Corrections log.

2026-07-26 (pre-broad-promotion editorial patch) · /what-you-get/, /, /vote/, /vote/how/, /evidence/, sitewide partials · Six wording corrections plus one accessibility improvement identified in a pre-broad-promotion editorial review

Six wording changes were applied so the site does not overpromise beyond what its cited sources actually establish. (1) On /what-you-get/, the “Your home is worth more” card was rewritten to make unmistakably clear that the Balmoral Group's estimated $660,000 lagoon-proximity premium comes from the study's Indian River County sample and should not be assumed for every Brevard property, while retaining the study's finding that lagoon proximity materially affects regional property value. The article correction (“an $660,000” → “an estimated $660,000”) is included. Evidence Ledger row E-04 now tracks this specific claim with its scope caveat. (2) On the same card, “it disappears if the lagoon collapses” was replaced with “that equity is exposed when water quality, wildlife, recreation, and confidence in the lagoon decline,” which is the association the study supports without the absolute-loss framing. (3) On the “Your flood risk drops” card, the household-level promise language (“between the next hurricane and your driveway” and “every dollar of flood damage the lagoon prevents is a dollar that stays in your pocket”) was replaced with regional-resilience language noting explicitly that no individual project guarantees that a particular home avoids flooding. (4) On the homepage, “Every dollar is publicly audited” was replaced with “Program revenues and expenditures are subject to annual independent audits, with the reports made public,” which matches how the county's published audit history actually describes the procedure. (5) On the homepage, “On November 3, 2026, the same half-cent renews or it does not” was tightened to “On November 3, 2026, Brevard voters will decide whether to renew the existing half-cent sales tax for another ten years.” The following sentence (“The vote is a continuation, not a new tax”) is retained. (6) Interior-page repetition of the full editorial disclosure was reduced. The full disclosure remains on About and in the sitewide footer as required; on /vote/ and /vote/how/ the FAQ “Who runs this site?” answer now reads “Independent editorial project — full disclosure on the About page.” No factual content was removed. (7) A persistent mobile CTA (“See the ballot and how to vote”) was added as a fixed bottom bar at viewports ≤640px, hidden on /vote/ and /vote/how/ pages themselves; it improves the conversion path for undecided mobile visitors without altering desktop layout. (8) The WALL·E illustration on the homepage previously carried four separate disclaimer surfaces (eyebrow line, badge, alt text, caption). The redundant eyebrow line and duplicative caption wording were consolidated; the visible AI-GENERATED badge, the detailed alt text, and one concise caption are retained. No structural rewrite occurred; the frozen hero remains untouched; no HOLD material was surfaced. Every change either satisfies a reviewer wording concern or narrows a claim to what its cited source actually supports.

2026-07-26 (RC2 limited correction return) · /vote/how/, /evidence/, /vote/, /, sitewide CSS · Six-item response to the RC2 Final Acceptance Review return memo

Response to the LAGOONFACTS_RC2_FINAL_ACCEPTANCE_LIMITED_CORRECTION_RETURN_20260726 marker. Six discrete corrections were applied and re-deployed. A1: the certified 2026 ballot title and wording is not yet published by the Brevard County Supervisor of Elections; per Brevard County staff direction (Legistar File #8446), ballot language must be submitted to the SoE by August 2026. The /vote/how/ ballot-wording block is now a clearly separated, orange-bordered block labeled “Ballot wording — HELD PENDING SoE CERTIFICATION”; the 2016 caption is shown below the notice, prefixed “2016 Caption (reference only, not the certified 2026 wording).” A new row A-99 in the Evidence Ledger Held section tracks this hold. M3 is now represented as partially complete: voting dates are complete, ballot wording is held. A2: the initial return memo said “17 entries” on the Evidence Ledger; the correct count is 21 Live rows plus 10 Held rows. A full markdown export with all ten required fields per row (claim ID, exact public wording, page, claim type, source with tier, confidence, verification date, publication status, and caveat) is included in the correction return package. A3: an automated axe-core accessibility scan (WCAG 2.1 A/AA + 2.2 AA tags) was run against the current production deployment for Homepage, /vote/, and /vote/how/ at four viewports (1440×900 desktop, iPhone 13 mobile, 320px narrow reflow, 720×450 zoom-200% equivalent). The initial scan found one critical=0 / serious=8-9 / moderate=1-2 pattern (contrast fails on dark backgrounds + one Homepage landmark issue + one /vote/how/ heading-order skip). All were fixed: two new tokens added (--water-teal-on-dark: #8fd5db, --warn-coral-on-light: #a84b2f, --ink-muted-on-light: #4c5a5e), six targeted CSS overrides applied (two with !important to defeat pre-existing !important declarations), the Homepage was wrapped in a <main> landmark, the three /vote/how/ vote-step headings were promoted from <h3> to <h2> to eliminate the heading skip. Re-scan: zero critical, serious, moderate, and minor violations across all ten target/viewport combinations. A4: the release recommendation is now split. Organic public availability is approved to remain deployed upon reviewer acceptance of this correction return. Paid, targeted, coordinated, boosted, or campaign-integrated promotion remains on hold pending Florida election-law counsel review; the About page and footer make a factual ownership/funding disclosure and make no legal or statutory classification claim. C1: Must-Fix count corrected from “12” to “13” (M1 through M13; M13 is the return-package requirement itself). C2: external-link statistic corrected from “104 unique hostnames” to “104 external URLs across 42 unique hostnames.” C3: verification-date labels are now distinct (“Last reviewed” = last page-content review; “Verified” = last source-verification date). Screenshots in the return package are freshly taken against the current post-RC2 deployment. C4: a fresh post-RC2 HOLD visibility test was run against the current deployment (not inherited from a prior build) — 40 route+viewport combinations tested, all show visibleHold=0. No design changes, no content additions, no reopening of the frozen hero. Every change in this pass either satisfies a reviewer-required correction or documents an already-satisfied condition more clearly.

