Jane MusgraveCommissioners reject top internal candidates, select longtime lawmaker and elected clerk, Joe Abruzzo.
Three months after Palm Beach County commissioners signaled that Clerk and Comptroller Joe Abruzzo would become the county’s next administrator, they on Tuesday made it official.
By a 4-3 vote, that was followed by a largely ceremonial unanimous one, the commission chose the 44-year-old former Democratic state lawmaker to replace longtime County Administrator Verdenia Baker.
“I promise I will handle the duties and powers of this position with the utmost transparency and respect,” an emotional Abruzzo told commissioners after he was chosen to oversee the county’s $9 billion budget and 7,000 employees. “We are at a true inflection point.”
In tapping Abruzzo, the commission overlooked two of Baker’s top lieutenants — Deputy County Administrator Patrick Rutter and Assistant County Administrator Isami Ayala-Collazo — along with Keith Clinkscales, the county’s director of strategic planning and performance management.
Rutter, who has worked for the county for 22 years and was groomed for the post by Baker, snared only the support of Mayor Maria Marino. Ayala-Collazo was the top choice of Commissioners Bobby Powell and Marci Woodward.
Commissioners Gregg Weiss, Joel Flores, Sara Baxter and Maria Sachs all voted for Abruzzo.
After the meeting, an upbeat Rutter said he wasn’t disappointed by the decision that came after the commission spent more than three hours quizzing the four finalists.
“I’ve loved every stage I’ve had working for the county,” said Rutter, who grew up in West Palm Beach. “I look forward to supporting Joe.”
Whether he will remain second in command will be up to Abruzzo, Rutter said. Discussions about his future will come as Abruzzo prepares to step into the role, he added.
Abruzzo’s new job comes with a salary bump. Now making $212,000-a-year, the pay range for the county’s top job is $341,000 to $477,000. How much Abruzzo will earn will be determined in negotiations with Abruzzo and Marino with help from county staff. A contract could be ratified at the commission’s next meeting on July 8.
Abruzzo has said that money didn’t drive him to seek the post. On his latest available financial disclosure firm, he lists his 2023 net worth as $16.4 million. His wealth is fueled by his ownership in a national chain of dental implant and denture centers.
The selection also leaves a gaping hole in the court system. According to state law, a temporary clerk will be appointed by Chief Judge Glenn Kelley. It will be up to Gov. Ron DeSantis, a Republican, to determine who will ultimately fill the post until an election is held in November 2026.
The temporary appointment would probably be someone who works at the clerk’s office, Abruzzo said in an interview last week. A likely candidate would be Shannon Ramsey-Chessman, who dropped out of the 2020 race for clerk when Abruzzo announced his candidacy.
After Abruzzo won without an opponent, she became his chief deputy. Abruzzo retained his seat in 2024, defeating Republican Samuel Thompson with 53% of the vote.
Abruzzo’s selection as county administrator followed two grueling days of interviews for the four finalists who remained after three out-of-state candidates dropped out. The seven were selected by a task force that reviewed the 96 candidates who met the minimum criteria out of 223 who applied.
The four finalists spent all day Monday bouncing from one commissioner’s office to another, fielding questions. Other than Commissioner Weiss, all commissioners met with the hopefuls privately. Weiss live-cast his hour-long conversations with each candidate on Facebook and posted them here.
In his interview with Weiss, Abruzzo promised to reach out to top managers of the county’s 39 municipalities to keep them abreast of county plans, to hold forums with residents to find out what they want and to empower county staff to “think outside the box.”
Touting the technological advances he’s made at the clerk’s office, he said he wanted to use artificial intelligence to increase county efficiency.
The other three candidates made similar comments.
While Abruzzo touted his work as a state lawmaker, which gave him ability to work with county residents and powerbrokers, Rutter emphasized his lifelong residence in the county and his long tenure on the county payroll.
He said he dealt with emergencies such as back-to-back Hurricanes Frances and Jeanne in 2004 along with last year’s tornadoes in Palm Beach Gardens. He has overseen some of the county’s largest departments and headed up major projects.
“I feel like I’ve been part of — either directly or indirectly — every issue in the county,” he told Weiss.
Rutter said he had no plans to make sweeping changes. “I don’t think you walk in and want to change the world,” he said. “I think you spend time and do it right.”
