Circuit Court judge to rule ‘as soon as possible’ on city’s motion to dismiss case
During a 30-minute hearing conducted in the 12th Judicial Circuit Court on May 26, Laurel Park resident Kelly Franklin maintained to Circuit Judge Dana Moss that the incorrect inclusion of her name in the minutes of the Jan. 16, 2024 meeting of the Sarasota City Commission was a continuation of an effort planned by individuals working at City Hall to destroy her reputation and ruin her husband’s chances of winning a City Commission seat during the November 2024 General Election.
Since those minutes were produced, Franklin has stressed that city Commissioner Kyle Battie never named her during a presentation to his colleagues on Jan. 16, 2024 characterized on the Agenda Request Form as a discussion regarding “Civility, Respect and Rhetoric.” Yet, the minutes attribute to Franklin what she has called a “hoax post” that looked as though it came from her personal Facebook page.
“The phrase ‘from Kelly Franklin’s social media page,’ ” — as written in the minutes — “does not appear anywhere in the captioning record sent to city staff the morning after the meeting,” Franklin told Judge Moss.
Moreover, Franklin said, “Given the documentation from [the city’s] own files of the amount of coordination it took to place the smear on a public meeting agenda, write it into the record and then maintain it for two-and-a-half years, it’s not in my interest as a taxpayer or yours to have this become a federal case, because they don’t have a leg to stand on. This was a fabrication using city authority to harm a journalist who was writing about city policy, and that journalist happened to be a professional publisher who just happened to be married to a City Commission candidate.”
At the time of the meeting, Franklin was part of an organization created by city residents that was called City PAC; it reported routinely on action during City Commission meetings. Additionally, in 2024, her husband, Ron, was a candidate for the District 2 seat that Commissioner Liz Alpert has held since 2015.
Franklin stressed to Moss, “A group of individuals at City Hall decided to use their power to fabricate a smear and harm me, and it worked.”
“All I’m asking for,” Franklin pointed out, “is a correction of the record, which I’m entitled to under Robert’s Rules [of Order], under the City Charter, under [the Florida] Sunshine Law [and under the state and federal constitutions].”
Two-and-a-half years later, Franklin said, “My name shows up in search engines right next to this vivid and fabricated account of this image made from my bucket list vacation photos.” With that statement, she was referencing the “hoax post,” which appeared to be a combination of a Facebook post that she created with photos of a trip she and her husband had taken to Rwanda, so she could see the country’s famous gorillas and photograph them; and a photo taken during the ribbon-cutting for the Corona Cigar Co. on Lemon Avenue in downtown Sarasota in September 2023. The photo shows Commissioner Battie, who was serving as mayor at the time, and Tanya Borysiewicz, co-owner of the business, whom Battie identified on Jan. 16, 2024 as half African-American. The heading on the post was “Gorillas in the midst of being gorillas are on my mind.”
Franklin continued during the May 26 hearing, “The depravity of this act makes it hard to even talk about. … And [the fact that] we’re still paying money to have a city lawyer try to justify this and try to smear me some more in court is astonishing to me.”
Franklin told Moss, “I hope you will end this.”
Jay Daigneault, of the Trask Daigneault firm in Clearwater, who has been representing the City of Sarasota in the litigation, raised his voice to tell Moss, “I haven’t smeared anybody!”
As Daigneault and Franklin began to talk over each other, Moss interrupted them. “The court reporter cannot take down minutes when people are talking at the same time,” Moss stressed.
“The fact that we’re having this back and forth shows the ongoing harm,” Franklin responded, as well as “why it is so important to me to have [the minutes] corrected.”
Formally, the hearing had been scheduled for oral arguments regarding the Exceptions that Franklin filed with the court in response to a recommended order that 12th Judicial Circuit Court General Magistrate Medisa M. Turner issued on April 9. Turner’s action followed a Feb. 11 hearing that she conducted on the issues outlined in Franklin’s Petition for Writ of Mandamus.
Turner’s recommendation was that the judge grant the City of Sarasota’s motion to dismiss the case, with prejudice, meaning that Franklin could not file an amended version of her petition.
Turner wrote that, based on the documentation provided in the court filings, she found that Franklin has no “clear legal right to demand the correction of the meeting minutes,” and the city has no “clear duty” to amend the minutes as a “ministerial function,” as Franklin has contended.