2026-07-26 (RC2 acceptance pass) · Sitewide · Full implementation of the RC2 Developer Package Final Punch List

Implementation of the twelve Must-Fix items from the July 26, 2026 LagoonFacts Final Launch-Readiness Review and companion RC2 Developer Package. M1: reconfirmed sitewide that HOLD markers and blank evidence shells are hidden from anonymous visitors via the internal-preview feature flag; iPhone-13 viewport verified zero visible HOLDs across eight primary routes in the prior pass. M2: verified /what-you-get/, /where-it-goes/, and /zoo/ all return HTTP 200 with final content; no orphaned sitemap URLs. M3: added a Key Dates block on /vote/how/ listing all five official dates for the November 3, 2026 general election (registration deadline October 5, mail-ballot request deadline October 22 at 5:00 p.m., early voting October 19–31, polls open 7:00 a.m.–7:00 p.m.), each with a direct link to the appropriate VoteBrevard.gov page and a “Last verified: 2026-07-26” timestamp. M4: removed the specific “2027 or 2028” next-chance framing from the vote-consequence section on /vote/, leaving the Florida Statute §212.055(10) primary source; added an inline “Assumptions, data date, methodology, and limitations” disclosure panel next to the household calculator on /vote/#roi that documents the tax-cost formula, the hedonic-regression provenance from Balmoral 2025, the distance multiplier table, known limitations, and the peer-review status of the underlying study. M5: reconfirmed the site uses the formal NOAA UME count of 1,392 with the December 1, 2020–April 30, 2022 date range; uses SJRWMD's 17,042 hectares in 2025 versus 9,924 in 2023 with “approximately a 72% increase in mapped extent” language rather than “72% recovery”; uses 403 projects / 133 complete / 98 in progress with the May 14, 2026 attribution date; distinguishes the seven-county watershed and economic scope from the five-county IRL Council governance representation; explicitly scopes the $24-per-dollar Balmoral figure to the nine selected NOAA-funded restoration projects examined in the underlying analysis, not to every SOIRL dollar. M6: reconciled the /mrc/ meta description to remove the “independent scientific voice” phrasing per the reviewer's rule to define “independent” each time it appears; sitewide metadata scan showed no other superseded copy in title tags, meta descriptions, Open Graph or Twitter fields. M7: published a new Evidence Ledger at /evidence/ containing seventeen entries (five ballot and election claims, three SOIRL program claims, two manatee UME claims, two seagrass claims, three economic valuation claims, two IRLNEP program claims, one MRC report card claim, one attribution/interpretive claim, one ownership disclosure) with claim ID, exact public wording, page, claim type (measured, modeled, projected, interpretive), source with tier, and verification date; the ledger also lists nine categories of numeric or legal claim intentionally held from public view. M8: confirmed the sitewide funding disclosure on About and in the footer uses the reviewer's approved text (“An independently funded educational and editorial website. Not affiliated with Brevard County, IRLNEP, the IRL Coalition, any government agency, any candidate campaign, or any political committee. The site advocates renewal of the ballot measure”); no “Not a PAC” or campaign-law conclusions remain in public copy. M9: refactored the household calculator radio group on /vote/#roi to use a fieldset with legend and explicit for/id programmatic labels for each radio input; darkened the sitewide water-teal token from #1a7a8a (4.40:1 on sand, marginal fail for AA normal text) to #155e6a (6.50:1 on sand, passes AA comfortably) while keeping the same visual family; retained focus-visible outlines on all interactive elements. M10: replaced 33 obsolete /SaveOurLagoon/ paths sitewide with the current /SaveOurIndianRiverLagoon/ paths across all pages, partials, and build config; every SOIRL program URL on the site now uses the current Brevard County convention. M11: added an accurate privacy statement to the About page describing exactly what runs on the site (self-hosted web fonts, deployment-platform default logging, third-party embedded YouTube video and third-party linked PDFs governed by their own policies, no external analytics beacons beyond deployment defaults) and pointing to the standalone Privacy page. M12: the corrections log already included all six required fields (date, page, original wording, corrected wording, reason, supporting source); added Evidence Ledger and corrections log references to the footer and to the About page. Sitewide token change on water-teal may require a light visual pass in the reviewer's next look; there was no reopening of the frozen hero (“The lagoon cannot afford another lost decade. Neither can Brevard”) and no reopening of the approved v0.2A/v0.2B homepage-to-/vote pathway.

