Mayor Keith Keogh
Mayor Keith Keogh chaired the Groveland Planning & Zoning Board through October 2024 and resigned mid-term to take the mayoral seat. The chair-to-mayor transition occurred at the November 7, 2024 PZB meeting where Keogh announced the resignation; the board elected Robert Proper as Chair and Zach Decker as Vice-Chair on the same agenda. Three months later, on February 6, 2025, Mayor Keogh addressed the board directly with a procedural directive: no item should go to council unless votes are unanimous, and dissenting votes must be documented with reasons. He also asked all board members to write a job description depicting their responsibilities. The directive reads as institutional-pressure for tighter board-to-council alignment under his mayorship — a governance posture distinct from his chair-era pattern of consensus-building. The directive coincided with active Code Update Version 5 drafting and Eco-Agrarian Code work; the unanimity directive shapes the regulatory architecture buildout the city has navigated since.
The chair-to-mayor transition
Keogh's chair-era posture appears in the November 7, 2024 PZB minutes as a clean institutional handoff. He chaired the meeting, the board elected Robert Proper as Chair (a Vice-Chair-to-Chair succession), and the same meeting elected Zach Decker as Vice-Chair (4-1 over Lambert; Shylkofski received no additional votes). Combined with Cicio's June 2024 departure and Bill Mathias's chronic absence, the board had undergone significant turnover in 2024. Five seats were expiring; the application process opened November 18, 2024. The chair Keogh vacated set the conditions for the Proper-Decker era of the PZB.
The unanimity directive
The February 6, 2025 PZB meeting is the cardinal Mayor Keogh moment in the corpus. Keogh addressed the board directly: no item should go to council unless votes are unanimous, and dissenting votes must be documented with reasons. He also asked all board members to write a job description depicting their responsibilities. The directive is institutional-pressure for tighter board-to-council alignment — a governance posture distinct from his consensus-building chair-era pattern. The PZB through 2025 then voted unanimously across nearly every substantive case (Galassi, Palisades, Cherry Lake denial 6-0, Eco-Agrarian Code 5-0, Brighthill Phase 2 unanimous). The unanimity discipline reads through every subsequent meeting.
The regulatory architecture context
The unanimity directive coincided with active CDC V5 drafting (the work Anita Geraci-Carver authored as City Attorney) and the Eco-Agrarian Code adoption window (Ordinance 2025-25, October 2025, recommended unanimously). Mayor Keogh's institutional frame — board-to-council unity, dissent-with-reasons documentation — operates as the procedural substrate for the regulatory-architecture buildout Groveland has navigated through 2025-2026. The mayor's directive shapes the city's defensive posture against SB 180 preemption: a unanimous board carries cleaner legal weight than a divided one. The institutional design is forward-looking even when the substantive votes appear routine.
Bidirectional links across the corpus
- Groveland PZB November 7, 2024 — Keogh resigned from PZB; Proper assumed Chair
- Groveland PZB February 6, 2025 — Mayor Keogh's unanimity directive to PZB