The Charter's Unfinished Salary Rule

What the printed charter says

A town charter works like a local constitution: it sets the rules the Town Council itself must follow. Section 2.05 of Eatonville's charter is the section that governs what elected officials are paid. In the official Code of Ordinances, it reads, in full:

Read the first sentence again. It grants a power — the Council may set salaries by ordinance (a local law the Council adopts) — and then starts to limit that power: "but no Ordinance." And there it stops. The words that would say what a salary ordinance cannot do are not there.¹

This is not a typo on one website. The same truncated sentence appears in the current Code posted on Municode, the Town's official code publisher — Supplement 6, the publisher's latest batch of updates. It appears in the earlier Supplement 4 print (created October 23, 2023) that is attached to Ordinance No. 2023-8 in Municode's ordinance archive. And the charter PDF the Town's own website offers residents today is a copy of that same Supplement 4 print. Everywhere the Town currently publishes its charter, the restriction is missing.¹²³

What the missing words said

The current charter was adopted on October 18, 2016, by Ordinance No. 2016-14. The Town's website later hosted a copy of that revised charter in a file dated December 2016 — the filename and the site's upload path both carry the date — and the Internet Archive preserved it. Its Section 2.05 is whole:

So the sentence had an ending, and the ending was a safeguard: a salary increase could not take effect until the terms that begin after the next regular town election. An election would come between a vote for a raise and the first paycheck that carried it.²

The safeguard is a standard one. Apopka — a city in the same county — carries the same rule in its charter today: "No change in the compensation ordinance for a city commissioner shall become effective until the duties of commencement of the terms of commissioners elected at the next regular election, provided that such election follows the adoption of such law or ordinance by at least six months." Eatonville's 2016 sentence and Apopka's current one are the same pattern. In Eatonville's codified text — the version printed in the official Code — the pattern appears without its second half.⁷

In August 2026, a public records request put the question to the Town directly, and the Town's production — request 26-205 in its public records portal — confirms the 2016 text. The Clerk produced the certified Ordinance No. 2016-14, signed and adopted on second reading October 18, 2016, together with a document titled "Revised Town Charter 2016" whose Section 2.05 is the complete one, matching the December 2016 posting word for word. The ordinance also records a step the codified charter's notes never mention: it recites that the revised charter "will go before the citizens of the Town of Eatonville through special election referendum ballot on December 10, 2016."¹¹

One caution survives the production. The certified ordinance is a two-page instrument that approves "a revised Town Charter in its entirety" without printing the charter's words, and the charter document the Clerk produced beside it is the Town's electronic file, not a signed exhibit. The chain is as strong as a records request can make it — the Town's own office, asked for the as-adopted charter, produced the complete sentence — but a signed charter exhibit physically attached to the 2016 ordinance has still not surfaced.¹¹

What the 2024 amendment changed

Section 2.05 has been amended — once, and the subject of the amendment was exactly the clause that had gone missing. In October 2023, the Council adopted Ordinance No. 2023-8, putting six charter amendments on the ballot. Question 4 was this section's. The ordinance explained it this way:

The ballot title voters saw was "ALLOWING COUNCIL TO ESTABLISH THE EFFECTIVE DATE OF ANY MAYORAL OR COUNCIL SALARY INCREASE," with the question put to voters: "Amending the Charter by allowing the Town Council to establish the effective date of any Mayoral or Council salary increases in the ordinance adopting such increases."³

Set that against the 2016 text and the explanation has a clear meaning: under the original clause, a raise waited until after the next election; under the amendment as the ballot described it, the Council could pick the effective date itself, in the same ordinance that grants the raise. On March 19, 2024, voters approved it — 265 yes to 101 no, about 72 percent, in the Orange County Supervisor of Elections' final published results.³⁴

Here is the part the record cannot explain. The ordinance says Question 4 amends Section 2.05 "as set forth in that section in the 'All Proposed Changes' document below," with additions underlined and deletions struck through. But in the ordinance as published in Municode's archive, the attached charter document is the Supplement 4 print — the truncated one — and its Section 2.05 carries no underline, no strikethrough, and no effective-date words.³