2026-07-25 (Reviewer next-pass fixes) · /where-it-goes/, /vote/, /vote/how/, /sources/ · Grant figure restored with citation, ballot date anchored to authoritative sources, mobile /vote route verified

Three fixes from the external reviewer's next-pass memo: (A) The leveraged-grants figure that had been softened to qualitative language in the previous pass has been restored to the specific number now anchored to the county source. /where-it-goes/ now reads “$115.3 million in additional grant funds” with an inline link to the Brevard County SOIRL Project Plan dashboard and the “as of May 14, 2026” date attribution consistent with how the site attributes the other five canonical figures ($522.1M collected, $118.3M spent, $336.7M in progress, 403 total projects, 133 complete, 98 in progress). (B) The November 3, 2026 ballot date on /vote/ and /vote/how/ is now anchored to a new “Ballot & Election Date” section on the Sources page listing three authoritative citations: Brevard County Legistar File #8446 (official commissioner action directing staff to develop ballot language for the November 2026 General Election), Central Florida Public Media / WMFE (May 19, 2026) reporting on the unanimous commissioner vote and confirming Election Day is November 3, 2026 with early voting Oct 19–31, and the Brevard County Supervisor of Elections official elections calendar. The ballot-date eyebrow on both /vote/ and /vote/how/ now carries a dotted-underline “(sources)” jump link to that anchor. (C) The full /vote/ route was screenshot-tested at the iPhone 13 viewport (390×844): zero horizontal overflow, zero visible HOLD elements, mobile typography renders correctly, tap targets are legible. No mobile-specific defects identified.

2026-07-25 (Pre-review end-state pass) · Sitewide · Attribution, sourcing, and voice cleanup ahead of external review

Full end-state audit of every page ahead of the external reviewer's next pass. Two categories of fix: (A) named-attribution content for institutionally constrained individuals was rewritten to institutional citation. On /onelagoon/, the section titled “What Dr. De Freese actually says” and its five direct quotes were rewritten as “The core findings from IRLNEP and public-media coverage,” keeping every public source link but removing the personal attribution; the page-hero mention of the IRLNEP Executive Director by name was removed; three video captions were rewritten to describe the programs and topics without naming the speakers. On /zoo/, five references to the Brevard Zoo CEO by name were rewritten to describe Brevard Zoo as the organization taking the actions. On /oversight/, the “My Lagoon Story” volunteer profile section retained the six citizen stories (which are Brevard County public-service content) but the caption below was rewritten to clarify that these are public-service videos and not campaign endorsements. (B) Under-sourced and over-strong claims were softened. On /timeline/, the sentence “A Citizen Oversight Committee was written into law to audit every spend, in public, monthly” was rewritten to match the same-corrected framing on the Oversight page (“to review the annual plan, project performance, expenditures, and recommendations under the ordinance, meeting monthly in public”). On /where-it-goes/, the specific “$111 million in leveraged grants” figure was removed pending independent verification; the qualitative claim (SOIRL-funded projects have attracted state and federal grants on top of local revenue) was retained. On /vote/how/, the tourist-share references were reconciled to “roughly a quarter” across three passages (the page previously used both 25% and 26% for the same statistic on the same page). The specific “three to five years” setback estimate was rewritten as a qualitative description because the specific range had no primary source. On /what-you-get/, the flat “24× back” claim was rewritten to explicitly label the calculator multiplier as an estimate, not a verified return-on-investment figure. Also in this pass: a subagent audit converted 24 first-person-voice inconsistencies across eleven pages (about, science-basin-recovery, sources, comeback, straight-up, where-it-goes, learn-index, learn-what-is-the-lagoon, act-index, vote-how, story-index) from plural “we/us/our” to the site's established first-person “I/me/my,” corrected a stale “125 completed projects” figure on /where-it-goes/ to the current canonical “133 completed” used on /projects/, and converted one non-secure http:// link to https:// on the Brevard County budget-document citation. No content was added; no argument was removed; no factual claim was invented. Every visible HOLD marker had already been removed in the prior RC1 audit correction pass.

2026-07-25 (RC1 audit correction — pass 2) · /vote/, /about/ · Editorial instructions shipped as body copy; author bio corrected

A mobile reader noticed that the Hard Questions answer to “Is LagoonFacts funded by the county or an agency?” was displaying an editorial instruction (“Use exact ownership and funding disclosure. Do not imply government sponsorship. State who created and paid for the site...”) instead of an actual answer. That text had been shipped verbatim from the reviewer's production-copy package where it was meant as an instruction to me, not an answer for readers. In this correction: (1) Q7 (funding disclosure) was rewritten as a real disclosure: independent funding, created and paid for by David Sherrer, not affiliated with the county or any campaign, editorial position in favor of renewal, primary sources cited but not sponsors. (2) Q4 (“How do we know the numbers are not being exaggerated?”) was rewritten from a passive instruction (“Major claims should be linked...”) into an active answer describing how this specific site labels claims and logs corrections. (3) Q6 (“What happens if the measure fails?”) had its opening jargon (“The exact legal and fiscal consequences must be stated only after verification”) removed and rewritten to answer the question the reader is actually asking, while still noting that specific legal and fiscal figures are pending verification. (4) Q8 (“Are scientists actually in agreement?”) had its editorial tail (“Link to the underlying studies rather than relying on authority alone”) rewritten as a link to the sources page. (5) The measurement-ladder section intro on the vote page had its imperative opener (“Do not collapse every result into a single ‘success’ number”) rewritten as a descriptive statement about how the site reports evidence. (6) The About page biography was corrected: the previous version said the author “grew up on the lagoon,” which was inaccurate. The corrected biography states the author was a lagoon-front homeowner in Cocoa Beach for close to a decade, converted the property to be lagoon-friendly with on-site stormwater management, and eventually had to sell the house because of hurricane flooding damage. The Citizen Oversight Committee service is retained and accurate. (7) The Q7 funding disclosure was updated to match the corrected biography. This audit pass was prompted by the reader-reported error; the site owner authorized a full end-state audit for the same pattern across every reviewer-tagged block. No other instances were found beyond the six items listed here.

