Everyone wanted in on Destin's first city council

Earlier this year, three candidates ran to fill the three open seats on Destin City Council.

20 years before, 37 candidates ran for seven open seats on Destin’s first-ever council. Whether they’d supported incorporation or not, everyone wanted to make sure the new city government met the tasks ahead, including hiring a staff, creating and enforcing ordinances, overseeing development and collecting taxes.

“I decided that if it was incorporated, I wanted to be sitting on the council,” Destinite Danny Woodward said in an interview this month. “I told them that I wasn’t for it, but I wanted to help make the decisions.”

George Eller, another candidate, told The Log at the time that he wanted to make sure the citizens “were not taxed out of existence, not regulated out of existence.”

The candidates included seven women; two career military; two civil-service employees; 10 people working in real estate or construction; eight candidates from the seafood/fishing industries; and five small-business owners.

And according to the timetable in the state legislation authorizing incorporation, the vote to pick from among them was scheduled for a date 45 days after the incorporation referendum — Christmas Eve, 1984.

“The election would be held virtually by absentee ballot,” Florida Sen. Dempsey Barron said when he agreed to move the date back to Jan. 8, 1985.

Out of 37 candidates for council, the winners were Woodward, Dewey Destin, Lloyd Taylor, Richard Duke, Jimmy Vaughn, Bill Phillips and Theo Shaw.

Pro-incorporation leader Bill McIlroy became Destin’s first mayor, beating out Jerry Najarian, who became a city councilor over a decade later. According to local historian Vivian Mettee, at the  inaugural Jan. 14 meeting, Najarian donated $100 to the Destin  coffers so the city “would not be broke to start off.”

With Destin City Hall still several years in the future, the 1985 meetings were held at the Destin Community Center, which at the time was a “little block building,” according to Woodward. The Destin Rodeo donated the use of its offices for city business and administration.
Creating a city government from the ground up proved no easy task, Councilor Lloyd Taylor said in an interview this month.

“We spent many hours cleaning up ordinances and adopting them,” Taylor said. “It was often midnight before council meetings were over.”

Initially, the city’s new attorney Jerry Miller, said he wasn’t sure if any county ordinances now applied in Destin, which would have left Okaloosa County deputies without the authority to even write traffic tickets.

After reviewing the question, Miller said that yes, county ordinances that didn’t exempt incorporated areas would apply until Destin adopted its own.

Despite Najarian’s donation, raising money proved a bigger challenge than expected. In order to receive tax revenues or other income, the city first had to file a certified map with the state, but the engineers hired for the job said they couldn’t draw the boundaries correctly.

Florida Rep. James Ward had redrawn the boundaries in the city charter the last day of the 1984 legislative session to exclude the Kelly Trust property in Destin’s northeast corner. Because the exclusion referred to a point on Choctaw Bay when it should have said Indian Bayou, it had no legal meaning, so neither did the boundary.

After three months of council debate over how to fix the problem, the legislature finally went ahead and amended the charter wording.

Although Dewey Destin urged the council to sue to keep the land within the city, other councilors said that with the first budget due in June, the city needed to qualify to receive revenue now.

With a city government in place, development could take place in Destin again. It had stopped late in 1984, when Okaloosa County deferred permit decisions to the future city government; early in 1985, the council authorized the county to resume issuing permits for projects that didn’t need a review from the county’s Planning and Zoning department.

The first permits the county issued for the new city were for Destin Business Center and Sea Loft Condominiums.

One authority the council didn’t want to give up was control of the Destin Harbor. Gov. Bob Graham had proposed creating a Harbor Authority that would oversee the harbor for the state, but the city government fought against the plan and eventually won.

Many of the remaining issues the first council tackled are still with us today: Should Destin create its own police force? Should garbage pickup be mandatory? What should the millage rate be? How can we protect the beaches?

Woodward said that even though he’d opposed incorporation, he now thinks the city should have done it sooner.

“I was real satisfied,” Woodward said. “We got better streets.”

Fraser Sherman can be reached at (850) 654-8442 and Fraser_Sherman@link.freedom.com.