UPDATE, Oct. 1, 2026. The Oct. 6 agenda is posted and carries no written order for this denial, no enclave item at all, and not the Sept. 28 minutes. The 90-day certification on inaction remains in the statute unchanged and expires Jan. 1, 2028. See Three enclave denials, and not one written order on Tuesday’s agenda.

The two parcels the St. Johns County Commission certified as agricultural enclaves on Aug. 19 come to about 1,166 acres, which is this paper’s addition of the 615.41 acres the county’s agenda gives for Heritage Development East and the 551 acres it gives for Heritage Development West.

The state law that put both of them in front of the board is seven weeks older than the first vote on them. It also has an end date printed on its face.

Chapter 2026-34, Laws of Florida, is the enrolled text of CS/CS/CS/SB 686. The Senate passed it 34 to 2 on Feb. 26 of this year and it took effect July 1. Section 3 expires the two subsections it rewrote on January 1, 2028, and the statute then reverts to the text in existence on June 30, 2026.

Every application the county is now holding sits inside a window that closes in just over fifteen months.

The clocks the act sets

An agricultural enclave is farmland ringed for most of its perimeter by development. The act lets the owner ask the county to certify a parcel as one before any development application is filed. Certification is not permission to build anything. It is a finding that the land qualifies, and what follows from the finding is where the deadlines live.

The county has 30 days from receipt of an application to hand the applicant a written report saying whether it complies. It then has 30 days from that report to hold a public hearing and approve or deny.

Then comes the sentence the rest of the process hangs from: “If the local government does not approve or deny certification of the parcel or parcels as an agricultural enclave within 90 days after receipt of the application, the parcel or parcels must be certified as an agricultural enclave.”

A board that runs out of clock does not preserve what was there before. The default the act writes in is certification.

What each answer costs

A denial does not close the file. The act requires the governing body to issue its decision in writing “with detailed findings of fact and conclusions of law.” It then gives the applicant 30 days from the date the county renders that decision to file a petition for writ of certiorari. That is the route by which a circuit judge reviews whether a local board followed the law, rather than whether it chose well.

An approval moves the land out from under the county’s own planning documents. Development plans submitted by the owner of a certified enclave “must be treated as a conforming use, notwithstanding the local government’s comprehensive plan, future land use designation, or zoning.” The comprehensive plan is the document that decides what a future land use designation permits at all. For a certified parcel the act sets it aside.

What happens after that is on a fixed schedule as well. Within 30 business days of receiving development plans the county and the owner must agree in writing to a process and schedule for “information submittal, analysis, and final approval,” and the act bars the county from requiring a process longer than 180 days or one that “includes further review of the plans in a quasi-judicial process or public hearing.”

The concurrency question, which is whether the roads, schools, water and sewer exist to carry what gets built, is answered inside the definition rather than at the hearing. A parcel qualifies if those services are available, or are scheduled in the county’s capital improvement element, or can be provided by an alternative provider, or if the applicant “offers to enter into a binding agreement to pay for, construct, or contribute land for its proportionate share of such improvements.” An offer is one of the four ways to satisfy it.

Why the interstate matters here

The definition the act rewrote reaches a parcel in continuous bona fide agricultural use for five years, owned by a single person or entity as of January 1, 2025, in a county whose population is 1.75 million or less. The acreage ceiling is 1,280. It rises to 4,480 only where the parcel is ringed on at least 75 percent of its perimeter by residential development reaching a density of at least 1,000 residents per square mile at buildout. Counties covered by the water protection plan at s. 373.4595(4)© are carved out of that higher ceiling.

Then there are three routes to satisfying the perimeter, and the one the geography here turns on sits inside the first. A parcel qualifies if 75 percent of its perimeter is “a combination of an interstate highway and a parcel or parcels that are within an urban service district, area, or line” which the county has designated on its future land use map for industrial, commercial or residential development.

A later paragraph then says a parcel certified under that particular test, where it is adjacent to an interstate highway, “may be developed for commercial, industrial, or single-family residential purposes” if an adjacent parcel or development permits the same density or intensity. The rest of the act runs to single-family residential alone. The interstate route is the one that opens commercial and industrial as well.

Heritage Development East is directly east of Interstate 95 and south of State Road 207. Heritage Development West is on the other side of the same interstate, which is the feature both applications lean on.

What the county’s own record says

Heritage Development Company of NE Florida, LLC applied on both. The Aug. 19 minutes give the east parcel as Parcel ID Nos. 136090-0005 and 136640-0000. The west parcel is 136635-0120, 137350-0010 and 140390-0000.

On the east parcel a motion to deny failed 2 to 3, with Commissioner Joseph and Commissioner Taylor voting for it and Commissioners Whitehurst, Murphy and Arnold voting against. A motion to approve then carried 3 to 2 on the mirror of that split, and the west parcel carried 3 to 2 the same way.

The failed motions are worth reading for what they asked the staff to do. Each one directed the Office of the County Attorney “to prepare the final written order, including findings of fact and conclusions of law supporting the Board’s determination, as required by Section 163.3162(4), Florida Statutes.”

Jacksonville Today reported on Sept. 28 that the board reversed itself and denied both certifications 3 to 2, with Commissioner Arnold moving to the side Commissioner Joseph and Commissioner Taylor had been on in August. That outlet also reported that county staff were reviewing eight further agricultural enclave proposals as of mid-September.

The county has posted no written record of Sept. 28. The Clerk’s board records index carries an agenda for that date, and the Approved Minutes and GovTV cells beside it are plain text.

What is not published anywhere

The 90-day rule is measured from the day the county receives an application. The county does not publish that day.

The Planning and Zoning division’s page carries the words enclave and ENCERT nowhere at all. A search of the whole county site for the phrase agricultural enclave returns one news item, which is the county’s own notice of the Aug. 19 special meeting. Nothing on the site lists which certification applications are in, when each arrived, or when the report under the first 30-day deadline was delivered.

A resident who wants to know whether a clock is running on farmland near them has the agenda of a meeting that has already been called. Nothing the county posts comes earlier than that.