The St. Augustine City Commission meets at 5 Monday in the Alcazar Room, and parking is not on the agenda. It sits in the consent agenda instead, as a record to approve. Item CA.4 asks the board to adopt the minutes of its Oct. 12 meeting. That is the night it narrowed Davis Shores to resident parking for the holidays, and the minutes now in the packet show how it did.

Two parking decisions passed that night under one agenda item. One got a public hearing. The other did not.

That is the one that takes the parking.

What the record shows

The item was 9.A.1, filed under the agenda heading No Public Hearing Required. The first motion was the first reading of Ordinance 2026-23, the measure raising the parking fine from $35 to $100 across an expanded downtown and Davis Shores boundary. It carried four to nothing, with Commissioner Cynthia Garris not present for the vote. A first reading draws no hearing, which is ordinary. The hearing comes at the second reading, and this ordinance got it on Oct. 26, with eight speakers and a written business-impact estimate.

Then, inside the same item, a second motion. Jaime Perkins, the community services director, presented the city’s temporary residential parking program, the one that issues resident hangtags and fines everyone else. Commissioner Jon DePreter moved to approve it “as presented.” Commissioner Barbara Blonder seconded. It carried five to nothing; Garris had returned to the dais. The draft minutes record the board finding the plan “a good compromise for the neighborhoods and businesses in totality.” They record no public comment on it.

The votes are on pages 206 and 207 of Monday’s packet.

The part that takes the parking

The program is the thing with the effect. In North and South Davis Shores it holds the public right of way to resident hangtags from 1 to 9 p.m. for the length of the Nights of Lights season, daily in the north and Fridays through Sundays in the south. Park there without a tag and the fine is the new $100. The season runs Nov. 21 through Jan. 18, by the dates the city published last month.

It is not an ordinance. It drew no published notice, no second reading, no hearing and no business-impact estimate of its own. The estimate the city did file is the one bolted to the fine, and it answers the question of how many businesses the fine would hurt in a single word.

None.

There is a line in the program the Davis Shores blocks did not get. Uptown and Abbott Tract, two other zones in it, hold their commercially zoned frontage to a 5 p.m. start, so the shops keep their street parking through the afternoon. North and South Davis Shores start at 1. The commercial frontage on Anastasia Boulevard, at the foot of the only bridge onto the island, falls under the residential hours like any other block.

What the coalition says is missing

The gap is what brought The 1565 Coalition into it. The group, whose editorial on the decision reached this paper over the weekend, argues the city stood up a residential parking zone without the steps its own rules require. St. Augustine’s permit-parking code, sections 24-90 through 24-99, and the policy manual under it call for a petition from 60 percent of the households on a block, two field surveys of how the curb is used, residentially zoned blocks, and a designation the city manager makes and records on a map. The coalition says it can find none of the surveys or the designation in the record of the Davis Shores zones, and that neither the ordinance nor the manual provides for a temporary one. It has asked the city for those documents under the public-records law.

The coalition is not a neutral party. It says plainly it is on the side of the businesses, and the reading of the code is its own. The petition itself appears to have cleared the bar: neighborhood leaders told the commission on Oct. 26 they had signatures from more than 60 percent of residents. The documented part is narrower and harder to argue with. The record shows a public hearing on the fine and none on the program, and the same record is what the board is asked to approve Monday.

Businesses on the boulevard have started to answer. The coalition points to reporting that more than a dozen of them, led by a brewery at the foot of the bridge, are asking the city to reconsider the Davis Shores and Anastasia restrictions. The city has not addressed the coalition’s questions in any public filing this paper has found, and Monday’s agenda posts no response.

The time left

The timing is the squeeze. The season starts Nov. 21. The commission’s next regular meeting after Monday is not until December, by the calendar the city carried in its Oct. 26 agenda, so the first stretch of the restriction, Thanksgiving weekend and the opening weekends of December, runs with the board out of session. Parking is not on Monday’s agenda. The one place a commissioner can raise it is item 14, Items by Mayor and Commissioners, near the end of the night.

That is the same place the mayor raised the fine on Sept. 28. The request set all of this moving. The board is asked Monday to approve the record of the night it finished. The record is accurate. It holds a hearing on the dollar and none on the street.