On April 10, Franklin filed her Exceptions to Turner’s recommended order.
Following the May 26 arguments, Moss told Franklin and Daigneault that she would rule on the Recommended Order “as soon as possible,” adding that she hoped that would be in a couple of weeks.
Legal semantics and the ‘hoax post’
More than once during the hearing this week, Franklin contended that the city had admitted in court that the Facebook post was a hoax.
Yet, Clearwater attorney Daigneault responded to those assertions by saying at one point, “I’ve had to answer this in court; I’ve had to answer it in the City Commission meetings …”
He read to Moss from the transcript of the Feb. 11 hearing that Magistrate Turner had conducted: At one point, he said, “I think, for purposes of today’s hearing, the Court is required to take … as true” Franklin’s assertion that the social media post was a hoax.
Again referring to the transcript, Daigneault noted that he added later on Feb. 11, “The city is conceding, for the purpose of this motion, that the … social media post is a hoax. Whether it is or it isn’t if the case moves beyond this hearing, you know, presumably, it will be subject to some discovery.”
Discovery is the term for the efforts that parties in litigation make to uncover documents and produce witness statements to support their legal arguments.
He also said during the Feb. 11 hearing, “The city is making that concession [about the social media post] because the Court is required to accept as true the well-pleaded allegations of fact and … I want that to be on record.”
During the May 26 hearing, Daigneault told Moss, “The Recommended Order recognizes the same thing.” He cited a similar statement that Magistrate Turner had written.
‘No clear legal right’
This week, Daigneault also noted Franklin’s arguments regarding the need for accuracy in journalism and publishing. He emphasized, “It’s all very interesting, but it hasn’t a thing to do with what happens before this court.”
At another point during his May 26 remarks, Daigneault said, “Ms. Franklin has gone well beyond the record before the magistrate,” even though the May 26 hearing was supposed to focus on the Exceptions Franklin had filed to the Recommended Order.
Among the facets of her statement to Moss that day, Franklin had asked that she be allowed to file an amended petition, as that would “[flesh] out several things the docketed draft does not fully address.”
Among those, she said, was the fact that the Jan. 16, 2024 “agenda item that put my name into those minutes was added late, vaguely noticed and placed under a category that gave no fair warning that a resident’s reputation was about to be put at issue.”
Second, she stressed, in training materials provided to the City Commission for workshops held in October 2025 and in April, “the city’s own lawyers told the [board members] and the city auditor and clerk that minutes correction is available and ministerial.”
Daigneault concurred with Turner’s finding that Franklin has “no clear legal right” to a correction of the minutes, he told Moss. “The Sunshine Law doesn’t offer any relief to [Franklin],” he continued, “because … it doesn’t talk at all, it doesn’t say a doggone thing about the minutes of [a] meeting, other than that you have to produce minutes, and those minutes must be promptly approved.”
Referencing a Florida Attorney General opinion that Franklin has asserted as supportive of her position, he further noted, with emphasis, “Nobody questions the City Commission’s ability to correct or amend the minutes. It certainly can. It has elected not to.”
“What mandamus requires, though,” Daigneault continued, “is a compulsion to do so, and there isn’t one in the law here.”
Turning again to the magistrate’s Recommended Order, Daigneault referenced pages 2 through 3, in which Turner discussed her effort to find that Franklin “had established factual or legal basis to assert her right to have the minutes corrected …”
Turner wrote, “When the requested action is discretionary, mandamus cannot be used to direct the public agency to exercise that discretion in a specific manner.”
“The City Commission has the discretion to [correct the minutes],” Daigneault repeated his earlier point. “As soon it has discretion, mandamus is no longer appropriate.”
When Moss asked Franklin whether she wanted to offer a response to Daigneault’s testimony, Franklin replied, “I certainly do. I think the line of argument is disingenuous and being made by an attorney who was not present during these events. And [he] magically acts as if there isn’t in the court record clear evidence from the city’s own files that this minute entry was invented, fabricated from the whole cloth the day after the meeting and doesn’t reflect the meeting.”
Franklin added, “I am asking to have one line corrected to accurately reflect what transpired at that meeting. And for some reason, the city is ignoring its basic obligations to the fact, to the law and to the Constitution and putting me in a position where my only recourse if we can’t resolve this [in] state courts is a federal lawsuit.”