The Clerk’s index of board records carries four columns, headed date, agenda, minutes and GovTV, and twenty meetings sit on it. Seventeen of them carry a link to the video.

Three do not, and one of those is Sept. 28, which has not happened yet. The other two are the regular meeting and the 5:01 hearing of Sept. 15.

That is the day the board set the tax rate.

Item 1 on the special agenda says what the hearing was for, in the statute’s own words. Adoption of final millage rates and budget for FY 2027, under sections 129.03 and 200.065, at a hearing the statute requires to be held after 5 p.m. on any day but Saturday, advertised in advance in the Record. The first substantive issue has to be the percentage increase in the aggregate millage rate over the rolled-back rate, and the board has to adopt the rates by resolution before it adopts the budget.

One page, one item, and every property tax bill in the county comes out of it. The page carries no rate on it and never was going to.

The minutes are not late, and that is worth saying first

Minutes get approved at the next regular meeting. They appear as backup to the item that approves them, and the next regular meeting is Oct. 6. The Sept. 3 minutes went up on exactly that schedule and are on the index now.

Nothing about that is unusual, and nobody is sitting on anything.

The video is a different animal, because it needs no motion, no second and no roll. A camera ran, and then somebody posts the file.

The budget page is still waiting for Sept. 15

Go to the county’s own FY 2027 budget page today and the section headed FY 2027 Final Budget opens like this: on September 15, 2026, at 5:01 pm in the County Auditorium, the Board of County Commissioners will follow a procedure prescribed by Florida Statute 200.065.

Will. The board will consider two motions, one to adopt the final millage rates and one to approve the budget.

That page has not moved since before the hearing, which is fine, except that it is the page a resident goes to.

Then there is the workbook. The page offers a Fiscal Year 2027 Final Budget Workbook, and it explains honestly why it looks familiar: since there were no changes from the first public hearing to the millage rates or the budget, the tentative workbook remains the same for the second and final hearing.

That explanation is true and it is also not the whole job. Both links go to the same address. The final budget workbook is the tentative budget workbook, because that is what the board was handed. It is the input. It is not a record that the board voted, or how it voted, or whether anybody moved to come down off a rate the same page calls a ceiling that may be decreased at the September hearings.

The number on that workbook is $1,939,752,566, with more than $482 million of it capital carried forward from previous years. It has been the same number since Sept. 3.

What eight days of this looks like from the outside

The morning meeting on the 15th is not exempt either. Item 1 that day, time certain at 9:30, was a closed attorney-client session under section 286.011(8) on settlement talks in Robinson Improvement Company v. St. Johns County. That one is closed by statute and nobody is asking for it. The rest of the meeting is closed by nothing at all.

So between Sept. 15 and Oct. 6, the county’s published account of the biggest vote it takes in a year consists of an agenda that says the hearing will occur, a budget page that says it will occur, and a workbook prepared before it occurred.

Nobody decided this

There is no reason on this record to think anyone did. A recording did not get posted in the week an office was closing out a fiscal year, which is the week a recording is least likely to get posted and the week it is worth the most.

That is the shape of most of what goes wrong in a records operation, which is that it is not a decision at all. It is a queue.

It is also the cheapest thing on this list to fix. Changing a tense on a web page takes a minute, and posting a video takes about as long as the upload takes. Seventeen of them made it.

Sept. 28 is a special meeting, and it is already on the index with an agenda and an empty video column. That column has two ways to go.

This is a column, the writer's argument, based on the facts shown above. Our news coverage is held to a separate standard, described on our standards page.