St. Augustine looking at changes for Nights of Lights

By Georgia Witt

This past holiday season, St. Augustine’s annual Night of Lights festival drew in an overwhelming amount of tourists, leading to traffic gridlocks, crowding, and public health and safety concerns. The festival has been successful in bringing tourism to St. Augustine since its start in 1993, but last year’s crowds were unprecedented.

“What we saw during this most recent Night of Lights was traffic congestion unlike anything we’ve ever seen before,” said David Birchim, St. Augustine’s city manager.

Last season’s festival caused several problems: traffic backed up on major highways, overcrowding in the streets where groups of people ignored traffic signals, and a lack of public restrooms and waste disposal. These problems, according to Birchim, highlighted several areas of the festival in need of improvement.

The city’s current plan is to test out potential changes for the festival during this upcoming Fourth of July, another major holiday that attracts high numbers of tourists to downtown.

According to Birchim, these potential changes that will be tested in July include: blocking off Cathedral Place to vehicular traffic, placing 115 portable restrooms at the downtown Bank of America parking lot as well as signs along St. George Street directing people to those restrooms, leasing or purchasing vehicle barriers to place around vehicle access points downtown, widespread messaging to incoming visitors, in the form of both electronic reader signs alongside I-95 and an app, that will alert them when all downtown parking is full and guide them to satellite parking spots outside of town.

“What we discovered is we need a better way to send that message out farther, so people will know before they even come into town, ‘Hey the garage is closed, go to the remote parking spaces, don’t even come downtown,’” Birchim said.

Another goal is to get the Florida Department of Transportation to reserve a traffic lane solely for transit buses, which are the vehicles that transport visitors who park in satellite parking to downtown St. Augustine. According to Birchim, the hope is that they can reserve either San Marco Avenue, North Ponce de Leon Boulevard, or both for bus lanes.

Finding a way to pay for these changes is another development the city is currently working on. The Tourist Development Council (TDC), a county organization founded by the bed tax, is responsible for advertising and funding the Night of Lights. The city is currently working with the TDC to see if they can allocate a portion of those funds towards improvements for the festival.

“The city does not get much revenue from Night of Lights,” Jim Springfield, who holds seat five on the St. Augustine City Commission said. “Our revenue comes typically through property tax, and so the sales tax that’s generated during Night of Lights, which is where most of the increase in money is, actually goes to the state. So, it’s a burden on the city of St. Augustine in managing the town because we don’t get revenue from it.”

Springfield also noted the difficulty of equally representing both St. Augustine residents and businesses, two parties that tend to see different sides of the festival.

“This is a typical fight between a town that’s a tourist town,” Springfield said. “A fight between the business owners and the people who live here.”

Residents of St. Augustine experience many drawbacks of the festival. Marisa Clark, who was born and raised in St. Augustine and currently lives in Flagler’s Model Land neighborhood downtown with her family, notes that during the festival, she and her family have to stay in, particularly over the weekend.

“In a way it’s not really for the residents anymore,” Clark said. “That’s fine, you know. I understand that this is a tourism-driven economy and we need it, but I feel like it’s been poorly managed and been allowed to kind of balloon to a place where we can’t move around as residents anymore. And so in a sense I feel like we lose our town for a couple of months every year, and that kind of sucks.”

Luann Allen, a resident of St. Augustine for over 30 years, believes that the amount of advertising done for the Night of Lights is not necessary. Allen also formerly owned a coffee shop downtown called Brewster’s.

“Having been a merchant downtown, there are other times of year when they need more business,” Allen said. “September and October are traditionally fairly slow downtown. The early part of May, before Memorial Day before the kids get out of school. Those are the slow times. Those are the times when they can advertise to bring people in.”

Ryann Cronin, who has been general manager of Auggie’s Draft Room on St. George Street for four years and worked there for six in total, noted that while businesses do gain from the tourism that Night of Lights brings in, downtown employees also experience the drawbacks of the festival. Cronin stated that finding parking for work is so difficult during the festival that she has had employees spend up to an hour searching for parking spots, and end up not coming to work when they can’t find a free space.

“I just don’t think they’re doing enough to help support employees,” Cronin said. “If they left one deck of the parking garage open for just employees or gave employees downtown a decal, that would be really beneficial. I think that’s definitely the number one problem is not supporting the employees of St. Augustine enough.”

Springfield, also a resident of St. Augustine, encourages fellow residents and employees alike to reach out to city officials.

“I really believe that most people don’t believe that contacting the city commissioners makes a difference, but it really does,” Springfield said. “So people should contact us with frustrations or with good things. What’s working and what’s not working. It really makes a difference for us to hear from people, even students, to let us know what’s happening to them personally and how the Night of Lights has affected them so we can make good decisions.”

On April 28, Birchim announced a series of public engagement meetings to address large-scale events, particularly the Night of Lights festival. The resident discussions will be held on Tuesday, May 20 and Tuesday, May 27 from 9-11 a.m., and the business discussions will be held on Thursday, May 22 and Thursday, May 29 from 1-4 p.m. The meetings are open to all residential and business stakeholders, and will take place in the Alcazar Room at City Hall.