The city renewed the horse carriage franchises Monday night for three years, 3 to 2.

The city has not said so itself. Minutes of the Oct. 12 meeting go to the commission at its next one, which is Oct. 26, and nothing the city has posted since describes what the board did. The News Flash carried the interim city manager appointment out of that same meeting on Oct. 13. It carries nothing about the carriages.

What the city has published is the agenda and the 502 page packet behind it. Both are a record of what the board was asked to do, and neither is a record of what it did.

So the account of the room comes from the St. Johns Citizen, which covered the meeting and published it Wednesday morning. The Citizen reported that the majority gave one medallion to each of seven qualified applicants and set a lottery for the city’s three remaining stalls. It reported that the term was cut from the five years allowed to three, and that the motion also calls for a future review of what the industry costs the city.

Commissioner Jim Springfield and Vice Mayor Barbara Blonder voted no. Mayor Nancy Sikes-Kline, Commissioner Cynthia Garris and Commissioner Jon DePreter voted yes.

Two other motions died first. The Citizen reported that Springfield proposed cutting the franchises to two and a half years so a later commission could let the industry sunset, and that the proposal never came to a vote. Blonder moved to table the approvals until the city’s costs were counted.

Nobody seconded it.

The five years is in the packet, and so is almost everything else a reader would want. Item 7.C.1 was the franchise applications, presented by Assistant City Manager Reuben Franklin. Item 6.A, the appeals, came before it. The backup to both carries the city’s blank franchise and license agreement, which starts at packet page 400 and runs about thirty paragraphs.

Paragraph 2(a) sets a term of five years. Paragraph 2(b)(i) renews it year to year after that unless one side gives three months’ written notice.

Paragraph 3(b) sets the money. The franchise fee is one thousand dollars times the number of medallions issued, due in quarterly installments in October, January, April and July, with a 15 percent late fee on anything that arrives after the fifth day of a quarter.

That thousand dollars is the figure the vice mayor argued from. The Citizen reported Blonder saying the annual medallion fee does not come close to covering what the city spends on oversight, veterinary bills and the upkeep of its horse transfer station.

The transfer station is in the agreement too, and it is the other half of what a franchise is. Paragraph 1(a) licenses numbered stalls inside the City of St. Augustine Horse Transfer Station, at the southern end of Riberia Street, directly south of the city wastewater treatment plant. Paragraph 2(b) makes the franchise and the stall coterminous. Lose one and the other goes with it.

Paragraph 1(d) says what a franchise is not. It recites that consistent with Jarrell vs. Orlando the franchisee has no right to use public streets for commercial purposes and is granted the privilege through this franchise.

That is the city writing into its own contract that it can say no.

One applicant’s business plan sits in the same packet from page 240. It describes a citywide cap of fifteen medallions under section 14-63(a) and a limit of five to any one franchisee, and it describes heat rules under section 14-79 that stop work at a measured temperature. Those are the applicant’s own account of the code and not the code, which the city does not attach.

The appeals came first on the agenda. The Citizen reported that three applicants had been disqualified under the new ordinance’s bar on felony and criminal traffic convictions, that the commission granted two of the three appeals, and that it upheld the third denial. This paper names none of the three. That is house policy and it is not a judgment about any of them.

The minutes land Oct. 26. Until a board approves them the city’s own record will not say how this carried. Which is fine.

The franchises run to 2029.

The Citizen reports that the commissioner who asked the city to start winding them down leaves the dais in December.