In Part I of our investigation into the Jacksonville City Government Ethics Commission’s disappearing records uncovered a larger question: Is Jacksonville city government using its legal, accessibility and technology resources as one government—or leaving departments to struggle alone?

Our initial investigation began with a straightforward question: Why was the Jacksonville Ethics Commission disconnecting years of public records from its website?

What we found points to a much larger problem.

The records reveal a city office struggling to meet a major federal accessibility requirement, with no documented participation from Jacksonville’s citywide ADA coordinator or a Technology Solutions Department with about 120 filled positions and nearly $48 million in revised operating expenditures.

They show employees manually addressing documents while important public meetings are reduced to incomplete handwritten notes. They show a webmaster directing staff to break links, attorneys discussing legal risk and public information becoming available only by request—with no documented citywide plan connecting the people responsible for accessibility, technology, legal guidance and departmental management.

Access to public records and compliance with the Americans with Disabilities Act are serious issues on their own. But this episode raises a broader question about how Jacksonville operates: Are its departments working together as one government, or are employees left to solve problems separately while taxpayers fund centralized expertise that does not consistently reach them?

That is a question of management, efficiency and accountability.

The Ethics Commission provides a revealing test—and the documented process does not inspire confidence.

John Nooney captured the public concern during the commission’s August 19 meeting. Staff’s handwritten notes summarize his comments in two blunt phrases:

“Ethics is gone.”

“Post everything.”

The approved minutes record only that Nooney spoke. That's it.

That omission is more than a transparency concern. It shows the operational problem at the center of this investigation: Jacksonville has modern technology, specialized employees, and citywide departments meant to support the entire government, yet an ethics commission overseeing matters of public trust produced minutes that omitted the substance of its own accessibility debate and the public’s objection to removing information.

The story is no longer only about what disappeared from one government website.

It is about what that disappearance reveals regarding the management of Jacksonville’s government.

The order to break the links

On April 1, Ethics Program and Training Manager Andrea Myers sent instructions for what she called “preliminary changes” needed “ASAP” to bring the commission’s pages into “full ADA compliance.”

Myers attributed part of the direction to city webmaster Lauren Spencer and Jacksonville’s effort to standardize boards and commissions pages.

The instructions called for deleting annual reports, removing the complaints section and lobbying-report link, disconnecting the complaint procedure, breaking links to meeting notices, agendas and minutes, and deleting pages containing material from other cities and commission resolutions.

The office added language telling visitors that documents that could not be posted in an accessible format would remain available through public-records requests.

That did not make the records secret. It did, however, replace immediate access with a process that requires someone to know a document exists, identify it, contact the city and potentially wait or pay for its production.

The correspondence does not establish whether the webmaster consulted Jacksonville’s citywide ADA coordinator before recommending that links be broken. It also does not show whether Ethics Office staff knew whether the coordinator had reviewed or approved the approach.

The commission’s April 20 minutes reported that previous agendas and minutes had been deactivated because they were noncompliant and supposedly could not be read by accessibility software because they contained the city or commission seal.

A seal does not ordinarily make a document impossible to remediate. Images can generally be tagged, described, or marked as decorative. The important questions are whether the document contains readable text, uses proper structure, and can be repaired with available software and expertise.

The minutes also acknowledged that Jacksonville had received another year to comply. Yet the office was already reducing access rather than using that additional time to build a remediation and archiving system.

Who was coordinating the response?

Jacksonville identifies Kara Tucker as its citywide ADA coordinator. The city describes Disabled Services as responsible for monitoring disability law and advising the mayor about actions needed for compliance.

Federal Title II rules require public entities with at least 50 employees to designate someone to coordinate ADA compliance. The Justice Department describes that coordinator as a central contact for the public and for government employees and departments confronting accessibility questions. The law does not require the coordinator to attend every departmental meeting, but the position exists in part to prevent fragmented compliance practices. U.S. Department of Justice Title II primer

Neither the April nor August Ethics Commission minutes lists Tucker or another citywide ADA representative as attending. The records provided do not document her review of the decision to remove material.

Her absence from the minutes does not prove that no consultation occurred. It means Jacksonville has not established a documented chain showing that its designated coordinator evaluated or approved this approach.

The record becomes more consequential in August.

Myers wrote internally that she had expected to present the accessibility update but understood that Assistant General Counsel Regina Ross would take over that portion of the meeting “as a representative of the ADA Compliance Committee.”

Planning notes identified Myers, staff member Sandy Homrighouse and Ross as participants in the website discussion. The notes said 2023 and 2024 links had been deactivated for remediation, while material from 2019 through 2022 “have to be removed because content limited to last 3 years.”

The notes also addressed whether to post meeting audio and video. They acknowledged that video would require captions and audio would require transcription. Near the notation “Regina recommendation,” the notes presented an alternative: post a notice saying recordings were available by public-records request.

