The Honorable Pam Childers, Clerk of the Circuit Court, in accordance with Florida Statute 28.12, is the clerk and accountant of the Escambia County Board of County Commissioners (BCC).

As Clerk to the Board of County Commissioners, this Clerk to the Board office is the official record depository for the BCC. The office is responsible for: attendance at BCC meetings; transcription of the minutes; maintenance of permanent records associated with the BCC; and keeping BCC-approved Resolutions, Ordinances, contracts and agreements. The Clerk to the Board office also functions as Clerk to the BCC appointed Value Adjustment Board.

The Clerk to the Board office is located in Room 114 of the Old Courthouse Building located at 223 Palafox Place in Pensacola, Florida

To search using the Board Minutes Search:

Simply type your search request into the text box provided.
Searches will be done ONLY in the year chosen

And click on the [SEARCH] button.

The matching documents will be displayed in chronological order.

If no documents match your search criteria, then this should appear.

Click on any of the matching documents to open that PDF document up in a new browser window.

The clicked on matching PDF document will open up and the first matching word(s) of your search criteria will be highlighted in blue

If your search criteria appears more than once in a document, click on Adobe Acrobat's "Jump Next" and "Jump Previous" buttons on the top toolbar to jump to the next highlighted match. The buttons look like a piece of paper with an triangle pointing to the left or to the right.

Clickable buttons are available in those Board Minutes PDF documents that have imaged supporting documents such as contracts, proclamations, reports, etc... The user may click on these buttons to view the non-searchable TIFF image of the supporting document.

If you decide to search for another word while inside the PDF document, then use Adobe Acrobat's "Find" and "Find Again" buttons [ CTRL-F ] to find a new phrase within the document. The "Find" and "Find Again" buttons look like binoculars. This feature is done completely without the use of the Board Minutes Search.

Boolean search techniques are really quite simple to learn and can add tremendous effectiveness to your searching. There are three Boolean operators: AND, OR, and NOT. The Boolean operators are used to combine search terms. Complex search statements may include a mix of Boolean operators.

One way to decide when to use the AND or OR operators is to test whether your keywords are different concepts, or just different ways (synonyms) to say the same thing.
For different concepts, use AND;
For synonyms, use OR.

"AND" means "I want only documents that contain both words." "AND" logic focuses, coordinates and narrows a search, retrieving only those documents containing at both terms or phrases from both sides of the "AND".

For Example
Searching for [ Poverty AND Crime ] would return the names of all documents in which both words "Poverty" and "Crime" appeared. If only one of the two words appeared in a document, then that document would NOT be considered a match.

Also
Searching for [ Poverty AND Crime AND Gender ] would return the names of all documents in which all three words "Poverty" "Crime", and "Gender" appeared. If only one or only two of the three words appeared in a document, then that document would NOT be considered a match.

"OR" means "I want documents that contain either words." "OR" logic broadens a search and makes it less focused, retrieving those documents containing at least one term or phrase from either side of the "OR".

For Example
Searching for [ College OR University ] would return the names of all documents in which either words "College" or "University" appeared. Only one of the two words has to appear in a document to be considered a match.

Also
Searching for [ College OR University OR Campus ] would return the names of all documents in which either words "College" "University", or "Campus" appeared. Only one of the three words has to appear in a document to be considered a match.

"NOT" removes any documents that contain the term or phrase. Don't use NOT unless you are confident the excluded search term always results in the retrieval of irrelevant documents.

For Example
Searching for [ Cats NOT Dogs ] would return the names of all documents in which the word "Cats" appeared but in which the word "Dogs" did not appear.

Use of parentheses ( and ) in boolean searching is known as forcing the order of processing. Parentheses ( ) require the terms and operations that occur inside them to be searched first. When more than one element is in parentheses, the sequence is left to right. This is called "nesting."

Parentheses MUST BE USED to group terms joined by or when there is any other operator in the search.

For Example
Searching for [ perdido and traffic and ( study or plan* ) ] - Requires the first two terms, "perdido" and "traffic" to be somewhere in all documents, and either "study" or "plan" must also be in the resulting documents.

Your most powerful keyword term is the phrase. Phrases are combinations of words that must be found in the search documents in the EXACT order as shown. You denote phrases within closed quotes using single quotes ' or double quotes " such as ("lien hold*", "board meeting", "contract approval" ). Phrases should be used where the constituent terms are naturally married.

When using phrases, it is important to consider nuances of the phrase that wouldn't normally be of concern. For example, the spaces between words are as important as any other character. If you include a double space between any two words in the query and the phrase typically has only one, the search will fail.

A search word can contain the wildcard characters asterisk * and question mark ?. A ? in a word matches any single character, and a * matches any number of characters. The wildcard characters can be in any position in a word. Use wildcards if you are not sure of how a word is spelled or if you want all deviations and plurals of a word

For Example
appl* would match apple, application, etc.
*cipl* would match principle, participle, etc.
appl? would match apply and apple but not apples.
ap*ed would match applied, approved, etc.
cit* would match citation, citations, citizen, cited, city, cities, and many more.

Stemming extends a search to cover grammatical variations on a word. Use the tilde ~ at the end of words that you want stemmed in a search

For example
A search for [ fish~ ] would also find fishing.
A search for [ applied~ ] would also find applying, applies, and apply.

Use the W/N connector in a search request to specify that one word or phrase must occur within N words of the other.

For example,
[ apple w/5 pear ] would retrieve any document that contained "apple" within 5 words of "pear".
[ (apple or pear) w/5 banana ]
[ (apple w/5 banana) w/10 pear ] and
[ (apple and banana) w/10 pear ]
are all valid proximity searches

In general, at least one of the two expressions connected by W/N must be a single word or phrase or a group of words and phrases connected by OR. Some types of complex expressions using the W/N connector will produce ambiguous results and should not be used.

The NOT W/ ("not within") operator allows you to search for a word or phrase not in association with another word or phrase.
For Example
[ apple not w/20 pear ]
would find all documents in which the word "apple" did not appear within 20 words of the word "pear"

Phonic searching looks for a word that sounds like the word you are searching for and begins with the same letter. For example, a phonic search for [ #Smith ] will also find Smithe and Smythe.

To search for a word phonically, put a # in front of the word in your search request.

For Example
#smith, #johnson