The Council's own meeting packets tell the same story. The ordinance had two readings — September 19 and October 3, 2023 — and in the posted packet for each, it appears as the bare six-page instrument, with no "All Proposed Changes" document attached. The exhibit the ordinance points to is absent from every public print of it that could be located.¹⁰

The Town's charter-review record deepens the puzzle. The minutes of the Charter Review Committee's September 7, 2023 meeting — produced in an August 2026 records request — say the Question 4 amendment "was read line by line," and note that "Ordinance and amendments are available through a town records request." Yet when exactly that request was made, the Town's production included the ordinance and the minutes, and no amendments document. The committee's June 13, 2023 minutes hold the earliest trace of the change, one line under Section 2.05: "Remove from Charter ("Set effective date in the Charter")."¹¹

That document has now surfaced. In September 2026, a follow-up to the same records request produced the "All Proposed Changes" document — five pages of redline, its file metadata naming the Town Attorney as author and dating it September 6, 2023, the day before the meeting where it was read aloud. Its Section 2.05 shows exactly one change: a strikethrough running from the comma after "by Ordinance" through "next regular election," deleting the entire restriction — the words "but no Ordinance" included. Nothing is underlined. Nothing is added. As approved, the section reads:¹²

The ballot had described the amendment as "allowing" the Council to establish effective dates. The text shows how: not by adding an effective-date provision, but by deleting the safeguard that stood in the way. With the restriction gone, the amended section places no limit on when a salary ordinance may take effect, or how often one may be adopted.¹²

The minutes of the two readings complete the trail. At the first reading, September 19, 2023, the minutes record legal explaining "full language available through the ordinance; the ballot will not have the full language according to law" — and record a resident's request for a copy of the revised charter, answered, as minuted, with "once voted upon council can decide to provide the copies." The first reading passed, all ayes. At the second reading, October 3, 2023, the preamble was read, the minutes note "There were no changes on the first reading" and no public comments, and the ordinance passed, all ayes — to be sent to the county Supervisor of Elections by a December 12 deadline for the March ballot.¹³

And here is what the produced text reveals about the Code: the printed Section 2.05 matches neither version of the charter. Before March 2024, the operative text — which the Town Attorney's own redline carries in full as its base — included the complete restriction; the Code printed half of it. After March 2024, the amended text contains no restriction at all; the Code still prints "but no Ordinance." — three words of the deleted span. The code publisher logged the amendment (the section carries the history note "(Ord. No. 2023-8, 10-3-2023, approved by voters 3-19-2024)") without changing a visible word.¹³¹²

The upshot is no longer a puzzle but a sequence. Voters were asked in 2024 to remove a restriction the official printed charter had already stopped showing. The ballot described the removal as an allowance. The resident who asked to read the text before the vote was told, per the minutes, that copies could be decided on after it. And the printed charter has never shown any version of the section correctly — before the vote or since.

The rest of the rulebook

Three other pieces of law bear on how Eatonville sets elected officials' pay, and none of them fills the gap.

The Town's own code says "by resolution." Section 2-52 of the Code of Ordinances, adopted in 2005 and amended in 2006 — a decade before the current charter — provides that "[t]he town council shall determine by resolution reasonable compensation to be paid to members of the town council," and that existing pay "shall be determined by compensation listed in the town annual budget." A resolution is a simpler action than an ordinance: typically one vote, one night, no second reading. So the older code's rule sits beside the charter's "by Ordinance," and the two do not say the same thing.⁵

The charter's petition power does not extend to salary ordinances. The charter gives registered voters an initiative and referendum power — a way to force a Town-wide vote on an ordinance. Section 5.06 carves salaries out of both. For the referendum power, its words are:

The initiative power carries the same carve-out in nearly the same words. By its own terms, then, Section 5.06 leaves a salary ordinance outside the charter's referendum tool.⁶

No state law fills the gap. Florida sets county commissioners' salaries by statute, but not city or town officials'. The Florida House's own staff analysis of a 2025 bill on the subject states it directly:

The bill that analysis accompanied would have required a referendum before local elected officials could raise their own pay. It died in the Senate Rules Committee in June 2025, and its 2026 refile, HB 1125, died in subcommittee in March 2026. If a check on an Eatonville salary ordinance exists in law, the charter — the document with the half-sentence — is where it would have to be found.⁸

Why it matters now

The Town is writing its FY2026-27 budget, and the proposed numbers put real weight on the question. The personal-services schedule — the budget's salary section — in the August 31 budget workshop packet lists, under Legislative:

• Mayor: $13,188 now; $32,970 proposed — a $19,782 increase, two and a half times current pay.
• Council Seats 2 through 5: $6,594 now; $18,000 proposed — an $11,406 increase per seat, about 2.7 times current pay.