But the final August minutes contain only the heading “Ethics Commission Website Update and ADA Accessibility Compliance.” They do not summarize the discussion, identify Ross’s recommendation, document the commissioners’ positions or record a vote.

The records leave two possibilities.

If Ross spoke only as the commission’s assigned attorney, this appears to have been a departmental cleanup without documented participation by the citywide ADA coordinator or Technology Solutions.

If she delivered the position of a citywide ADA committee or the Office of General Counsel, the recommendation could reflect a broader city approach favoring removal or request-only access as a way to reduce compliance risk.

Different assistant general counsels routinely advise different city clients. Jacksonville should nevertheless speak consistently when interpreting a federal requirement that applies throughout city government.

The records do not explain whether Ross’s recommendation had been coordinated with the ADA coordinator, the General Counsel, the webmaster or Technology Solutions.

Jacksonville already pays for citywide technology

Jacksonville operates a large technology organization designed to solve problems across departmental boundaries.

The city made Technology Solutions a standalone executive department in 2024, although its predecessor information-technology division existed for years. City law directs the department to assist departments, boards and commissions, pursue citywide solutions, coordinate technology spending, establish common standards and maximize efficiency.

That is a core mandate. But having a mandate does not prove that it is being met.

As of March 31, Technology Solutions’ information-technology and radio operations had 133 authorized positions and 120 filled positions. Revised operating expenditures totaled approximately $48 million. A separate proposed five-year technology plan included more than $13.6 million in new project funding for the coming year. Jacksonville Council Auditor’s March 2026 report

The department has undertaken a $4.2 million network upgrade, developed Salesforce systems and implemented cloud and enterprise applications. Jacksonville has also promoted Power BI and Azure transparency dashboards that it says saved more than 600 staff hours through two projects.

These may be meaningful accomplishments. But selected success stories do not establish that technology and expertise consistently reach employees dealing with everyday problems.

The available records do not identify a Technology Solutions representative participating when the Ethics Office disconnected documents or discussed whether recordings should remain online.

That omission is particularly noticeable because the April minutes say the Ethics Office was working with Technology Solutions and the Public Records Center to calculate the cost of fulfilling a large records request. Staff therefore knew how to involve the department when they needed technical assistance for that assignment.

The record does not document equivalent involvement when staff addressed accessibility and removed online access.

Technology Solutions could potentially provide accessible templates, automated testing, centralized remediation software, searchable archives, captioning and transcription tools, and standardized publishing workflows. It could determine which documents require manual reconstruction and which can be repaired efficiently.

The commission’s minute-taking illustrates the operational stakes.

Its meetings are recorded, but staff still relied on handwritten notes to prepare the August minutes. Those minutes omitted Ross’s recommendation, the commissioners’ positions and Nooney’s comments.

The problem is not the employee holding the pen. Management determines the system that employee must use.

Meetings were recorded on tape decades before cloud services and artificial intelligence. Today, commonly available systems can record a meeting, produce a searchable transcription and generate a preliminary summary. Staff can compare that transcript with the recording, correct mistakes and prepare minutes for approval.

Minutes do not need to reproduce every spoken word. But they should accurately preserve significant recommendations, disagreements, decisions and public concerns.

A transcription-assisted process could improve accuracy, accessibility, searchability and institutional memory while reducing the time employees spend reconstructing meetings from handwritten notes.

That is precisely the kind of shared solution Technology Solutions is supposed to help provide.

A federal rule created to expand access

President George H.W. Bush signed the Americans with Disabilities Act in 1990.

During the Obama administration, the Justice Department began working toward explicit web-accessibility requirements for state and local governments but did not complete a binding technical standard.

The Biden administration finished that work. In April 2024, the Justice Department under Attorney General Merrick Garland adopted a Title II rule generally requiring state and local government websites and mobile applications to satisfy WCAG 2.1 Level AA.

The objective is essential: People who use screen readers, keyboard navigation, captions and other assistive technologies should have meaningful access to government information and services. Justice Department web-accessibility rule

Implementation nevertheless presents real challenges. Governments may have decades of PDFs, scanned forms, recordings and poorly formatted records. Individual offices may lack accessible-document expertise, and manual remediation can consume hours per file.

In April 2026, the Trump administration’s Justice Department granted state and local governments another year to comply. Larger governments such as Jacksonville now face an April 2027 deadline, while smaller entities and special districts generally have until April 2028.

The extension recognized the staffing, financial and technological burden. It gave governments more time to develop solutions. It did not require them to erase public archives.

The rule also contains an exception for qualifying archived content. Older material retained solely for reference, research or recordkeeping may remain online without complete conformance if it is placed in a clearly identified archive and left unchanged.

That exception will not cover every document, and governments must still meet their broader ADA responsibilities. But it demonstrates that wholesale removal is not the federal rule’s only contemplated response.

