St. Augustine has set its fire protection assessment for the year beginning Oct. 1 at 9 cents a square foot on a house and 16 cents on everything else.

The commission adopted it Sept. 9, by Resolution 2026-25, at the 5:05 hearing in the Alcazar Room, and the two rates sit in a table on page 6 of a 171-page packet.

This paper reported a week ago that the city’s FY2027 budget book names a fire assessment increase in its highlights and prints no figure for it in 160 pages. The figure was in the packet for the earlier hearing all along, under a heading set in spaced capitals.

What the resolution says

The city expects $2,625,453 from it in the fiscal year that starts Thursday. That is the estimate the resolution prints, and the same figure appears in the notice mailed to owners.

The rate is charged per square foot, against the billing units the city attributes to a parcel. The mailed notice leaves the owner four blanks: the classification, the number of billing units, the type of unit and the dollar figure. All four are blank on the form in the packet.

Page 7 carries a second table, setting the maximum the city may charge in later years without sending another notice, which is $0.1053 residential and $0.1921 non-residential. Those are ceilings and not rates.

The resolution heads that row Non-Residential and the mailed notice heads the same row Commercial.

At 9 cents, 2,000 billing units of residential square footage comes to $180 for the year. That multiplication is this paper’s and not a number the city prints.

How it reaches you

It is collected on the ad valorem tax bill, which the notice says goes in the mail in November.

It is not a millage, and it did not have to stay still when the millage did.

The assessment is a lien ranking equal with state, county, district and municipal taxes, and sitting above everything else until it is paid. The notice says failure to pay causes a tax certificate to be issued, which may result in a loss of title.

New construction is not exempt for the year. Section 3(H) levies an interim assessment against any property issued a certificate of occupancy after adoption, at the rates approved that day.

The dates on it

The legal ad went to the St. Augustine Record on Aug. 18, to run Thursday, Aug. 20. The Director of Financial Services swore that individual notices went first class to every affected owner on or before that date. The budget timeline on page 25 wanted the roll certified to the Tax Collector by Sept. 11.

Section 4 says the adoption is the final adjudication of the rate, the method of apportionment and the roll, unless somebody goes to court within 20 days of it. Twenty days from Sept. 9 is today.

What the record does not carry

The packet nowhere prints last year’s rate, and neither does the budget book inside it, which names the increase in a highlights list and moves on.

The city’s four September 2025 commission agendas are where a rate resolution for the current year would have been heard. None of the four carries one. So the size of the increase is not established by anything the city has posted.

An owner who wants to know what it moved by compares this November’s bill against last November’s. That is the only way there is.