The county and the company suing it spent eight hours in a room on Aug. 14 and came out with nothing signed.

The mediator’s report runs two pages. It gives the date, the hours, ten in the morning until six at night, the place, which was the county’s own administration building at 500 San Sebastian View, and the mediator, Samuel S. Goren. At the bottom there are five boxes and one of them is marked. The marked one reads: the parties did not reach an agreement.

It was filed with the court on Aug. 19. The board meets behind a closed door about this case on Tuesday at 9:30 a.m.

Those two facts belong next to each other. Under Fla. Stat. 286.011(8) a board may close a meeting to discuss pending litigation with its lawyers, and the notice for Tuesday names this case. A mediation that failed a month ago is the thing a board talks about in that room.

What the county says, on the record

The Office of the County Attorney answered six written questions from this paper on Friday and the Director of Public Affairs forwarded the answers Monday. Three of the six came back the same way: no comment due to pending litigation.

The three that did not are worth printing in full.

Asked what the board did with the special magistrate’s report, Assistant County Attorney Ryan E. Ross wrote: “The Special Magistrate’s report was presented to the Board on September 16, 2025. The Board took no action on the report.”

That report is the one that found the county’s denial of the rezoning unreasonable and said it inordinately burdened the property. It went to the board almost a year ago. The board did nothing with it, and five weeks later it was an exhibit to a federal complaint.

The other two answers were documents. “A copy of the County’s answer is attached.” “A copy of the mediation report is attached.” The covering note adds: “You may also disclose the attachments.”

This paper wrote on Sept. 10 that the county’s answer was not publicly retrievable. It is now.

The county’s side, for the first time

The answer runs thirty-nine pages and responds to the amended complaint filed Feb. 13. It was filed March 30.

Most of it is line by line. Admitted for jurisdictional purposes only, otherwise denied, over and over through the jurisdiction section. On the property itself the county admits the company owns land in St. Johns County and denies knowledge of the boundaries as drawn. A footnote says the section headings are the plaintiff’s own and that to the extent anything is being alleged through a heading, that is denied too.

The affirmative defenses are where the county makes its argument, and there are more than a dozen.

The takings claims are not ripe, it says, and will not be until the company “has fully availed itself of all available state administrative procedures and remedies.”

The substantive due process claim fails because no fundamental right is at issue. The county cites Greenbriar Village v. Mountain Brook, 345 F.3d 1258, for the proposition that land use rights are state created and cannot support that claim “even if the plaintiff alleges that the government acted arbitrary and irrationally.”

Procedural due process fails, it says, because a state remedy exists and the company “is presently pursuing” it.

And the declaratory judgment count should be set aside entirely, because the company has a petition for writ of certiorari pending in the Seventh Judicial Circuit here in St. Johns County, “in which the parties are litigating the matters in controversy raised in by the Amended Complaint.” The county asks the federal court to abstain.

Then the plainest one: the county “has not taken the Plaintiff’s property for public use by denying the subject PUD.”

Tuesday

The session is noticed for 9:30 a.m., before the regular meeting at nine and the budget hearing at 5:01. Under the statute the discussion is confined to settlement negotiations and litigation strategy, a court reporter takes it down, and the transcript is sealed until the case ends.

Whatever is said in there, the board comes out of it with a case that did not settle in August and a trial calendar that does not care.