissioner Dave Sullivan nominated Mullins. He described himself frustrated over the controversy and public outcry over Mullins becoming chairman of the commission, and frustrated with Mullins’s own “social media activities and contentious stance on some highly charged political issues.” He called the social media activities “nonsense.” Then, seemingly oblivious to the abrasiveness of Mullins’s behavior even as he acknowledged it, he said the chairmanship “should just be a non-event.”īut in the end, that’s all it was: a veil for what proved to be the unsurprising vote that made Mullins, a bigot with a propensity for lies, slanders, insults, anti-Semitism and unprecedented divisiveness for a commissioner, chairman of the county commission for the next year.
He prefaced his support for Joe Mullins in what at first sounded like the opposite. (© FlaglerLive)Ĭommissioner Don O’Brien tried to have it both ways. The Flagler County Commission in a 3-2 vote today, including his, elected Joe Mullins chairman of the commission.
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