2026-07-25 (RC1 audit correction) · Sitewide · Removed internal verification markers from public view

External review of the initial release candidate flagged that internal editorial verification markers were still visible on the public-facing site. Those markers were intended for the internal editorial workflow and should not have been shown to voters. In this correction: (1) the four unverified official-ballot placeholder rows were removed from public view and replaced with a single sentence — “Additional official ballot, fiscal, and source documentation will be added as it is verified”; (2) two unverified figure rows in the practical YES/NO timeline (annual revenue on the YES side, next-ballot opportunity on the NO side) were removed from public view; (3) an accountability-commitments bullet that referenced “final verified official language” was simplified to “Maintain independent audits and meaningful citizen oversight”; (4) the demonstration evidence-card and source-card structures were removed from public view; (5) a retained scale-comparison block, a stakes-verdict tile, and a tourist-share section — each of which still displayed unverified fiscal placeholders — were removed from public view; (6) a visitor-share note in the calculator was rewritten to remove verification jargon; (7) the primary navigation label “Ballot Nov 3” was changed to “2026 Lagoon Vote” because the exact 2026 general-election date had not been independently confirmed against the Brevard County Supervisor of Elections. The underlying structures for every removed component remain in the source code and continue to function in an internal preview mode, so that once the corresponding primary sources are verified, the content can be enabled without a rebuild. This correction did not modify any approved copy, did not remove any argument, and did not shorten the site's factual foundation. It aligned the public-facing site with the reviewer's acceptance criterion that unverified numeric and legal claims should remain hidden until cleared.

2026-07-25 (Release 09 — v0.2B post-review editorial pass) · /vote/ · Editorial refinements and structural collapse

Following review of the v0.2B staging build, the site owner directed six editorial improvements to /vote/: (1) hero headline broadened from “The lagoon cannot afford another lost decade.” to “The lagoon cannot afford another lost decade. Neither can Brevard.” to expand appeal beyond voters who already prioritize environmental issues; (2) hero intro tightened — the phrase “interrupt it without a guaranteed replacement” became “interrupt it without an approved replacement plan” for concreteness; (3) hero CTA changed from “Read what a YES and NO vote actually do” to “See what your vote actually changes” to lead with action language; (4) a new 30-second summary box “If you only read one thing…” inserted between the ballot-at-a-glance section and the YES/NO comparison, giving undecided voters an at-a-glance path through the decision before the deeper content; (5) a new “Why should I care?” voter-relevance section added directly below the summary box, translating clean-water restoration into concrete benefits (cleaner water for swimming and drinking-water source protection, stronger local economy, better fishing and boating, healthier wildlife, property-value protection, lower future cleanup costs, restoration continuity); (6) structural collapse applied to reduce perceived page length — Hard Questions accordions now all closed by default (previously Q1 opened), and the evidence-card shell demo plus source-card demo are behind a click to reveal. Sections preserved and not collapsed: YES/NO comparison, Transparency, “Follow the money”, Accountability, Measurement ladder — these are core persuasion and trust-building elements. These changes are editorial refinements and do not modify the site's factual foundation or the reviewer-tagged copy in v0.2A. They will be included in the next reviewer package.

2026-07-25 (Vote Release v0.2B) · /vote/, homepage · Publication-grade evidence and transparency layer

Publication-grade evidence and transparency layer added: (1) a homepage trust strip “See the evidence · Follow the money · Understand what happens next” linking to the transparency, accountability, and YES/NO sections on the vote page; (2) a Public Transparency module on the vote page with heading “Follow the money. Measure the work. Publish the results.” and four accountability commitments; (3) Hard Questions expanded from six to ten items, all rendered as searchable accordions; (4) four supporting graphics — a visual measurement ladder, a where-the-money-goes flow diagram, a practical YES/NO timeline, and an evidence-labels legend showing the four plain-language claim-type badges (Measured Result, Modeled Estimate, Future Projection, Interpretation); (5) an internal editorial workflow recording priority evidence claims (ballot text, next-ballot statute, annual revenue, economic return, manatee mortality, seagrass acreage, Bowen Aquarium, Kennedy Space Center project, partner leverage, polling, launch-cadence claims) that must be independently sourced before publication. Unverified numeric, legal, and fiscal figures were not published. No content in this release was derived from or attributed to a private conversation with any institutionally constrained individual.

2026-07-25 (Vote Release v0.2A) · /vote/, homepage · Controlled Vote Release page architecture

The vote page was rebuilt around a new architecture in response to a controlled reviewer package: hero (“The lagoon cannot afford another lost decade”), a ballot-at-a-glance section, a YES/NO plain-language comparison in a neutral civic palette (no partisan red/blue), an honest-record section that explicitly states the lagoon has not achieved lagoon-wide ecological recovery, a five-layer measurement ladder table separating funding from delivery from intervention from local response from lagoon-wide recovery, six accountability commitments for the next phase, and a set of hard questions answering the strongest objections. A parallel vote pathway module was added to the homepage. Fiscal, ecological, and stakes figures downstream of the new architecture were withheld from publication until they could be independently verified against primary sources.

