TaxpayerScope
Status
active
Date
September 22, 2026
Methodology version
4

0004: Duval County / City of Jacksonville consolidated-government identity

Context

Duval County is a consolidated city-county government: since 1968, the City of Jacksonville and Duval County operate as a single consolidated government, and Florida’s Economic and Demographic Research (EDR) office — the agency whose compiled per-county Excel files are this project’s source for all 67 governments (SRC-01, SRC-02) — reports Duval’s fiscal data as the City of Jacksonville’s, not as a standalone county filing. IDENT-01 through IDENT-04 (.planning/REQUIREMENTS.md) require every government to carry a permanent TaxpayerScope identifier in the form US-FL-COUNTY-ORANGE, a display name and slug that are independently mutable, a slug history so renamed governments’ old URLs redirect, and a record of country, state, government_type, name, slug, and FIPS code. This record decides what Duval’s identifier is, how the consolidation is carried, and — because Duval forces the question into the open — what a TaxpayerScope identifier actually names.

Decision

Duval County’s permanent TaxpayerScope identifier is US-FL-COUNTY-DUVAL. IDENT-01’s identifier form stays invariant across all 67 governments; no government gets a different identifier shape because its underlying administrative structure differs. The City of Jacksonville consolidation is carried in data, never in the identifier scheme, through four named mechanisms:

  1. A reporting_entity field on the government record, whose value is City of Jacksonville.
  2. A consolidated boolean flag on the government record, true for Duval and false for every other of the 67 governments.
  3. A mandatory on-page disclosure on the Duval county profile, stating plainly that Duval’s fiscal data is filed and reported as the City of Jacksonville consolidated government. This is a visible trust feature, presented in the same spirit as PRD section 23’s source-provenance treatment — never a silent substitution. PITFALLS.md’s “Looks Done But Isn’t” checklist names “Duval County page … silently broken or silently substituted” as a specific failure mode this disclosure exists to prevent.
  4. A /florida/jacksonville/ slug alias that redirects to the canonical county URL (/florida/duval/ or whatever slug the registry assigns) through the IDENT-03 slug-history mechanism, rather than existing as a second, independent page. /florida/ — the statewide landing page listing all 67 counties (STATE-01) — needs no special case: Duval appears once, under its permanent identifier, like every other county.

Phase 2 implements all four mechanisms in the identity registry (IDENT-01 through IDENT-04). Phase 1 records the decision only.

Geography versus government

Duval forces a distinction into the open that the identifier scheme must state explicitly: a TaxpayerScope identifier names a government, not a geography. US-FL-COUNTY-DUVAL identifies Duval County Government — whose reporting_entity is the City of Jacksonville — not “Duval County” the place. One county geography can hold several governments at once: a county government, a school district, municipalities, and special districts. Florida school districts in particular are independent local governments with their own elected boards, their own millage rate, and their own filings under section 218.32, Florida Statutes — not departments of the county government.

The identifier scheme already carries this distinction without needing to change shape. The third segment of US-FL-COUNTY-DUVAL is government_type — COUNTY today, with SCHOOL, MUNICIPALITY, and SPECIAL available as future values without a scheme change — and IDENT-04’s county FIPS code is the key that scopes several governments to one shared geography: every government whose geography is Duval County carries the same FIPS code regardless of its government_type. v1 publishes only government_type COUNTY — school districts and special districts are explicitly out of v1 coverage per PRD section 62 — but both carriers (government_type and the county FIPS code) must stay populated and geography-scoped from the start, not treated as decorative fields on a 67-row county table. Under PUB-08’s /data/v1/ contract, adding a new government_type value later is an additive change: existing readers of government_id, government_type, and the FIPS-scoped geography keep working unchanged. Re-interpreting what government_id itself denotes — for example, collapsing government and geography back into one concept — would be a /data/v2/ break. Phase 2 implements this distinction in the identity registry; Phase 1 records the decision only.

