- April 24, 2024
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Updated Jan. 12
Jon Netts, who served as a City Council member or mayor for more than 15 of the city of Palm Coast’s first 20 years of existence and was its most influential figure in that time, died Jan. 9, of complications from COVID-19. He was 78.
Netts served on many regional boards, including the Northeast Florida Regional Council and the Florida Inland Navigation District. He was director of the Palm Coast Historical Society, director of Enterprise Flagler, and Executive Board member of Flagler Habitat for Humanity.
He was a believer in the exceptionalism of the city.
Mayor Milissa Holland, who is close to the family after her father served with Netts on the City Council 20 years ago, recalled a “Nettsism” that illustrates his view of the city: Netts would say, “Everyone likes ice cream, and Palm Coast is one flavor. If you don’t like that flavor, you can find another flavor somewhere else.”
"Jon Netts fiercely loved Palm Coast and I know that I can express from all of us our very deepest sympathies to his family and friends as we together learn how to cope as a City without one of our most beloved pioneers and companions."
— MILISSA HOLLAND, mayor
In other words, of all the cities in Florida, many residents retired here because they like how the city looks and feels. He moved here in 1992 with his wife, Priscilla, because of the boating opportunities, and his philosophy on the City Council was often driven by his desire to preserve Palm Coast’s character.
“He was passionate about our city,” Holland said in a Jan. 12 phone interview with the Palm Coast Observer. “When I drive around and understand how those policies work, Jon Netts has his imprint on many of those, and I’m thankful for that.”
He presided over the city as mayor in a civil and nonpartisan manner, Holland added.
“Other mayors that have served with him throughout the county always found Jon to be the voice of reason and to be a stabilizer when things were uncertain,” she said.
No memorial announcement has been made yet by Priscilla. The two were very close: “There was never a Jon sighting without a Priscilla sighting,” Holland said.
Netts was known also for his intellect. His family would call him MacGyver because he could always solve complex problems. He was insightful in City Council meetings, distilling complex issues into simple terms, warning of government overreach with this saying: “If the only tool you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.”
“Jon is one of the brightest elected officials I’ve ever known in my career,” Brian Teeple, of the Northeast Florida Regional Council, said on one of the Netts' campaign pages. “He understands issues.”
In 2011, Netts was interviewed by the Palm Coast Observer as he was seeking a second term as mayor. In the interview, his personality as a man of action is evident.
He told the Observer that he once decided to take a jiu-jitsu class and eventually went on to be a sensei and lead women’s self-defense classes. He played football for Princeton and was a volunteer paramedic for 35 years.
Weekends as a kid, he built hydroplane racing boats out of wood and fiberglass. After “retirement,” he built a flooring company from scratch into the biggest in St. Augustine.
He conducted about 500 weddings and claimed never to have used the same ceremony twice.
“I’m the kind of person who, if you do things, you do them wholeheartedly,” he told the Observer in 2011. His parents used to tell him, “Don’t dabble.”
Netts compared politics to chess. The actions you take now, he said, have consequences. Can you anticipate the unintended consequences? If you didn’t anticipate them, what can you do about them now?
“I like the intellectual challenge of what I’m doing,” he said of being mayor.
He knew it was important to know the people and know the issues. “Part of the job of any elected official is to try to understand balance,” he said. “The difference between fat and bacon depends on who’s doing the slicing.”
In 2016, Netts completed his second and final term as mayor. The city held a ceremony to wish him well, and Palm Coast’s first mayor, James Canfield, called Netts “a great mayor for the city of Palm Coast and its people.”
“One of the things he operates with is a high degree of civility,” Canfield said in the 2016 Observer article. “Every speaker that comes to these meetings … is treated with courtesy, and with dignity.”
As are residents who’ve interacted with Netts outside of the formality of City Hall, Palm Coast resident Deleana Williams related from the podium at the event, which was attended by more than 100 people.
Williams said she’d asked Netts if he would write a letter of congratulations for her friend, Regina Wilson, in honor of Wilson’s 90th birthday. She knew the mayor was busy. But he answered the same day.
“Now, I know that my request was not at the top of his to-do list; I’m well aware of that, Mr. Mayor. But you sure treated it as if it were,” Williams said. Netts sent the letter in time for Wilson’s birthday party. “I wish you could have seen the look on my friend Regina Wilson’s face. … By your kindness, you have shown that you are more than ‘Mr. Mayor.’ You’re a man with a heart of gold.”
At the ceremony in 2016, Netts joked that he would be watching his successor, Holland, closely. He said, to chuckles from the audience, “By golly, if she deviates from the path — I’m going to stand up and have something to say about it.”
He said his greatest accomplishment was staying true to the vision that made the city so appealing to the many people who've chosen to make it home.
“It still has that same flavor, that same essence,” he said. Netts has often lauded Palm Coast for being “clean, green and marine.”
“It still is clean. It still is green,” he said. “We have lived up to the promises that we’ve made each other.”
— Jonathan Simmons and Mike Cavaliere contributed to this article.
