Patty dives into county finance guide at Chamber luncheon

By Anthony Richards

Since Brandon Patty was elected as St. Johns County Clerk of the Circuit Court and County Comptroller and appointed in Dec. 2019, he has been thinking about how to better inform the public regarding tax dollars.

The result was the creation of the “Tracking Your Tax Dollars,” which serves as a guide to St. Johns County’s finances.

Patty expanded on the venture and his goals behind it as the guest speaker at the St. Johns County Chamber of Commerce Ponte Vedra Beach Division luncheon at Ruth’s Chris Steak House Feb. 16.

“In many ways our office is the backbone of the county, because we’re involved in so many things,” Patty said. “The clerk’s office works as the checks and balances and ensures that trust of a community and its government is maintained.”

The county finance guide is one of the ways he seeks to preserve that trust and rekindle it for others.


It is the first year such a guide has been created and Patty already has plans to have an annual edition come out each fiscal year. 

The guide consists of 18 pages of information designed to break down and sum up where the taxes that residents pay are going, which is information that does not always come across clearly to the public.

“We tried to make sense of it all,” Patty said.

Several forms of economic research are part of the guide, including statistics pertaining to local businesses, the housing market, property taxes and the…

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