A state corporation that grades every clerk of court in Florida reported in August that the St. Johns County Clerk of the Circuit Court and County Comptroller did not meet one of its collections standards in the quarter that ended June 30.

The document is the Quarterly Performance Measures and Action Plans Report of the Florida Clerks of Court Operations Corporation, covering April 1 through June 30, 2026. Section 28.35(2)(d) of the Florida Statutes requires the corporation to build a uniform system of performance measures, to notify the Legislature of any clerk not meeting a standard, and to hand over a copy of the corrective action plan. The report sets out what it currently measures: collections in nine court divisions, two kinds of timeliness in ten, and one measure for juror payment processing, all of them quarterly. The corporation’s own note says staff compiled this one on Aug. 12.

Table A of that report marks a single division for St. Johns, family, and codes the cause external. Table G, the summary, gives the office one collections action plan and zero under each of the two timeliness measures and under juror payment. Table D is where the offices’ explanations are printed, in a column headed Description. The St. Johns line is numbered 67, and the description reads: void. The word appears nowhere else in the eighteen page report, and nothing in the report says what it refers to.

The same column carries paragraphs from other offices. The Duval County entry, three pages earlier in the same table, runs to three lines about continuing staffing challenges, enhanced online payment options, a compliance department and a contract for compliance software. Gadsden’s says many of its defendants are repeat offenders carrying multiple cases without the means to pay. Putnam’s says the office is now suspending driver licenses in misdemeanor cases for failure to pay court costs and fines.

What the report does not carry anywhere is a rate. It records the division, whether the office called the cause external or internal, and the office’s description, and no table in it states what any clerk actually collected. The standards the corporation publishes beside these reports set the family division at a 90 percent annual collection rate, circuit criminal at 9 percent and civil traffic at 90 percent. That standards page was approved by the corporation’s executive council on Dec. 16, 2021, and it is the only version posted under the quarterly performance heading on the corporation’s reports index.

The quarters before this one are on the same index. In the quarter running January through March 2026 the office is marked zero in every table. In the quarter before that, October through December 2025, a note on Table A states that Jefferson and St. Johns did not submit a collections report at the time the report was compiled, and a second note dates that compilation to Feb. 13, 2026.

Going back a year, the office missed civil traffic in the quarter that ended June 30, 2025, and the description printed beside it is two words and a full stop: more collected. It missed circuit criminal in the quarter that ended Sept. 30, 2025, and that description reads: Staff shortage. Working to increase the collection rate for the next quarter. In the two quarters before those, October 2024 through March 2025, St. Johns is marked zero throughout.

The office has not missed a timeliness standard in any of the six quarterly reports read for this story, and it has not missed the juror payment standard in any of them. Those measures cover how fast new cases are filed and how fast they are docketed, and they are the two the corporation applies to ten divisions rather than nine.

Statewide, the report counts 50 clerk offices submitting 108 collections corrective action plans for the quarter, and 52 counties submitting 130 plans in all, with 15 counties recording none. Leon County’s office is listed with six. Among this county’s neighbors, Table G gives Flagler and Volusia zero, Clay and Nassau one each, and Duval and Putnam three each.

The Tattler will publish the office’s account of what the entry means. Quarterly submissions for the quarter that ends Sept. 30 are due to the corporation on the 20th of the month after it closes, which is Oct. 20, and the corporation compiled the last two reports about six weeks after each quarter ended.

A criminal charge is an accusation. All defendants are presumed innocent unless and until proven guilty. The Tattler tracks the cases it reports and publishes the outcome, including when charges are dropped or reduced. If you are named in this story and the case has resolved, write to corrections@stjohnstattler.org and we will update it.