JACKSONVILLE, Fla. \u2014 An effort to make city records more accessible has inadvertently resulted in a multi-week period where records will be much less accessible.<\/p>\n
Anyone checking the City of Jacksonville\u2019s website lately may have noticed that access to old and newly filed bills, meeting agendas, and more are no longer available.<\/p>\n
The City of Jacksonville\u2019s website usually posts all legislation, past and present, in an easily searchable database, but if you visit the site today, you\u2019ll be greeted with this message<\/a> saying, \u201cThis page has been removed while we work to bring it into compliance with ADA requirements\u201d.<\/p>\n \u201cFor us here in 2026 it\u2019s like, you know, we wake up and bam we\u2019re back in 1992,\u201d said First Amendment Attorney Alison Steele.<\/p>\n Steele said despite the temporary period of inaccessibility, the City of Jacksonville is likely not in violation of Florida\u2019s strong open records laws.<\/p>\n \u201cLike we\u2019re all going to experience the Microsoft update on a daily basis for the next month and a half. That\u2019s always going to happen,\u201d said Steele. \u201cSo long as people proceed reasonably, nobody is violating the law.\u201d<\/p>\n We reached out to the city asking how members of the public will be able to continue accessing legislation, agendas, and other records during this period.<\/p>\n We were told residents can email CouncilPIO@coj.net<\/a> to request copies of any bills.<\/p>\n If you don\u2019t have a bill number, keywords can be provided to help narrow down the search.<\/p>\n Once the upgrade is complete, the city says the website will include new features like screen reader technology to help the visually impaired access records online.<\/p>\n Steele said while it may cause a lot of headaches in the short term, there was a time when these online tools didn\u2019t exist at all, and people managed to make it work.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s much more cumbersome, it\u2019s much less efficient, but it can be done,\u201d said Steele. \u201dAnd if everyone proceeds with goodwill and, you know, some honest back and forth and probably even a little bit of humor about the situation, you may find that it\u2019s going to work out.\u201d<\/p>\n While the goal is to finish the upgrades and relaunch the portal by June 3rd, Action News Jax has been told it is possible the system upgrades could be completed ahead of schedule.<\/p>\n >>> STREAM ACTION NEWS JAX LIVE <<<<\/b><\/a><\/p>\n [DOWNLOAD: <\/b>Free Action News Jax app for alerts as news breaks<\/b><\/a>]<\/b><\/p>\n [SIGN UP: <\/b>Action News Jax Daily Headlines Newsletter<\/b><\/a>] <\/b><\/p>\n Click here<\/b><\/a> to download the free Action News Jax news and weather apps, <\/b>click here<\/b><\/a> to download the Action News Jax Now app for your smart TV and <\/b>click here<\/b><\/a> to stream Action News Jax live.<\/b><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"JACKSONVILLE, Fla. \u2014 An effort to make city records more accessible has inadvertently resulted in a multi-week period…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":776731,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5136],"tags":[12189,42410,318170,5229,318169,3188,723,11561,7310,3005,240795,48916,425,252,67,586,132,5230,68,2969],"class_list":{"0":"post-776730","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-jacksonville","8":"tag-action_news","9":"tag-ada","10":"tag-alison_steele","11":"tag-america","12":"tag-americans_with_disability_act","13":"tag-fl","14":"tag-florida","15":"tag-jack","16":"tag-jacksonville","17":"tag-jake","18":"tag-jake_s_stan","19":"tag-jake_stowan","20":"tag-local","21":"tag-microsoft","22":"tag-united-states","23":"tag-united-states-of-america","24":"tag-unitedstates","25":"tag-unitedstatesofamerica","26":"tag-us","27":"tag-usa"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/116526385024076795","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/776730","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=776730"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/776730\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/776731"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=776730"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=776730"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=776730"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}