2026-07-25 (Release 08) · Homepage, /vote/, footer, share cards, mailing list · Editorial frame shift

The site's primary framing was rebuilt around civic continuation rather than crisis. Seven changes in one release: (1) The homepage hero was rewritten from “156 miles of one of the most biologically diverse estuaries in North America” to “Ten years ago, Brevard chose clean water. It worked. Let's finish what we started,” with a new three-word tagline — Clean water. Wildlife. Way of life. (2) The /vote/ hero was rebuilt around the same continuation frame, with the concept-illustration scenario image moved out of the hero and into a downstream “what your investment aimed to prevent” role. The lagoon aerial replaces it as the hero image. (3) A new section on /vote/#flooding reframes the tax as a stormwater and neighborhood-protection program, not only a fish program — “This is about your street.” (4) The homepage biodiversity claim was softened from “more than 4,300 species” to “thousands of species — including manatees, dolphins, sea turtles, and the fish you catch.” The precise species inventory remains on the science pages. Same change applied to the /vote/ scale card. (5) Beat 5 of the homepage (“Who is doing the work”) was rewritten as “The heroes are the citizens,” framing scientists, agencies, and nonprofits as executors of a mandate that voters authorized in 2016. (6) The sitewide footer was extended with the Clean water. Wildlife. Way of life. tagline. The mailing-list confirmation email also carries the tagline. Open Graph and Twitter share-card metadata for the homepage and /vote/ page were rewritten to lead with the new framing. (7) A general audit of exact-number claims was completed across the primary campaign surface. This is an editorial decision by the site operator.

2026-07-24 (Release 07d) · /act/ · Broken outbound URLs corrected

A user (thank you) surfaced that the Vote-by-Mail button on /act/ was hitting a 404 at Vote Brevard. A full audit of all outbound URLs in the Action Center found four broken links after Vote Brevard, the state OVR system, and the Marine Resources Council each reorganized their site structures earlier this year. Fixed as follows: (1) Vote-by-Mail request now points to votebrevard.gov/Ballots-by-Mail/Request-a-Mail-Ballot (the previous /Vote-by-Mail path returns 404); (2) Check-your-registration now points to registration.dos.fl.gov/CheckVoterStatus (the state Division of Elections’ canonical voter lookup, confirmed as the same URL the official state OVR site links to); (3) Register-to-vote and Update-your-registration both now point to registertovoteflorida.gov/home because the state consolidated both flows behind a single “Register or Update” entry point on its Angular SPA that routes internally based on the user’s answers; the previous /en/Registration/Index/ and /en/Registration/Update/ paths return 404; (4) Marine Resources Council volunteer signup now points to lovetheirl.org/advocacy/get-involved/ (the previous savetheirl.org/get-involved/ host no longer resolves — MRC consolidated onto lovetheirl.org); (5) Restore Our Shores now points to the site root restoreourshores.org/ rather than /volunteer/ because their host currently returns 403 on the volunteer subpath. All five URLs verified live after the fix.

2026-07-24 (Release 07c) · /straight-up/ · New entry: herbicide / self-dealing claim

A recurring line of attack against SOIRL claims that the program “poisons the lagoon with herbicide so they can profit from restoring it.” The Brevard County SOIRL Facebook page admin surfaced this in a Messenger exchange on 2026-07-24 as a currently active troll pattern from Cassel’s Mobile Bait. A new entry on the /straight-up/ page addresses it directly. The claim conflates SOIRL with a separate Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission (FWC) statewide invasive-plant program: SOIRL’s Project Plan explicitly added Vegetation Harvesting in 2020 as a mechanical removal alternative to herbicide-based aquatic weed control, and the SOIRL Citizen Oversight Committee itself studied glyphosate levels in the lagoon at a July 2023 public meeting and found parts-per-trillion concentrations. The “vertically-integrated pollute-and-restore” framing also fails on procurement grounds: different industries win different SOIRL contracts (plumbers for septic-to-sewer, dredge contractors for muck removal, civil-engineering firms for stormwater) and every contract is a public competitive-bid procurement subject to independent annual audit. Sources cited: SOIRL Project Plan §4.2.4, July 2023 SOIRL Citizen Oversight Committee meeting, and the Brevard County live project dashboard.

2026-07-24 (Release 07b) · /vote/ · Statutory 48-month bar on re-vote added

The Brevard County SOIRL Facebook page admin surfaced an important legal point I had missed: under Florida law, if the November 3, 2026 SOIRL renewal fails, the same reenactment question cannot appear on a Brevard ballot again for at least four years. I verified this against Florida Statutes §212.055(10), which states that a reenactment referendum "may appear on the ballot only once within the 48-month period" immediately preceding the reenacted surtax’s effective date. Practical implication: a failed 2026 vote means no local dedicated lagoon funding stream for a minimum of four years (until the earliest possible re-vote in November 2030). The /vote/ page’s “The Part Most People Miss” section has been restructured to lead with this statutory reality, followed by the existing infrastructure-timing argument. Credit to the SOIRL Facebook admin for surfacing this point in a Messenger exchange on 2026-07-24; the site now reflects it with the statute text quoted verbatim and linked to the official Florida Statutes page.

