StepUpLaw/fl-local-codes

Florida Local Codes of Ordinances: Publication and Currency, 2026

Where each of Florida's 478 local governments publishes its code of ordinances, who publishes it, and how current that code is. One row per county and per incorporated municipality, covering all 67 counties and all 411 cities, towns and villages. Municipal law is the hardest layer of American law to locate: there is no master index, and each commercial codifier lists only its own clients, so a reader who does not already know who publishes a town's code has nowhere to start. This dataset is that missing index for one state, and it records the jurisdictions no codifier carries, which is the part no vendor list can show. Currency is measured from the codifier's own stated codification date, so a code that has not been supplemented in years is visible as such.

478 rows. Licence CC BY 4.0. Not legal advice.

Where this comes from

Canonical record	https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.22247377
Code and methodology	https://github.com/stepuplaw/legal-empirics
Research page	https://stepuplaw.com/research/
Author	Kevin D. Klagge, ORCID 0009-0002-1385-8498
Source	US Census Bureau subcounty population estimates (vintage 2024) for the jurisdiction frame, joined to the public metadata APIs of the commercial code publishers. No court opinions are involved.

The DOI above identifies the code, which is a different object from this dataset. Cite the code when you are describing the method and cite this dataset when you are using the numbers.

Columns

Column	Type	Meaning
geoid	string	Census GEOID: 12 followed by the county FIPS code, or 12 followed by the place FIPS code
name	string	jurisdiction name without its type suffix
type	string	county
county	string	the county the jurisdiction sits in; for a county row, itself
counties	string	every county the place falls in, pipe separated, largest population share first
population	integer	Census population estimate, vintage 2024
code_status	string	online-html
publisher	string	municode
code_url	string	the verified URL of the code of ordinances; empty where no code is online
publisher_client_id	string	the codifier's own identifier for this jurisdiction, where it has one
code_product_id	string	Municode product id for the code of ordinances; the key to its table of contents
codified_through	string	date of the most recent ordinance included in the code, as the publisher states it
code_last_updated	string	date the publisher last posted an update online
pdf_available	integer	1 where the publisher offers the code as a downloadable PDF
pending_ordinances_count	integer	adopted ordinances awaiting codification, per the publisher; null outside Municode
official_status	string	official
source	string	municode-api
source_checked_date	string	the date this row was checked; codifier contracts move, so the date is part of the claim
notes	string	free text, used mainly for jurisdictions no codifier carries
statement	string	the row written as one self-contained English sentence, so it can be retrieved, quoted and checked on its own

Every row carries a statement column, which is the row written as one self-contained English sentence. A row of codes can be downloaded but not retrieved or quoted, and the sentence is what makes each row usable on its own.

How it was built

The jurisdiction list is the Census Bureau subcounty population file, which is independent of every codifier and yields exactly 67 counties and 411 municipalities, matching the Florida League of Cities directory. Each publisher's public metadata was joined onto that list by normalised name, and every jurisdiction no publisher carried was opened by hand in a browser. Two traps had to be handled: the largest publisher's classification field does not encode jurisdiction type, so type comes from the Census, and its library returns HTTP 200 with an empty JavaScript shell for addresses that do not exist, so every URL is verified against the resolver the library's own page calls rather than against a status code. Metadata only. No ordinance text is retrieved or republished, and the dataset must not be described as ordinance text.

datapackage.json carries the Frictionless schema, croissant.json the MLCommons Croissant description, and dataset.jsonld the schema.org form.

Limits

This is a point in time. Codifier contracts move. Every row carries the date it was checked, and that date is part of the claim rather than a footnote to it.

Currency is the publisher's word. codified_through reports when the code was last compiled, not that the compilation is correct or complete.

Official status is usually unstated. Most Florida codes do not say on the page whether the online version is the official one, and the column records what the page says rather than inferring it.

This says where the law is, never what it says. There is no ordinance text here, by design.

Read the study's own limitations section in the repository before quoting a number. Each one names the specific threats to its own validity, including the ones that are unflattering.