Food truck owners want the kitchen open later
A late-hours fight at the county, a drive-thru coffee permit off CR 210, and a November ballot question that could reshape your tax bill.
St. Johns County has regulated food trucks for years with rules nobody could quite point to, and commissioners held a hearing on Tuesday, July 21, to finally codify them. County officials and the operators themselves agree on that much: the trucks have worked under ambiguous rules, and writing them down is long overdue. The disagreement is in the details. Operators want later operating hours than the draft allows, and the ordinance's mandated 100-foot setbacks are a sticking point for anyone trying to park somewhere people actually walk. Owners are pushing for changes before the final regulations are adopted, and nothing is final yet - which is the part worth paying attention to. The version that gets adopted decides whether the truck you like can still be serving after dinner.
A drive-thru coffee shop is coming to the Forum at Greenbriar
St. Johns County issued a building permit July 23 for a Boost Coffee + Energy at 87 Ashourian Ave., on an outparcel at The Forum at Greenbriar off County Road 210. It's a $450,000 job for 713 square feet - small building, big canopy of drive-thru ambition. St. Augustine's own Marvel Construction Group is the contractor, with Yuro & Associates of Ponte Vedra as civil engineer and Jacksonville-based Ash Properties as landlord. Boost's menu runs past coffee into energy drinks, protein lattes, shakes, smoothies and its own sodas, and the company lists 5 a.m. to 10 p.m. hours daily. It joins Extract Juicery, Poppy's Italiano, Avalon Nail & Spa and Brooks Rehabilitation in the center. The chain opened its first store in West Jacksonville on June 10 and has said it plans roughly ten corporate North Florida locations before franchise sales begin in late 2027, so this one is early in a longer rollout rather than a one-off.
The homestead amendment has fine print
In a June special session, the Legislature put a constitutional amendment - CS/HJR 1F - on the November ballot. It would raise the homestead exemption from $50,000 to $150,000 for non-school levies starting January 2027, lift it to $250,000 in 2028 with inflation indexing after, and constitutionally direct the Legislature to schedule the full elimination of homestead property taxes, with no deadline specified and no replacement revenue identified. It needs 60% voter approval to pass. The city has prepared an FAQ fact sheet, and City Manager David Birchim framed the goal as clear, factual information about the amendment's potential impact on city services and capital improvements.
The carriages stay, but the route changes
Activists asked the City Commission to end horse-drawn carriage tours outright. The commission declined. What it approved instead was a modified route, along with revisions to the policies that regulate the carriages - part of a broader overhaul of how the city franchises tour vehicles. So the tours continue, on a route the commission chose to change rather than leave alone. For a downtown where the carriages have been part of the scenery about as long as anyone can remember, that is the substance of the decision: not whether the horses work, but where.
HOAs and CDDs cut out of the neighborhood grants
St. Augustine is excluding homeowners associations and community development districts from the city's Neighborhood Grant Program. The practical effect is a line drawn between neighborhoods organized under an HOA or a CDD and those that are not, and if your street sits inside one, it is now on the far side of it.
The commission candidates, minus the opposition research
Most of what a voter learns about a candidate arrives secondhand, filtered through whoever paid for the mailer. St. Augustine Social has put together a guide built on the opposite premise: the people running for the St. Johns County Board of County Commissioners, introduced on their own terms instead of through their critics. Worth the time for a practical reason. This is the same board now weighing setbacks and operating hours for food trucks, which is a fair measure of how much ordinary life passes across that dais before anyone thinks to look up.