A public record of a vote is allowed two sentences. What was moved, and how it carried. Everything else in a set of minutes is decoration.

Four days after the St. Augustine City Commission picked the man who will run the city from Dec. 17, the city has published the first sentence and not the second.

What it published instead is a communications release, and the release says the commission appointed Reuben C. Franklin Jr. “with a unanimous vote,” and that sentence is the whole of the public account.

Unanimous is not a roll, it is a summary of a roll written by somebody who was not required to write one, and it is the only account of this vote that a resident of this city can read today.

The date it prints twice, and the one it does not print

The release gives the start date twice over, as Thursday, December 17, once in the subheading and once again in the opening sentence. It does not give an end.

The memorandum that put the item on the dais did. Item 13.A, packet page 487, asks the board to appoint Franklin “starting on December 17, 2026 and ending on June 17, 2027, or at a future date as determined by the City Commission.” That is a six month term with a trapdoor in it, and the memorandum says plainly what the six months are for: to allow the new Mayor and the new city commissioners enough time to consider their options.

So the question a reader is entitled to is narrow and it is not rhetorical. Did the board adopt the June 17 date, or did it take the clause after the comma. One of those hands the permanent hire to the commission seated in 2027. The other lets a future board set the end date whenever it likes. The release answers neither, and the difference is the whole item.

This is not a city that cannot publish

That is what makes it worth writing down. St. Augustine is the best meeting-record operation in this county. It posts an agenda, a packet, an indexed video and a downloadable file, usually inside a day, for boards most places do not film at all. The county does not come close.

The portal has the Oct. 12 agenda and the Oct. 12 packet. Two files, both labeled Agenda. No minutes, which is ordinary, because minutes are approved at the next meeting and not before.

The next meeting is Oct. 26 and its agenda is not posted. Neither is the Community Redevelopment Agency’s for the same afternoon, nor the shade meeting listed at half past two.

None of that is a violation and none of it is a secret. It is the gap between what a city is required to publish and what a city is able to publish, and this city routinely publishes well past the line the statute draws. That is a compliment and it is also the standard it set for itself.

Which is fine. The highlights release exists because the city decided readers should not have to wait two weeks to learn what a board did. Having decided that, it put out an account with the roll taken out of it.

What it costs to leave the roll out

A roll call is not a formality and it is not something filed away only for later. It is the only document that attaches a name to a decision, which is the entire mechanism by which a commissioner can be asked about one later. A board that skips it has not hidden anything, and it has still made that harder.

And unanimous does not say how many. A board of five that votes 4-0 with a member absent has voted unanimously, and so has a board that votes 5-0. The release does not separate those two, and the document that would is scheduled for a meeting whose agenda does not exist yet.

The vote is lawful. The appointment is lawful. Nobody broke a rule. Nothing here is a scandal. The release is accurate as far as it goes.

It just stops one sentence short of being a record, and that is the sentence with the names in it.

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.