The St. Augustine City Commission voted 5 to 0 on Monday evening to tell the state that it owns no land suitable for affordable housing.

That is Resolution 2026-33, item 9.B.1, and the city did not go looking for it. Section 166.0451 of the Florida Statutes requires every municipality to prepare an inventory of the real property it holds which is appropriate for use as affordable housing, review that list at a public hearing, adopt a resolution containing it, and put it on the city’s website. The first deadline was Oct. 1, 2023. The statute says every three years after that, which makes the next one Thursday.

The city met it with three days to spare. What it adopted is an empty list.

Amy Skinner, the planning and building director, put it to the commission in about ninety seconds. The resolution updates the one passed in 2023. The properties contemplated then are still the only ones to consider, she said, and they are not suitable. One of them, 800 South Plantation Island Drive, comes off because the city no longer owns it. Everything the city has bought since was bought under the conservation lands program, and is not suitable for housing either.

Nobody asked a question. The mayor asked for comments, got none, took a motion and a second, and the clerk called the roll. Five yes votes, at 1:19:19 on the recording. The item took about two minutes end to end.

The parcel that came off the list

The Plantation Island property is the interesting one, and the commission had already talked about it an hour earlier, on the companion report at item 7.C.1.

The city swapped it. A private owner took 800 South Plantation Island Drive, and the city took 90 and 92 South Dixie Highway. The South Dixie property is now the site where Dining with Dignity moved from the Granada lot on Nov. 14, 2025, just ahead of Nights of Lights, and which the city has taken to calling the Dignity Pavilion because it now does more than meals.

A commissioner wanted the timeline nailed down, specifically whether the swap happened before the state preemption on affordable housing took effect. The city attorney said the resolution he drafted a few years ago referenced the swap and described using the property for homeless services as not quite the same thing as affordable housing, but in the same vein.

The exchange ended where the questioner wanted it to end, on the point that the city violated nothing in making the swap. That is now on the record.

Both things are true at once. The city turned a parcel on its affordable housing inventory into a place that feeds and shelters people, which is a real thing to have done. And the inventory the statute asks about is now empty.

What else Monday carried

Item 7.C.2, Tier Two franchise agreements. Sixteen businesses applied in a window that ran Aug. 11 to Sept. 15 under ordinance 2026-11. One application arrived late and was accepted over a communication problem. All sixteen cleared background checks and insurance. The commission voted to let the city manager execute ten-year agreements with each of them.

Ten years is the part to write down. It will outlast this commission.

Item 10.A was the Dignity Pavilion update. The second phase is a drop-in center. Later in the evening a commissioner moved to formally name the place on Old Dixie Highway the Dignity Pavilion, for Dining with Dignity.

One more thing, since both governments met the same day

The county commission met Monday morning and decided roughly 1,166 acres. The city commission met Monday evening and decided it has no land for housing.

By Tuesday afternoon the city had posted the agenda, the full two hours and twenty-four minutes of video, an index that jumps to any item on it, and an MP4 anybody can download. Its archive runs thirty-nine pages back. The city’s own calendar page promises video within 24 hours, which is a promise it kept.

The county’s row for Sept. 28 on the Clerk’s index offers three things, Agenda, Approved Minutes and Watch on GovTV. The agenda is a link. The other two are plain text, as they are for both Sept. 15 meetings.

Same county, same Monday, two governments, and only one of them can be read.

The city commission meets the second and fourth Monday at five o’clock in the Alcazar Room at 75 King Street. The empty inventory goes on the website, because the statute says it has to, where anyone looking for somewhere to build housing people can afford will be able to find it and see that there is nothing on it.