FOCUS: St Augustine voters opt for change

Did you catch it? In the spring edition of FORUM, the magazine of the Florida Humanities Council, writers informed their audience about the plans for the future of St Augustine, and moves underway to better balance the city to accommodate tourists as well as the families who live and work in the 450-year-old town.

Historic City News reprint:

Political newcomer, Nancy Shaver, won her bid to become St. Augustine’s mayor last November on a platform that called for balancing the city’s tourism focus with more attention to local priorities like traffic management and infrastructure improvement.

“After years of putting attracting tourists first, we have reached a tipping point on traffic,” she wrote on her candidate website. “After 20 years of patching here and there, our streets need real attention, along with our water, sewer, and storm water systems.”

Shaver, who has 25 years of marketing experience that includes working at top corporate levels, defeated four-term incumbent mayor, Joe Boles, with 51 percent of the vote (2,650 to 2,531).

Boles, a local attorney who served as mayor for eight years, said during a campaign interview with the St. Ar1gustine Record that the city survived the economic recession better than many areas because of tourism, which is the local economic driver and number-one industry.

He said efforts were ongoing to provide more parking and that roads and infrastructure were kept up as well as possible over the years.

Both candidates emphasized that the city wants to better attract and serve “heritage” tourists-visitors specifically interested in learning about and seeing historic sites. This type of tourist tends to spend more nights in local hotels and more time in the city than those who are interested in visiting local beaches and other attractions.

Shaver said the city needs to work out how it can receive more of the revenue generated by tourism in order to pay for the costs of accommodating it.

She also called for the city to do strategic planning and establish a long-range plan that would guide day-to-day decisions.

At the same time mayoral campaigns were taking place, a citywide “visioning” committee chaired by the vice mayor was meeting to create goals it hopes will help guide city officials.

Top on its list of goals is creating a better strategy to deal with parking and traffic. Other goals include collaborating with tourist development agencies to promote St. Augustine as a distinctive historic community, becoming a model city for sustainability, and creating governing principles to balance interests of residents, businesses, and visitors.