The approved minutes of the Sept. 28 special meeting went up on the Clerk’s board records index this week, and the four pages of them print the entire motion by which St. Johns County refused agricultural enclave certification to two parcels south of State Road 207. The motion carried 3/2, with Taylor, Joseph and Arnold voting yes and Murphy and Whitehurst voting no, and its final clause directed the County Attorney to prepare the final written order with findings of fact and conclusions of law. That order is the document this story went looking for.

It is still not in the record.

What the two items cover is printed in the agenda text the minutes reproduce. ENCERT 2026-05, Heritage Development East, is approximately 615.41 acres directly east of Interstate 95, and ENCERT 2026-06, Heritage Development West, is approximately 551 acres on the other side of the interstate. Both sit south of State Road 207, and adding the county’s two figures together gives about 1,166 acres, which is this paper’s addition and not a total the county prints anywhere.

The motion is the findings, until the order exists

An agricultural enclave certification is the statutory door that lets a landowner skip the comprehensive plan amendment and have single-family housing on farmland treated as a conforming use, so the question at a certification hearing is never what gets built. It is whether the parcel meets the six-part definition in section 163.3164(4) of the Florida Statutes. The motion that carried on Sept. 28 answers that in the county’s own words, and those words are worth having in full, because they are the only reasoning any public document attaches to this decision.

The board found that the applicant “has not carried its burden under section 163.3164.” It found that “the property is not surrounded by a legally established urban service area,” and defined that term in the same breath as “an area identified in the comprehensive plan with facilities in place or in the capital improvements elements.” It found that “reliance on the development area boundary as provided or planned or is a functional equivalent of an urban service area does not meet that standard.” It recorded that “staff separately found that the services were not adequate for the site,” and that “unlike Ordinance No. 2015-4 for Durbin Creek, no Ordinance, Comprehensive Plan Provision, or Future Land Use Map Designation established an urban service area.” Then it found that “the certification was not authorized.” That is the whole of the reasoning.

The Durbin Creek clause is the load-bearing one for anybody who has to argue this again. The board is not saying that an urban service area is impossible in this county, it is saying that where one exists an ordinance made it, and that the development area boundary a planner draws on a future land use map is a different instrument which does not do the same work. A perimeter test leaning on the second instead of the first is the argument the board rejected, and the minutes record the Deputy County Attorney reading the statutory definition into the record and telling the board that whether an enclave had to sit inside an urban service area depended on which perimeter calculation was used.

The reconsideration, and what the room did first

This was the second time the board heard these two applications. On Aug. 19 a motion to deny them failed and a motion to approve them then carried 3 to 2 with Joseph and Taylor dissenting, which is to say the county had already certified both parcels once. On Sept. 15, during commissioner comments, Whitehurst moved to schedule a special meeting to bring the item back, and the Sept. 28 meeting is that motion carried out.

The minutes record one more thing before the substance, in two sentences and with no further explanation: “Motion by Joseph to censure Commissioner Whitehurst. Motion failed for lack of second.” Whitehurst then explained why he had brought the item back, items 1 and 2 were discussed together, and the board took public comment from 23 speakers by this paper’s count of the entries in the list, three of whom filed lettered exhibits that are bound into the back of the minutes. An attorney for Heritage Development East gave the rebuttal. The meeting ran an hour and thirty-seven minutes.

Written questions went to Arnold and to Whitehurst on Sept. 30 about this vote, with a deadline of Oct. 6, and neither has answered. Murphy answered a separate set of questions on Oct. 6 and his answers ran in full.

Twenty-nine days, and the clock has not started

Section 163.3162(4)(d) requires a local government that denies certification 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 local government renders its decision to file a petition for writ of certiorari in circuit court. Both halves of that sentence depend on a document, and the board’s own motion acknowledges as much by directing the County Attorney to prepare one.

Twenty-nine days have passed since the vote. None of them produced one. The approved Oct. 6 minutes were published in the same batch as the Sept. 28 minutes, and all fourteen pages of them were searched for encert, enclave, written order, certiorari, Heritage and PARC, and return nothing on any of those terms. The Oct. 20 agenda carries no written order either, and what it does carry is four more certification applications: Adler Creek at approximately 594.42 acres, Carter Road Associates at approximately 200.75, Star IV at approximately 70.83 and Pacetti Oaks at approximately 40.5. The Clerk’s index publishes no minutes for Oct. 20 at all, only the agenda and the video.

So the record now holds a reasoned refusal of about 1,166 acres and no rendered order to appeal from, which is the same position the 4,462 acres north of Nocatee Parkway have been in since the Sept. 15 denial. The applicant in that case did not wait. It says it petitioned the Seventh Judicial Circuit on Oct. 19, 34 days after a vote whose written order has never appeared, and a court will now decide what rendition means when the only thing rendered is a motion in a set of minutes. Heritage has filed nothing this paper can find. Until an order exists for these two parcels there is no date to count the thirty days from, and the next scheduled chance for one to reach a board agenda is Nov. 3.