Other cities offer warnings—and better models

Jacksonville does not have to invent a solution from scratch. Other cities have already demonstrated both the risks of poor coordination and the benefits of treating accessibility as a citywide responsibility.

Governments around Des Moines began deleting older or less frequently used online documents before their accessibility deadlines. Urbandale considered removing a substantial share of approximately 3,000 documents while budgeting $40,000 for compliance work. Critics warned that request-only access would make government harder to examine. Axios Des Moines

DeBary and other Florida cities previously removed PDFs amid concerns about ADA litigation, requiring residents to call or visit government offices for information that had once been available online. Government Technology

Portland’s city auditor identified the broader management problem in 2024. The audit found that individual bureaus planned technology separately, contributing to fragmented purchases, delays, duplication and accessibility problems. The auditor called for citywide strategy and guidance. Portland City Auditor

Better models are available.

Arlington, Massachusetts, created a unified portal for agendas and minutes and committed to migrating older records. Racine, Wisconsin, launched an accessible document platform. Antioch, California, converted more than 4,000 documents—approximately 215,000 pages—into searchable, translatable web content.

Berkeley established a cross-department accessibility task force. Salt Lake City placed its accessibility program within its information-technology organization and combined technical standards, employee training, audits and purchasing requirements.

Those governments did not leave every employee or department to solve accessibility independently. They treated it as an organization-wide responsibility requiring management, legal guidance, technology and training.

The negative examples show how quickly compliance concerns can reduce public access when departments respond defensively or in isolation. The positive examples show that governments can improve accessibility while preserving transparency—and use the challenge to modernize records, reduce duplicated work and make information easier for everyone to find.

Jacksonville can learn from both.

Is Jacksonville managing one government—or separate departments?

From a business-efficiency standpoint, the Ethics Commission episode reveals a basic management problem: Jacksonville appears to possess the personnel, technology and money needed to address the issue, but the available record does not show those resources being coordinated.

In a well-managed business, an employee would not be expected to invent a separate solution to a problem the organization has already hired specialists to solve. Management would establish a common process, assign responsibility, provide the appropriate tools and measure whether the solution worked.

The same principle should apply to city government.

The real test of efficiency is what happens when an ordinary operational problem appears.

Does the affected department know whom to contact? Does Technology Solutions actively help departments identify better systems? Does the ADA coordinator provide one compliance process? Does the Office of General Counsel deliver consistent legal guidance? Do department heads meet to identify common problems, eliminate duplicated work and share solutions?

Does anyone determine what the chosen solution costs, whether it works and whether it creates another problem for the public?

If those systems do not exist—or departments do not consistently use them—Jacksonville risks operating as a collection of departmental kingdoms rather than one government. Each office may remain focused on its own workload, budget and immediate priorities while another department possesses the expertise needed to solve its problem.

That produces duplicated effort, inconsistent decisions and avoidable costs. It transfers the consequences to residents trying to obtain records, information, permits or services.

ADA compliance makes the breakdown especially visible because it crosses organizational lines. It involves federal law, legal interpretation, websites, document production, information technology, employee training and public access. No department should be left to improvise its own response.

Jacksonville should have one coordinated accessibility program supported by the ADA coordinator, Technology Solutions, the webmaster, the Office of General Counsel and affected departments. It should establish common standards for current documents, archived records, meeting recordings, transcription, remediation and public access.

Responsibility for creating that system does not rest with one administrative employee.

Department heads are responsible for identifying operational problems and improving how their offices work. The mayor and executive administration are responsible for making departments collaborate and ensuring citywide resources serve the entire government. The City Council approves budgets, adopts governing requirements and exercises oversight; it must determine whether the money it authorizes produces coordinated and measurable results.

Together, those officials are responsible for the costs and consequences of inefficient government.

City leaders can point to projects completed, dashboards created, vacancies filled or staff hours reportedly saved. But favorable metrics alone cannot establish efficiency. Management must also identify where the organization is failing, expose the challenges, measure what attempted solutions cost and determine whether those solutions improve public service.

A business that promotes only its successful numbers while overlooking duplicated work and broken internal processes is marketing itself, not measuring itself.

The same is true of government.

The Ethics Commission is the case that brought the problem into view, but it is not the limit of the concern. It demonstrates what can happen when centralized legal, accessibility and technology resources do not visibly reach the departments that need them.

A federal civil-rights requirement intended to expand access instead produced broken links, request-only records, incomplete minutes and unanswered questions about who authorized the response.

If Jacksonville cannot demonstrate effective coordination while addressing a major federal mandate, residents have reason to ask where else departments are duplicating work, using outdated processes or failing to use expertise taxpayers already fund.

The final question is therefore larger than why the Ethics Commission removed documents.

It is whether Jacksonville’s mayor, department heads and City Council have built—and are actively managing—the systems necessary to make dozens of departments function as one efficient government.

Claims of efficiency will ring hollow until city leaders show not only what is working, but what is failing, what it costs and what they are doing to fix it.