Two more enclave files on the agenda, three denials unwritten

The Sept. 15 regular agenda carried three agricultural enclave items, and two of them were applications this county had not seen before: ENCERT 2026-07 Sandy Creek at approximately 379 acres east of Interstate 95, and ENCERT 2026-08 AFI Property at approximately 310 acres west of Pacetti Road. The third was ENCERT 2026-01, approximately 4,462 acres between Nocatee Parkway and the Duval County line. It was on the agenda for a third hearing, because on Sept. 1 neither a motion to deny nor a motion to approve had carried.

An agricultural enclave certification is not a rezoning and it is worth being precise about what it is, because the difference is the whole mechanism. Certification is a finding that a parcel qualifies under section 163.3164. Once a parcel is certified, the owner may submit plans for single-family housing consistent with the density of an adjacent parcel, and the statute requires the county to treat that development as a conforming use notwithstanding its own comprehensive plan, its own future land use map and its own zoning. The county’s planning documents stop governing the land at the moment of certification. That is why these files are the most consequential thing on any agenda in this county, and why what happens to them procedurally matters more than it would anywhere else.

Here is what the public record shows about the five applications this board has handled since Aug. 19.

The acreages are the county’s own, printed as approximate on its agendas. The Aug. 19 votes and the reconsideration dates come off the Sept. 28 agenda, which recites the history of both Heritage files and records that Commissioner Whitehurst moved on Sept. 15 to call a special meeting to bring them back. The denials themselves were reported by Jacksonville Today the day each happened, and that outlet is the record for them, because there is no other one: no minutes of Sept. 15 or Sept. 28 are posted.

Added up, the first three are roughly 5,628 acres, which is this paper’s addition of three figures the county prints as approximate. Jacksonville Today put the N Palm Valley proposal at more than 4,000 homes and the two Heritage projects at as many as 15,000.

The statute makes the writing the decision

Paragraph (d) of subsection (4) is two sentences and they are the load-bearing ones:

If the application is denied, the governing body of the local government must issue its decision in writing with detailed findings of fact and conclusions of law. The applicant may seek review of the denial by filing a petition for writ of certiorari in the circuit court within 30 days after the date the local government renders its decision.

The clock runs from rendition, and rendition is the writing. A vote in a room at which five people raise their hands is not a rendered decision under that sentence, which means that twenty-one days after the board denied about 4,462 acres, the applicant’s 30 days have not begun. Neither have the county’s obligations finished. The words ENCERT, enclave, written order and findings of fact appear nowhere in the eight pages of Tuesday’s agenda.

The usual way to read a delay like this is that paperwork is slow and lawyers are careful, and there is something to that. A findings-of-fact order on a 4,462 acre application has to survive a circuit judge reading it, and nobody should want it written in a week.

But the statute that requires the order is the same statute that certifies a parcel automatically if the county does not act within 90 days of receiving the application. The Legislature wrote a deadline into every part of this process it cared about: 30 days for the compliance report, 30 days for the hearing, 90 days to the automatic certification, 30 days for the appeal. It attached no deadline at all to the written order. That is the gap the county is sitting in, and it is a real one rather than an invented one.

What sits in the gap

Three things, and none of them is abstract.

An applicant who wants to go to circuit court cannot, because the document that starts the clock does not exist. A resident who wants to know on what grounds 4,462 acres was denied cannot find out, because the findings of fact are the grounds and they have not been written. And the county itself is holding three decisions it has announced and not finalised, which is the worst of the three positions to be in if any of this is litigated.

Meanwhile the docket keeps filling. Two more applications went on an agenda on the same day one of the unrendered denials went back on it for a third hearing. Sandy Creek and AFI Property are small files beside the others, about 689 acres between them, and they carry 90 day clocks of their own running from the dates the county received them. The county does not publish those dates.

That is the actual problem, and it is not about how fast anybody types. A process with a hard automatic deadline on one end and no deadline on the other end rewards the county for the half of the work that is a vote and asks nothing of it for the half that is a decision. The vote is the easy part. It happens in public, it takes four minutes, and it gets a press account the same night. The order is the part that has to stand up, and it is the part with nothing in the statute making anyone write it.

Tuesday’s agenda has two lines about the Sept. 15 minutes and not one about an order. The next regular meeting is Oct. 20, which will be five weeks on the first denial.