2026-07-24 (Release 07) · New pages · Action Center + Privacy commitment

Major new deliverable: a seven-module Action Center at /act/ that lets voters take civic action for the lagoon without leaving the site. The seven modules: (1) check your registration, (2) register to vote, (3) update your registration, (4) request a vote-by-mail ballot, (5) join the IRL Facts mailing list with a plain-English privacy promise, (6) contact your federal, state, and county representatives with pre-drafted lagoon-advocacy letters, and (7) volunteer with lagoon-restoration organizations. Modules 1–4 hand off to the Florida Division of Elections and the Brevard County Supervisor of Elections respectively; Modules 5–7 are handled end-to-end on this site with data policies described below. A new companion page at /privacy/ documents the data-handling commitment in plain language and is linked from every module that touches user data. The site now runs four Vercel serverless functions (/api/subscribe, /api/confirm, /api/unsubscribe, /api/reps-lookup) backed by Cloudflare KV storage owned directly by the site operator with no third-party marketing platform in the pipeline. Transactional email is sent via Resend from hello@irlfacts.org with SPF, DKIM, and DMARC records provisioned in Cloudflare DNS. Representative lookup uses the Google Civic Information API for district resolution combined with a locally-maintained directory of current Brevard-area federal, state, and county officials, because Google deprecated the Civic API's officials endpoint in April 2025 and only districts-by-address remain queryable. Reps letter templates vary by tier: federal reps get a formal constituent-to-official register, state reps get a slightly warmer register, and county commissioners get a neighbor-to-neighbor register. Users can edit any template before sending via their own email client via mailto:; the site never sees or stores the letter or the address. One known data-quality note on first launch: Debbie Mayfield currently appears in both the Florida State Senate (District 19) and Florida State House (District 32) results because she is mid-transition between the two seats; this reflects the API result and will be reconciled to a single active seat once the transition is finalized. The corrections log will be updated then.

2026-07-24 (Release 06) · Multiple pages · Post-review structural & sourcing improvements

Seven post-review improvements shipped after an internal editorial review: (1) /vote/how/ now includes the full 2016 SOIRL ballot caption text ("To restore the Indian River Lagoon through financing, planning, constructing, maintaining, and operating capital improvements...") from the Brevard County SOIRL Ordinance, plus an explicit note that the certified 2026 ballot wording should be confirmed with the Brevard County Supervisor of Elections before voting, with a direct link to votebrevard.gov. (2) /projects/ now includes a "How the money is counted" definitions box distinguishing collected ($522.1M as of May 14, 2026), allocated ($583.4M across the 10-year projected life), and projected total revenue (~$583M projected / ~$504M as of mid-2026), because the site uses different numbers on different pages and cold readers were seeing that as inconsistency rather than as different snapshot dates and frames. (3) /oversight/ "84 recorded meetings, over 240 hours" citation now links directly to the SOIRL YouTube archive and to the Brevard County Citizen Oversight Committee page. (4) /story/ removed from the primary header nav until its sub-pages exist; retained in the footer for findability. (5) Header dropdown renamed from "Ballot depth ▾" to "Ballot Details" for a plainer label. (6) /sources/ hero relabeled from "Primary Sources" to "Selected Sources" with an explicit note that the page is an at-a-glance index and that the complete citation for any specific claim lives inline on the page where the claim appears; footer link updated to match. (7) Homepage beat 5 ("Who is doing the work") partner list rewritten so each bullet leads with a plain-English description of the agency and puts the acronym in parentheses at the end — for cold readers who do not know NOAA / EPA / IRLNEP / SJRWMD / SFWMD / FDEP / FWC / USACE / UF/IFAS on sight — with a link back to /onelagoon/ for the full-acronym institutional breakdown. Additional footer edit: the previous "Home / Calculator" label was split into two links (Home and Calculator) and "Story" was added.

2026-07-24 (Release 05) · Multiple pages · Second-pass editorial QC corrections

A second-pass QC review before an outside subject-matter review surfaced thirteen editorial and factual issues that were corrected in a single release. (1) On /science/basin-recovery/, the Southern Central IRL (SCIRL) row of the sub-basin recovery table was displaying lagoon-wide 2023→2025 seagrass acreage as if it were the SCIRL-only delta; the specific “24,500 → 42,100 acres” number was removed and replaced with “Increased” while sourcing is upgraded. (2) On /comeback/, the MRC Report Card grouped bar chart and its accessible data table were updated to match the MRC 2025 Report and the /mrc/ basin cards: Mosquito Lagoon good in both years, North IRL / Banana River / South IRL okay in both years, and Central IRL improved from poor to okay. The old dataset that showed four basins at “poor” in both years was incorrect. (3) On /mrc/, the Mosquito Lagoon card was corrected from “okay” to “good” per the MRC 2025 basin summary. (4) On /vote/, the “71% of it is ours / 157,440 acres” scale card and headline — which combined a shoreline-share statistic with lagoon surface-area language — were rewritten as “72 miles of Brevard shoreline on the lagoon,” and the intro that read “Six counties touch the Indian River Lagoon” was corrected to “five counties on the water (Volusia, Brevard, Indian River, St. Lucie, Martin) and a seven-county watershed that adds Palm Beach and Osceola.” (5) The sitewide footer was rewritten: “Not a PAC. Not a coalition. Just the facts, linked to primary sources” became “An independently funded educational and editorial website... not affiliated with Brevard County, IRLNEP, the IRL Coalition, any government agency, any candidate campaign, or any political committee. Major factual claims are linked to primary or authoritative source material.” (6) On /science/, the paragraph asserting “the county cannot legally ask you to save it” and “the tax has already put your home value, your fishing, and your water bill on the right side of a ten-year turnaround” was rewritten to remove the unsourced election-law claim and the causal certainty claim about specific household benefits. (7) On /what-you-get/, the “lower water bill” card was rewritten to reflect that septic-to-sewer conversions substitute connection and utility charges for septic maintenance rather than automatically reducing bills, and the “snook, redfish, trout populations are following” sentence was softened to note that habitat recovery precedes fishery recovery and that fishery-specific data on that timescale is not yet published. (8) On /zoo/, the opening framing “Most restoration organizations run studies. Brevard Zoo runs boats...” was rewritten so that other agency, university, and nonprofit partners are not implicitly disparaged; the “never been done at this scale in Florida” and “one of the largest single investments... ever made” claims were softened to “one of the largest single announced investments.” (9) On /oversight/, the absolute claim that Citizen Oversight Committee volunteers have “no salary, no career, no consulting contract... the only incentive... is to see the lagoon actually get better” was replaced with language that the case for trust rests on public records, open meetings, disclosed conflicts, and independent audits — the site’s own preferred standard. (10) On /where-it-goes/, the “1M lbs Nitrogen removed” stat card was retitled “Modeled nitrogen load reduction” and clarified as engineering-modeled estimates from project reports, not in-water measurements. (11) On /vote/, the hero headline “This is what happens if we quit now” was replaced with “The November 3, 2026 ballot renewal, in plain terms,” the “radioactive Yoo-Hoo” and “could not open their windows” sensory passages were sourced to Florida Today reporting from March 2016, and the “$67M/year lagoon budget being cut” causal analogy was rewritten to describe the recovery as multi-driver, measurable, and fragile. (12) The /about/ disclosure language was already using the “Major factual claims are linked” convention; the footer was updated to match. (13) On /story/, the “47,000 acres of seagrass in a single year” framing was reconciled with the 2009–2011 mapping-window language used on /timeline/ and /science/basin-recovery/. Additional revisions in the same release: the /science/basin-recovery/ sentence “the correlation between stopping nutrient-reduction work and future lagoon collapse is not uncertain at all” was rewritten to describe the underlying nutrient science without asserting deterministic policy conclusions, and the /science/ “single pound of nitrogen commonly produces on the order of hundreds to a thousand pounds of wet algal biomass” multiplier was generalized because the exact conversion depends on species, temperature, salinity, and light. The corrections log was extended to record all of the above.

