BY DAN HILDEBRAN
Three weeks ago, Charlie Van Zant was walking his dog at an Interstate 10 rest area when he got a call from an old acquaintance from Tallahassee.
The Keystone Heights city manager and his wife, Stephanie, were on their way to Eglin Air Force Base to visit their son.
The call was from Anthony Sabatini, whom Van Zant knew from Sabatini’s days as a state house member. Weeks earlier, the Lake County-based Attorney had hired former Keystone Heights city Council member Gavin Rollins for his staff.
In May, the City of Treasure Island hired Sabatini’s firm to handle its legal affairs, and in making the call to Van Zant, Sabatini was helping in his client’s urgent search for a city manager.
Treasure Island terminated its city manager in June, following allegations that he mishandled storm recovery efforts from Hurricanes Debbie, Helene, and Milton.
Rollins recommended that Sabatini call Van Zant, and after the retired Army helicopter pilot answered the phone in the I-10 rest area, Sabatini put Treasure Island City Commissioner Chris Clark on the line, who got right to the point.
“Mr. Van Zant,” Clark said, as recalled by Van Zant, “we just got lambasted with three hurricanes last year. I had seven feet of storm surge, which wiped out a lot of our city. We fired our old city manager because he couldn’t make a decision.”
Clark asked Van Zant to fill the interim city manager’s job in the Pinellas County town between Madeira Beach and St. Pete Beach.
Over the weekend, two more city council members and the mayor called Van Zant, asking him to make the move.
With the 2025 hurricane season already underway and Florida’s budget season fast approaching, the officials were desperate to fill the job.
The following week, the city’s human resource director asked Van Zant for his resume. Last week, the city council voted to hire Van Zant on an interim basis, and the mayor extended a job offer to him.
Van Zant responded by taking Stephanie on a weekend trip to Pinellas County to explore the area.
“There are beautiful beaches,” he recalled of the trip. “Beautiful hotels and condos that weren’t damaged, and there are pieces of it that reminded me of Kuwait after Saddam rolled through there with his T-55 tanks in 1990, steel rebar hanging out of concrete.”
Van Zant said that as he and his family prayed over the impending decision, one message kept coming back to his mind: “These people need help.”
“As Stephanie and I were sitting on a piece of concrete on city property,” Van Zant recalled, “watching the sun go down that Sunday night, I told my wife, ‘They’ve got engineers, they’ve got all the professionals, but they’re in drastic, dire need of leadership. They just need somebody to put the puzzle back together.’”
Van Zant later received a call from a federal official who described the dysfunction at Treasure Island’s city hall as the town tried to recover from the three storms.
“We sent them resources, and we could never get a reply back from the city, so we redeployed the resources somewhere else,” said the official, according to Van Zant.
Charlie Van Zant’s last day at the Keystone Heights City Hall is July 15.
As a retired career Army officer, he sees his series of jobs as missions, and he and his family concluded that it was time for the next mission.
“I’m not disparaging anybody,” Van Zant continued, “but the problem with being Christian and praying about things is sometimes when you just clearly hear the call for the next mission, then you actually have to do it, or risk being disobedient. I don’t know how else to say it.”
