- May 1, 2024
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Palm Coast District 1 challenger Bill McGuire spent 40 years in business consulting. He believes he can fix the city’s budget.
Sinking into a lazy chair inside his living room, Palm Coast City Council District 1 candidate Bill McGuire sips coffee and admits that he has no past political experience. But he sees that as an advantage.
After 40 years in business management and consulting, he knows that fresh eyes and objectivity have always been his strong suit.
Part-owner of Palm Coast-based Manufacturing Business Solutions, McGuire, who moved to Flagler in 1986, has a history of entering new organizations — whether it’s a meat-packing plant, mining operation or copper smelter — to identify inefficiencies and then correct them.
He calls himself a “problem-solver.”
“I find ’em. I fix ’em. I work with people,” he said. “And that’s essentially what I plan to do in Palm Coast.”
It’s the challenge that draws him, the opportunity to best an opponent, whether physical or intellectual. In high school, he was a four-year wrestling letterman. He used to box. Today, he’s a competitive power-lifter and plays online tournament chess, against nationally ranked players — and he has a winning record.
He says he plays chess in order to exercise his mind. His grandmother had Alzheimer’s disease and, he doesn’t plan to let that get the better of him, either.
“Seat 1 is a blue-collar district, a working district,” he said, wearing a red St. Luis Cardinals T-shirt, his living room decorated in old music posters.
He mentions how he grew up in segregation-era Missouri, in a “broken home,” how in eighth grade he tutored and became best friends with an African American named Benny, who taught him about the blues. He says he was a teamster, and used to manage a factory where all 330 of his workers were black.
Growing up in the heat of the Civil Rights movement, McGuire feels he has gained a sympathy for the underdog, and anyone who is treated unjustly.
It’s a feeling that has transformed into a respect of the local entrepreneurial spirit.
“Economic development here, in the last three, four years, has become like nuclear physics,” he said. “Everybody’s for it, but no one understands it.” That’s why he believes in the little guys, the scrappy startups, the Palm Coast Business Assistance Center.
Small businesses are experiencing a local “renaissance,” he says, and by applying to the county’s new Economic Opportunity Council, he intends to lend a hand to the movement.
In his past, McGuire relocated a company from St. Luis, to Mexico, simultaneously managing multiple branches, about 200 workers split between two factories. He managed a plant in Georgia, which fabricated titanium castings for jet engine parts. There, he oversaw 1,100 employees.
While campaigning, he has already knocked on about 500 doors in Palm Coast, each time asking, as he always has in consulting, what residents felt were the biggest issues around town.
Now he plans to help address those issues, and says he looks forward to working as an idea man with the city.
“The way you’ve always done things is not always the best way to do them,” he said. “It’s a disciplined way of thinking. Question everything.”
He describes red lights flashing inside his head the minute he walks into new organizations. The alarms identify problem areas, issues to be resolved, opportunities.
“I find problems, I fix them,” he said. “That’s how I made my living. That’s my life.”
TKO. Check mate. What’s next?
CANDIDATE Q&A
NAME: William E. McGuire
AGE: 69
FAMILY: wife, Sandie; two children, two grandchildren
CAREER: Manufacturing management, turnaround specialist
POLITICAL EXPERIENCE: None; head of the Flagler County Tea Party School Board Auditing Committee
QUIRKY FACT: Holds four Florida power lifting records and two Missouri records (bench press and squat)
Is the city budget as lean as it should be? If not, what specific changes would you make?
The City Council has taken money out of the budget. Is it as lean as it could be? No. But here, I’d like to paraphrase Mayor Netts here. He says there are things that are nice to have and things that you need to have. I believe that.
You can go into the budget and determine that, “No, we really don’t need this.”
I think that a lot of the capital projects that the city has — the engineering studies are extremely expensive. We’re going to put a wastewater culvert here; let’s have a $50,000 engineering study before we do that. Now, I don’t know anything about building a wastewater culvert, but I find it hard to believe that it takes $50,000 to figure out how to do it. There’s a lot of that sort of thing: We need a study of this and we need a study of that.
They’ve made some improvements in the budget. But I don’t know that they’ve looked at the devil that’s in the details.
One thing about the City Council up till now, is that they don’t like to talk about the capital budget. They’ll spend weeks in workshops and present all kinds of slides and graphs and data about the general fund. The general fund this year is about $26 million, but the total budget is $120 million. All the rest of it is in enterprise funds and capital projects. But I think that they give that short shrift when they present that to the public. They don’t give you a chance to stand up and say, “Wait a minute. Instead of building a sidewalk here, shouldn’t we do this instead?”