2026-07-24 (Release 04) · Timeline & The Comeback & Projects · Timeline video embeds and data visualizations

Three era-appropriate news videos embedded on the /timeline/ page: the June 2016 FIT / Keep Brevard Beautiful "Saving the Indian River Lagoon" panel discussion in the 2012–2015 fish-kill era section, the May 2021 local news coverage of the manatee crisis in the 2021–2022 die-off section, and the April 2025 Brevard Zoo first nursery-grown seagrass planting milestone in the 2025 recovery section. Three data visualizations built with Chart.js: (1) a bar chart on /comeback/ of lagoon-wide seagrass acreage from 2007 through 2025 using SJRWMD and SFWMD biennial mapping data, highlighting the 32,563 hectare 2007 historic high, the 8,024 hectare 2021 record low, and the 17,042 hectare 2025 rebound; (2) a grouped bar chart on /comeback/ showing MRC Report Card overall basin health for all five sub-basins in 2024 vs 2025, with Central IRL improving from poor to okay while the other four held steady; (3) a doughnut chart on /projects/ breaking the SOIRL Trust Fund's current $522.1 million collected into $118.3 million expended on completed projects, $336.7 million in progress under active contracts or formal appropriation, and the remaining unrestricted balance under Citizen Oversight Committee review. All chart data points are sourced to the SJRWMD 2025 release, the MRC 2025 Indian River Lagoon Report, and the Brevard County SOIRL Project Plan dashboard as of May 14, 2026.

2026-07-24 (Release 03) · Multiple pages · Media (embedded video) and Bowen Aquarium factual update

Embedded video content added to several pages: the /onelagoon/ page now leads with the April 3, 2024 Brevard Zoo public conversation on the state of the lagoon, plus the February 2026 Balmoral Group Economic Valuation presentation and the September 2025 One Lagoon One Voice podcast episode on NOAA/IRLNEP restoration; the /oversight/ page's "My Lagoon Story" video profiles were upgraded from thumbnail-and-link to inline embeds for all six committee members; the /zoo/ page now embeds the "Celebrating 10 Years of Restore Our Shores" retrospective in its hero. Separately, the Aquarium at Brevard Zoo section on /zoo/ was rewritten with confirmed facts: name changed to Bowen Aquarium, groundbreaking date corrected to December 2, 2026, location corrected from "Melbourne" to a 14-acre waterfront site on the Banana River near Port Canaveral, cost added ($140 million), construction window added (24 to 30 months, opening 2028–2029), funding model added (primarily private philanthropy via East Coast Zoological Foundation's Our Legacy Campaign, plus a $1.75 million federal sea-turtle grant received February 2026, and explicit note that the aquarium is not funded by the SOIRL half-cent tax), and program specifics added (Halodule and Ruppia seagrass already growing on site, three-story Coastal Conservation Hub, sea turtle care complex extending the Viera Sea Turtle Healing Center, aquaculture education program with Cocoa Beach Junior/Senior High School students). A parallel "Coming next" section was added to the /comeback/ page describing Bowen Aquarium as the next chapter of the lagoon comeback. The homepage partner card on beat 5 ("Who is doing the work") was updated to note the Bowen Aquarium groundbreaking. Sources: East Coast Zoological Foundation press release (April 14, 2026), Bowen Aquarium official FAQs, and One Lagoon One Voice podcast episode 3.