Following the daylong interviews, each finalist answered questions submitted by the public during a two-hour forum at the Palm Beach County Convention Center.
Roughly 100 people turned out to listen as each answered questions about affordable housing, maintaining clean drinking water, stopping fraud and waste and whether they would work to bring back SunFest. The forum was also broadcast on the county’s Channel 20.
No headhunter, quick turnaround
The selection process was unusual from the start.
Instead of hiring an executive search firm to solicit candidates, a common practice among large Florida counties and one that was used before Baker was promoted to the top job in 2015, the commission opted to advertise the post nationally and screen candidates in-house.
But even that was a concession for some commissioners. In a proposal spearheaded by Commissioner Powell, four commissioners initially said they wanted to only consider local applicants and would waive a long-standing requirement that the future administrator have a master’s degree and 10 years of executive management experience, preferably in government.
The application pool would have been open for less than two weeks.
Those conditions favored Abruzzo, who has a bachelor’s degree from Lynn University and said he is studying online for a master’s in legal studies from Pepperdine University. Before being elected clerk, he served as a port specialist in the U.S. Coast Guard Reserves and worked as a lawmaker and lobbyist.
The other three have at least master’s degrees and Rutter and Ayala-Collazo have been government executives for decades.
Powell, joined by Commissioners Sachs, Baxter and Flores, said the job should be filled quickly and there was no need to hire a headhunter to scour the country.
“We live in paradise here,” Sachs said. “The word is already out. We are getting people from all over the country applying. There will be no shortage of candidates.”
Marino, Weiss and Woodward favored a more deliberate and extensive approach. They said it appeared Powell’s plan was crafted by former Commissioner Mack Bernard, a close friend of Powell’s who works at the lobbying and campaign management firm Cornerstone Solutions.
Woodward told Stet that Powell’s proposal appeared to be an effort to hand the job to Abruzzo.
Bernard didn’t respond to requests for comment. His boss at Cornerstone, Rick Asnani, said if Bernard did approach commissioners, he wasn’t doing it as a paid lobbyist for Cornerstone. That would have been illegal under a state law that bans lobbying of one’s former board for six years after leaving office.
Ultimately, however, Flores switched sides. He joined Commissioners Weiss, Woodward and Marino to insist on national advertising and giving candidates one month to apply.
In the ad, commissioners described a master’s degree as “preferred” rather than mandatory and said only that applicants “should have” 10 years of executive experience.
In the room
Throughout the day on Tuesday, commissioners quizzed the candidates about many of the same issues that were addressed privately and at the forum.
The questions, at times, illustrated commissioners’ concerns given recent national events.
Citing the weekend assassination of a Minnesota lawmaker and her husband and the wounding of another legislator, Baxter asked each candidate what they would do to keep commissioners safe.
Flores, who last week railed against being forced to eliminate a program that helps women- and minority-owned businesses to comply with orders from President Donald Trump, focused on how the candidates would address historically underserved areas.
All agreed that threats facing elected officials are real. The county’s security services division is well-trained to address threats, Rutter said. Clinkscales said he would survey other counties, such as Miami-Dade, to see if additional safeguards are needed.
Likewise, all agreed that county resources must be used to help economically disadvantaged areas.
Not surprisingly, all said they were the best qualified for the post. Abruzzo focused on his experience as a lawmaker and administrator. Clinkscales described himself as an “operational excellence guru,” who could transform the county.
Ayala-Collazo stressed her engineering, law and doctoral degrees along with her government work. “My experience is proven and tested,” she said. “It’s not just theoretical.”
Rutter, who listened as the others described flaws in the county’s organizational structure, its relationship with municipal leaders and the public, and its antiquated technology, said his longevity with the county was important.
“I can bring you the history. I can tell you why we did things,” he said. “That doesn’t mean we always have to do it that way.”
At the end, most commissioners said they were satisfied with the process.
Mining homegrown talent, instead of hiring someone from outside, will benefit the county, Sachs said. “We got the best,” she said. “I believe we really did.”
Weiss said the commission will never know whether it did or not because the search was limited. “I honestly wish we had expanded that map,” he said. “We don’t know what we don’t know.”
Editor’s note: This story has been corrected to say the length of Florida’s ban on lobbying by public officials after they leave office is six years.
