Commissioners split over whether county's development-area boundary equates to a statutory "urban service area"

A central legal dispute at the meeting was whether St. Johns County's development area boundary can be treated as the "urban service area" described in Florida Statutes section 163.3164. Vice Chair Anne Taylor read the statute into the record and said the statutory phrase requires areas to be "identified in the comprehensive plan" with public facilities already in place or specified in the capital improvements element; she argued that the record lacked the specific funded capital projects necessary to meet that test.