I think their philosophies of the budget are good: We want to keep Palm Coast an attractive place to live. We want to keep it a safe place to live. As far as I’m concerned, anything beyond that, is something that’s nice to have, and is now really the time to do it? There’s always something you can revisit in a budget.
The School Board would have never believed that we could take out $3.5 million from their budget, but we did it, and nobody felt any pain.
(Editor’s Note: McGuire was head of the Flagler County Tea Party School Board Auditing Committee, which proposed budget cuts to the School Board.)
I don’t know if there’s $3.5 million to come out of the Palm Coast budget or not, but I think I can find ways to help their budget to be leaner.
Nobody ever looks at the methodology. If the controller says, “OK, we have to have this capital project, and this is what it’s going to cost” — are you telling me there’s no cheaper way to do that? For example, the city has a program where their goal is to refurbish 40 miles of swales a year, and this is their budget. What if you could find a way to refurbish those swales for less money? Has anyone gone out and said, “If we had this piece of equipment, we could lower the cost”?
I don’t think those things are looked at, and I don’t know if it’s because they don’t have the expertise on the City Council or not, but I can tell you this much, this is expertise that I would bring to this City Council, and this is one of the main reasons that I’m running.
What are the biggest obstacles to economic recovery in Palm Coast? How can you remove those obstacles?
It is not the government’s job — not the city, the county, the state or the federal government — to create jobs. You can create an environment that is friendly to creating jobs ...
If you accept the premise that Palm Coast is a residential community, then those industries that are conducive to a residential community should be welcomed and encouraged, and the city should be willing to make concessions, if necessary, to get them here …
The best you can do that is have a package ready, so that if such a thing were to happen, you’ve got something that has already been approved by the mayor and everyone else, so that you can say, “These are the things we are ready to do for you right now, if you’ll make a commitment to build a facility here” … If you do that, you’ve done all that you can be expected to do for economic development.
Should the users of athletics fields pay the bills, or the taxpayers as a whole?
If the people using the fields are nonprofit organizations that are keeping kids off the street, I think the city should pay the bill. We always have up to now ...
Whenever I speak before a group, invariably someone is going to ask me, “What are you going to do for our young people, to keep them off the streets and away from drugs?” Well, this is one of them ... If I’m elected, I’ll fight to keep these fields free of charge to nonprofit athletics organizations.
Hypothetically speaking, if the research and data lead to conclusion A, but some residents are vocal that they want conclusion B, what is your responsibility as a City Council member?
My responsibility is to show them the logic of conclusion A. A lot of people in the city have a distorted vision of how the city functions ... People aren’t aware that you can’t just go build a sidewalk — “They have a sidewalk, now I need one.” It’s not that simple.
Mayor Netts has a town-hall meeting every quarter. I went to his last one, and I was one of four people. I think the city needs to make good use of the media and say, “Here’s the thing that leads to this conclusion” …
If you’re having a City Council meeting, and someone’s making a presentation about conclusion A, and they haven’t presented any alternatives, what is a citizen supposed to use to make a judgment?
It isn’t until the citizens rise up and start screaming that any alternatives are presented. Look at the fiasco with the redistricting. They put a commission together, and within 20 minutes, they knew how they wanted to do it. Of course, it cut Dennis Cross out of the race, “But that’s OK, we’ve got it all settled.”
And the people went and nailed them to the cross. “Hey, that’s it?” They didn’t want to talk about alternatives. We’re bad about that. If I’m elected to the City Council, I’ll say, “This is one way of doing it, and this is another way, and this is how much it costs, and these are the time frames” …
(With regard to the city park fees workshops): The presentation that was made to the public (in the regular meeting) is exactly the same as the presentation at the workshop. Nobody had any questions or suggested any alternatives ...
I don’t know the background of the current City Council … but they vote as a block. At the City Council meeting Tuesday, everything that was put on the table was unanimous. I’ve been going to these meetings for two years, and nobody dissents …
When there’s a powder keg like (the city park fees), somebody needs to play devil’s advocate in workshop and say, “I’m going to see what I can do to shoot down your ideas, and you better have some ready answers for me” ... But they don’t do that ...
My boss once told me, “Bill, if you and I sit down and have a meeting, and we always agree on everything, one of us is unnecessary.”
When you’re managing money … you have to make decisions that are fiscally responsible, and you can’t do it by always agreeing on everything. Somebody’s got to stand up and say, “The public’s not going to buy that. You know it. I know it. What else do you have?”
At the workshops, you don’t have any discussion.
