The Palm Coast City Council on Tuesday heard a presentation from Flagler Sheriff Rick Staly outlining his request for close to $2.2 million higher of a budget to continue serving Palm Coast with his forces. Unlike Bunnell and Flagler Beach, Palm Coast does not have its own city police department. It instead contracts law enforcement services with the Flagler County Sheriff’s Office to shoulder the administrative and practical burdens for them.
Staly’s request was 24% higher than what Palm Coast has been paying the FCSO most recently. The budget would come to $11.2 million, up from $9.0 million in the previous fiscal year. That number itself was an increase of $1.6 million from the year before that. The Council was generally receptive on Tuesday, but the increase would need to be formally approved in the city budget to take effect officially.
Some of the reasons for the need for continuous increase in funding, Staly says, are the rising costs of living and the growing population in Palm Coast. He stated that $800,000 of the $2.2 million increase he was asking for would merely maintain the level of service currently being provided, to account for cost-of-living raises. The rest of the increase would help the FCSO keep up with Palm Coast’s growth.
Car Accidents in Palm Coast
Councilman Ty Miller asked Staly about a curious trend in Palm Coast: vehicle crashes are up, while fatalities are down. About halfway through 2025 it appears the number of fatal motor accidents is on track to rebound, as the year is already two-thirds of the way to matching 2024’s numbers.
This, Staly says, is in part due to infrastructure and planning. “Most of the crashes that we’re seeing are traffic congestion-related, people not paying attention,” he said. “SR-100 is almost done being repaved, that’s great. It’s a two-lane road with a few new turn lanes. It needed to be a six-lane road, three on each side. With turn lanes.” Most of the length of SR-100 has two lanes in each direction.
Anatomy of a Growing Budget
Palm Coast accounts for 18% of the FCSO’s funding, making it the third largest source from which the agency draws. The average cost per deputy, Staly said in data presented to the City Council, is $155,642. The biggest portion of this comes from salary, which Staly showed at 36%. Other major factors include operations and finance (22%), retirement (16%), and health (12%).
If the City Council formally approves Staly’s request, they’ll be paying almost twice what the city paid the FCSO as recently as 2022. In return, they’d be getting nine new deputies this time around; Staly is offering an increase from 57 to 66 deputies to patrol within Palm Coast. Overall, the FCSO has 367 full-time employees. 251 of those are deputies.
Maybe Palm Coast needs to go and put the traffic light times back to where they were at the beginning of the year, quicker changing of the red lights. The timing is to long for red lights and this is causing a lot of the traffic back up all over town.