Together, elected officials' pay would go from $39,564 to $104,970 a year. These are workshop figures — proposed, discussed, and not adopted as of this writing.⁹

Timing is where the missing clause matters. Under the 2016 wording, a raise adopted this fall could not be collected until the terms that begin after the next regular town election — which, under the charter's election calendar, is March 2028. Under the amendment text produced in September 2026, the restriction is gone altogether: nothing remains in the section to limit when a raise takes effect. But that rule still cannot be read in any charter text the Town publishes — a resident who opens the official Code to check finds the sentence that stops.¹²¹²

And one thing does not depend on the missing words: however a raise is adopted, Section 5.06's carve-out leaves a salary ordinance outside the charter's referendum tool. The check the 2016 clause built in — an election first — was, on the printed record, the only one of its kind.⁶

What is still open

A signed charter exhibit, and the state filing. The certified 2016 ordinance has now been obtained through a public records request, and the Town's production pairs it with the complete charter text. Two records would close the remaining distance between the Clerk's electronic file and the paper the Council signed: a signed charter exhibit physically attached to the 2016 ordinance, and any record of the charter or its amendments being filed with the Florida Department of State. Neither was in the production.¹¹

Where Question 4's approved language is — resolved. The "All Proposed Changes" document surfaced in September 2026, produced in a follow-up to records request 26-205 and now listed in the Town's records portal. What its production leaves standing is the record of how long that took: absent from the ordinance as published, from both 2023 reading packets, and from the first records production — surfacing almost two and a half years after the vote it defined.¹²

Whether the print gets fixed. The correct current text is now determinate — with the produced redline, the fix is a one-sentence correction: the amended section, with the deleted clause fully removed. Whether the Town asks its code publisher to make it is unresolved on the public record. There is precedent for the fix: reviewing Question 6 in September 2023, the committee's minutes record that a town-clerk section printed in Municode "was never in the Charter which was confirmed. Municode has since made the correction." The correction path exists, and the Town has used it.¹¹

A note on what this is and is not

This finding is about the text of the charter, not the merits of a raise. Eatonville's elected pay is modest — $13,188 for the Mayor, $6,594 for a Council seat — and there may be a sound public case for changing it. Nothing here says otherwise, and nothing here says any official has done anything improper. The truncation appears to be a publishing failure: the 2016 document is whole, the codified text is not, and nothing in the record reviewed here shows the change was anyone's decision. The proposed figures sit in a workshop packet, where proposals are supposed to be discussed.

What the finding documents is narrower. The sentence that limits how elected pay may be changed appears in the official Code without its second half. The missing half was an election-first safeguard, shown whole in the Town's own 2016 document. Voters then removed that safeguard in 2024, in an amendment the ballot described as allowing the Council to set effective dates — and no version of any of it can be read in the charter the Town publishes today. No legal conclusion is drawn here. What the gap and the amendment mean for any ordinance the Council may adopt is a question for lawyers, and this site does not offer legal opinions.

How this was sourced. Charter and code text is quoted letter for letter from the Code of Ordinances as posted on Municode, the Town's code publisher, and checked against the charter print attached to Ord. No. 2023-8 and the charter PDF on the Town's website. The 2016 text is quoted from the Internet Archive's capture of the file the Town's website hosted, and confirmed against the Town's own production in public records request 26-205 — which also supplied the certified 2016 ordinance, the 2023 Charter Review minutes, and, in a September 2026 follow-up, the Question 4 redline quoted above. The 2023 reading-night quotes are from the Council's approved minutes on the Town's meetings portal. The referendum result is the Orange County Supervisor of Elections' final published count. Salary figures are from the Town's August 31, 2026 budget workshop packet. Apopka's charter is quoted from Municode as posted, including its own imperfect phrasing ("the duties of commencement of the terms"), which is preserved verbatim.