The commission takes the second and final reading of Ordinance 2026-23 on Monday. Item 8.A.1, public hearing, five o’clock in the Alcazar Room.

What the mayor asked for in September was a Nights of Lights measure. The city now has that request on paper, for the first time, because the draft minutes of the Sept. 28 meeting are in Monday’s packet at pages 148 to 154, waiting to be approved as item CA.4.

Page 154:

“Mayor Sikes-Kline requested support for a resolution which would increase the illegal parking fine from $35 to $100 in the Davis Shores area during Nights of Lights. She said the neighborhood was in favor of the change. There was unanimous support for the resolution.”

Three sentences. One of them is a season.

Ordinance 2026-23 carries no holiday dates, no seasonal window and no expiration. The phrase Nights of Lights does not appear in it. Neither does the word season. What a reader on Comares Avenue is being asked to live under is a permanent amendment to the code, and once the signs are up the fine on those rights of way is $100 in February and in July.

This paper reported the first reading on Oct. 12 and said then that the ordinance did not mention the season at all. The minutes are the other half of that. They show where the season went in.

The nine clauses explain it a different way

The ordinance arrives with nine whereas clauses and not one of them mentions a light display. They recite congestion, air pollution, excessive noise, pedestrian safety, access for residents and businesses, the availability of designated parking spaces, the delivery of public and emergency services, environmental sustainability and the city’s multimodal transportation system. The last one says the city recognizes that certain roadway corridors will be congested.

That is a year-round case. It is a different case from the one the request was made on, and both of them are in Monday’s packet.

What the filing still does not answer

Section 166.041(4) of the Florida Statutes makes a city file a business impact estimate, and the one at pages 58 to 60 answers the business half of its own question.

Prompt 2(c) on that form asks for the city’s regulatory costs including estimated revenues from any new charges or fees to cover such costs. The filing says the signage comes out of the normal operating budget. It does not estimate the other side.

Nothing in 164 pages says what a $100 ticket brings in where a $35 ticket used to. The fine is the only number in the item that moves.

And the record of the first reading is not here

CA.4 offers one set of minutes for approval and they are September’s. The Oct. 12 meeting, where this ordinance was first read and where the three horse carriage franchises were granted, is not in the packet at all.

So the city takes the second vote before it publishes an approved record of the first one, which is fine, and which also means the only account of the Oct. 12 meeting a resident can read on Monday morning is a newspaper’s.

The same minutes carry a smaller thing worth keeping. The vice mayor told the board the city had received a Class 4 Community Rating System grade, which she put at a 30 percent flood insurance reduction. The minutes record no question about what the class was before.