The applicant for agricultural enclave certification on approximately 4,462 acres north of Nocatee Parkway says it filed a petition on Oct. 19 asking the Seventh Judicial Circuit Court to review St. Johns County’s refusal to certify the land. The notice of it is two lines on a web page the PARC Group runs and says it manages, under a heading reading Latest Application Updates, and it gives no case number.

The county commission denied that application on Sept. 15 by a vote of 3 to 2. The approved minutes of that meeting, published by the Clerk of the Circuit Court, record the motion in one sentence that does two separate things. It denies the certification, finding on the competent substantial evidence in the record that the parcels do not satisfy the statutory definition. Then it directs 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.

That order is the document the clock runs from.

Section 163.3162(4)(d) says a denial must be issued in writing with detailed findings of fact and conclusions of law, and that the applicant may seek review by filing a petition for writ of certiorari in the circuit court within 30 days after the date the local government renders its decision. The vote was Sept. 15 and the petition, by the applicant’s own account, was Oct. 19, which is 34 days later counting from the day after the vote. No written order has been published in the interval.

Where the order is not

Neither the Oct. 6 nor the Oct. 20 board agenda carries an item on a written order, findings of fact or conclusions of law for any enclave certification. The only entries on either agenda bearing the number 2026-01 are a Grand Oaks major modification, a Grand Oaks development agreement and a Durbin Creek development agreement modification, three unrelated files that happen to share the sequence number.

The Clerk’s index of board records is where an approved set of minutes would appear, and the page says minutes are posted after Board approval. The index carries 22 meeting rows. All 22 link an agenda, 21 link a GovTV recording and 19 link an approved minutes PDF. The words Approved Minutes are printed in every row, and in three of them the words are not a link: Oct. 20, Oct. 6 and Sept. 28. On the Oct. 20 row, Watch on GovTV is not a link either, which makes that row the only one of the 22 offering a reader nothing but an agenda.

A reader checking that page should know the label is not the document. The words sit in all 22 rows, and in three of them they lead nowhere.

Sept. 28 is the day the board denied ENCERT 2026-05 and 2026-06, the two Heritage applications covering about 1,166 acres between them. This paper reported on Oct. 1 that no written order had been published for any of the three denials. Nothing has changed on that, except that one applicant has now gone to court anyway.

What certification does, and what it removes

Certification is not approval to build. The applicant’s own page says so. What it changes is which room the next decision gets made in.

Under paragraph (e) of the same subsection, an owner whose land is certified may submit development plans for single-family housing consistent with the uses, density and intensity of an adjacent parcel or an adjacent development. That development must then be treated as a conforming use notwithstanding the county’s comprehensive plan, its future land use designation, or its zoning. Paragraph (g) then requires the county and the owner to agree within 30 business days to a process and schedule for approving those plans, which may be administrative in nature. It bars the county from requiring a process longer than 180 days, or one that includes further review in a quasi-judicial process or public hearing. Paragraph (f) bars the county from applying any rule to an enclave that is more burdensome than the rule for a comparable application, and requires it to treat an enclave next to an urban service district as though it sat inside one.

So the hearing the board held on Sept. 15 is, by the statute’s design, the hearing. A reader wondering what happens to the land after certification is reading about a process in which the county may not require a public hearing.

The concurrency question on this file has an answer and it is a short one. There is no development plan to measure. The applicant says no plans have been submitted and that certification would authorize no construction, and the county has published no trip generation, no level-of-service finding and no classroom count against 4,462 acres, because at this stage nothing requires one. Paragraph (d) of the definition lets an applicant satisfy the public services test by offering to enter a binding agreement to pay for, construct or contribute land for its proportionate share of the improvements.

The acreage, and the ceiling

The definition in s. 163.3164(4)(e) caps an agricultural enclave at 1,280 acres. The cap rises to 4,480 acres only where the parcels are surrounded on at least 75 percent of their perimeter by existing or authorized residential development that will reach a density at buildout of at least 1,000 residents per square mile, in which case the statute says the area must be determined to be urban.

The application the minutes describe is approximately 4,462 acres. Subtract the one figure from the other and the file sits 18 acres inside the higher ceiling, and the higher ceiling is available only if the urban determination holds. The board’s motion found that the parcels do not satisfy the statutory definition. It does not say which paragraph.

The statute also tells anybody measuring a perimeter to ignore what sits immediately across a road, a canal or a body of water and to use the parcel on the far side instead. The land runs west of the Intracoastal Waterway to the Duval County line, and the perimeter test is what the applicant’s lawyer argued on Sept. 15 and what the board voted against.

The law expires in 2028

The certification process this fight is being conducted under is temporary, and the statute says so in a footnote to itself.

Section 3 of chapter 2026-34 provides that the amendments that act made to ss. 163.3162(4) and 163.3164(4) expire on Jan. 1, 2028, and that the text of both subsections reverts to what existed on June 30, 2026. The Legislature’s own site prints the returning text underneath the current text. In it, subsection (4) is headed AMENDMENT TO LOCAL GOVERNMENT COMPREHENSIVE PLAN. The route for an enclave owner there is an application to amend the county’s comprehensive plan under s. 163.3184, with 180 days of good-faith negotiation and state agency review. It carries a rebuttable presumption that the amendment is not urban sprawl, and it requires any parcel larger than 640 acres to include clustering, mixed use and the transfer of development rights.

There is no certification in that version. No 90-day clock that certifies land when a board does not vote, no conforming-use provision, no bar on a quasi-judicial hearing, and no certiorari paragraph. Every mechanism in the North Palm Valley file arrived with chapter 2026-34 and leaves with it.

What the applicant is saying

The PARC Group has put up a page at northpalmvalleyagenclave.com carrying eleven questions and answers, among them how the application would affect traffic in Ponte Vedra Beach, whether certification approves future development, what environmental protections would apply and who pays for required infrastructure. It lists as reference material the two statutes and a July 31, 2026 county Growth Management staff report on the application’s eligibility, pages 4 to 8.

The St. Johns Citizen reported on Oct. 22 that PARC’s president, Chris Pilinko, said in a statement that the company believes the application meets the requirements of state law, consistent with county staff findings, and is asking the court to review the commission’s decision. The same report puts the request at one home per acre and describes the land as owned by the Davis family. It calls the property about a third the size of Nocatee, which it gives as more than 13,000 acres. It also says the website cites a county-funded 2024 traffic assessment for a figure putting Nocatee trips through Ponte Vedra Beach at about 1.7 percent of A1A traffic north of Solana Road. The Citizen also reports that no timetable has been announced for the court’s review.

The county has published nothing about the petition, and its news release feed carries no item on it.

The petition itself has not been published, and the Clerk’s online case search for the circuit court sits behind a gate. So the only account of the filing is the applicant’s own, and the only account of the vote is the county’s minutes. Those minutes record a direction to write the order on Sept. 15, and the order has appeared on no agenda and in no index since. The Tattler will publish the order when the county issues it, and the case number when the court’s record can be read.