Rationale

The geography covered is Duval County, and a taxpayer searching for their county must land somewhere predictable — typing “Duval County” or “Jacksonville” and reaching a page under a stable, permanent identifier. An identifier scheme that varied its form depending on whether a government’s structure was consolidated, independent, or otherwise non-standard would make the permanent-ID form conditional — exactly what PRD section 10 (“Permanent TaxpayerScope IDs … never display names — so IDs survive URL and name changes”) exists to prevent, and what would force a page-load-time or build-time branch everywhere an identifier is consumed.

Rejected alternative: a distinct identifier form for consolidated governments — for example, US-FL-CONSOLIDATED-DUVAL or a Jacksonville-specific identifier namespace separate from the US-FL-COUNTY-* set. Choosing this would have cost: (a) a conditional identifier scheme, since every consumer of a US-FL-* identifier would need to know which of two (or more) forms applies before it could parse or link to a government; (b) a special case on the statewide /florida/ listing and in any cross-government comparison, since Duval would no longer sort, filter, or link identically to the other 66 counties; and (c) no actual gain, since the same four data-carried mechanisms above fully express the consolidation without requiring a second identifier shape.

Source Evidence

Verified this session and in Plan 01-02’s source enumeration (.planning/phases/01-source-data-verification/01-02-SUMMARY.md): the EDR county fiscal page (cntyfiscal.cfm) lists 66 counties with working .xlsx download links; Duval’s row carries no <a href> element at all — the row reads “Duval — see data for City of Jacksonville” with no anchor to click. A downloader iterating “the 67 counties” against that page’s URL template produces exactly 66 files with a clean exit code, because there is no broken link or failed request to catch — the omission is structural (a missing table cell), not a request-level failure.

Duval’s actual fiscal data is published on a different page — the municipal fiscal page (munifiscal.cfm) — under the two Jacksonville filenames, in a table row whose County column literally reads Duval. Plan 01-02 archived both files and recorded them in the committed manifest at data/sources/fl-edr-sources.json:

Both records are committed in data/sources/fl-edr-sources.json alongside the other 132 archived source files, retrieved 2026-09-22T22:27:15Z.

Bounded claim

This finding is a claim about EDR’s county fiscal page coverage as observed on the retrieval date — exactly one municipal-page exception across all 67 governments in Plan 01-02’s source enumeration — and not a general claim that no other Florida local government (school district, municipality, or special district; or any government outside EDR’s compiled county series) has a non-standard or consolidated reporting entity. If a second consolidated government were later added to TaxpayerScope’s coverage, this decision costs nothing in the identifier form: the same four mechanisms (reporting_entity, consolidated, on-page disclosure, slug alias) carry it without a scheme change.

Methodology Version

This decision takes effect in methodology_version: 1. It has no prior version to supersede — this is the first record of Duval’s identity handling.

Revision (2026-09-24)

This revision supersedes methodology_version: 1 with methodology_version: 2. The decision recorded above is carried forward unchanged into methodology_version 2; the changes this version-2 coordinated bump makes are recorded in 0001-total-expenditures-definition.md, 0005-population-and-cpi-series.md and 0008-total-revenue-definition.md. This revision recorded by Task 3, 03-06-PLAN.md.

Revision (2026-09-24)

This revision supersedes methodology_version: 2 with methodology_version: 3 (ADR-0009, 04-01-PLAN.md). The decision recorded above is carried forward unchanged into methodology_version 3; the changes this version-3 coordinated bump makes are recorded in 0009-category-and-revenue-classification.md. This revision recorded by Task 3, 04-01-PLAN.md.

Revision (2026-09-25)

This revision supersedes methodology_version: 3 with methodology_version: 4 (ADR-0010, 05-01-PLAN.md). The decision recorded above is carried forward unchanged into methodology_version 4; the changes this version-4 coordinated bump makes are recorded in 0010-statewide-publication-rules.md. This revision recorded by Task 3, 05-01-PLAN.md.