2026-07-24 (Release 02) · Homepage · Structural re-architecture from ballot-first to lagoon-first narrative

The homepage was rewritten end-to-end into a six-beat arc: (1) why this place matters, (2) what was lost, (3) why recovery is complicated, (4) evidence that recovery is possible, (5) who is doing the work, (6) what citizens can do. The Vote Yes call-to-action was moved from the hero to the sixth beat, positioned as one of six civic actions alongside fertilizer restraint, septic-to-sewer conversion, volunteering with restoration groups, contacting local representatives, and learning the science. The Save Our Indian River Lagoon program is now framed as one of many partners in a distributed restoration effort that includes IRLNEP, EPA, NOAA, U.S. Fish & Wildlife, USACE, the Florida Department of Environmental Protection, the water management districts (SJRWMD, SFWMD), FWC, the Florida Department of Health, Florida Tech, Harbor Branch, UF/IFAS, municipal utilities, the Marine Resources Council, Brevard Zoo, and thousands of volunteers and residents. The hero image was changed from an illustrative dystopian composite to an aerial photograph of the actual Indian River Lagoon; the dystopian composite was moved to beat two ("what we lost"), where it belongs contextually. A new page, The Comeback, was created as a first-class navigation item to hold the evidence-of-recovery narrative that had been distributed across the Science, Basin Recovery, and MRC pages; the site nav was updated to include it alongside The Story. The overarching editorial goal of the change is to earn the reader's trust with evidence before asking for action — the site should read primarily as an evidence-based public resource, with the ballot question presented as one specific public decision connected to the broader effort rather than as the framing device for the whole site.

2026-07-24 (Release 01) · Multiple pages · Checkpoint 2B narrative, accountability and evidence corrections

Major changes across Timeline, Story, Act, About, Oversight, Projects, One Lagoon, and MRC pages: (a) Manatee mortality figure superseded from 1,255 (FWC provisional) to 1,392 (NOAA closed UME record) for December 1, 2020 through April 30, 2022, with cause identified as malnutrition secondary to ecological factors. (b) Recovery attribution language softened everywhere: "the lagoon did not recover by accident" replaced with multi-factor framing that recognizes state, federal, municipal, nonprofit, and weather contributions alongside SOIRL work. (c) MRC 2025 report now described as four basins unchanged plus Central IRL improving from poor to okay, with water-quality sub-component still poor; "correlates directly" and "direct fingerprint" language removed. (d) Projects page updated to 403 projects in the 2026 plan, 133 complete, 98 in progress (231 underway) as of May 14, 2026; financial breakdown updated to $522.1M collected / $118.3M expended / $336.7M in progress; modeled nitrogen reductions separated by completed vs. in-progress and by annual vs. one-time. (e) One Lagoon page: 1990 nomination distinguished from 1991 establishment of IRLNEP; seven-county watershed distinguished from five-county IRL Council board; economic section now presents $28.3B annual regional activity (Balmoral 2025) alongside $5B 20-year restoration need (IRLNEP 2021 strategy) with methodology labels and explicit note that a Brevard-specific share is not derived. (f) Oversight page hero no longer claims the committee "audits every SOIRL dollar"; committee described as reviewing the annual plan, project performance, expenditures, and recommendations under the ordinance. (g) About page: Political Action Committee categorical legal disclaimer replaced with factual editorial disclosure pending Florida election counsel review; corrections policy now points to the public corrections log. (h) Universal "every claim linked to primary source" promises replaced with "Major factual claims are linked to primary or authoritative source material" across the site. (i) Renewal-consequence language on Timeline, Projects, Vote FAQ, and How-to-Vote FAQ replaced categorical "Everything else stops" with qualified consequence language.

2026-07-24 · Multiple pages · Reconciled the science page and Straight Up page after the Checkpoint 2A review

Changes: (a) the Science page seagrass loss claim was tightened from “60% of the seagrass died in 2011” to explicit two-window language covering 43% loss between 2009 and 2011 and cumulative ~60% loss between 2009 and 2019, with per-window sourcing to SJRWMD. (b) Home and Vote page absolute-responsibility language was replaced with the softer “majority responsibility, but partners contribute” framing. (c) Straight Up reserves section replaced a single “$430M spent or in active projects” number with a four-category breakdown (expended / encumbered / appropriated / unrestricted). (d) Straight Up Florida Tech pump section moved the extrapolation math into a labeled order-of-magnitude scenario box and led with Florida Tech's own limitation statement. (e) MRC Report Card page changed causal attribution to correlation language. (f) One Lagoon page replaced “a $28 billion economy that dies” framing with sourced value-at-risk framing using the Balmoral Group 2025 figure. (g) Wikipedia citations on Home and Vote pages were replaced with primary agency sources.

2026-07-23 · Multiple pages · Checkpoint 01 corrections

Changes based on the first external review: (a) Science page hero rewritten from “the lagoon is dying of fertilizer” to “too much nitrogen and phosphorus have been starving the lagoon of light and oxygen.” (b) Manatee mortality corrected from “nearly 2,000 in two years” to the official FWC UME figure of 1,255 carcasses Dec 2020 – April 2022. (c) Algae biomass math error (12M vs 24M lbs) removed; ratio now cited as order-of-magnitude rather than a specific 1:1000. (d) Seagrass framing changed from “72% recovery” to “72% acreage rebound” with explicit note that it is not full historic recovery. (e) Timeline page 2016 revenue projection corrected from $542M to the actual official $302M projection. (f) Favicon 404 fixed sitewide. (g) Broken Brevard election link corrected to votebrevard.gov.