ST. AUGUSTINE, Fla. – Residents are sharing their vision for the future of St. Augustine.
The city of St. Augustine is revisiting their Vision Plan from 2014 by gathering feedback from residents at six workshops hosted throughout the city.
Monday night the city hosted the second of six workshops at the St. Augustine Yacht Club.
About 30 people packed the room to take part in the workshop, including Ansley Bates, who’s been living in St. Augustine for four years and wants city leaders to consider highlighting the arts and music scene as part of the vision plan.
“I think it brings a lot representing the tradition. So I think it’s cool that we have this opportunity to meet,” Bates said. “I want to bring more of that aspect into it, and really get more people involved so that the vision of St. Augustine really is accomplished by the whole St. Augustine, not just certain people.”
Melinda Rakoncay, who has lived in St. Augustine for 44 years, also attended the workshop. She was involved in the creation of the 2014 plan and she feels that there’s nothing wrong with that plan. Her issue is that she feels city leaders didn’t follow that plan.
“It’s becoming more and more the emphasis is on it just becoming downtown, just becoming a tourist destination, or giant tourist attraction, not a living downtown where people can live and work,” Rakoncay said. “So I think a lot of us feel like, yeah keep it, but let’s just start following it.”
Amy Skinner, planning and building director for the City of St. Augustine, said one of the main accomplishments of the vision plan is that they moved forward with their mobility plan by hiring a mobility coordinator. They’ve done this by creating safer forms of transportation for pedestrians and bicyclists.
“We’re seeing a lot of scooters, electric bikes, and other forms of transportation,” Skinner said. “And so we don’t want to be so oriented toward just vehicles. We’d like vehicles to kind of get parked, stay parked, and parked once, so people can walk around and enjoy the city.”
As the nation’s oldest city, Rakoncay hoped they would focus more on historic preservation in the future.
“We’ve got a lot of important historic resources that are nowhere else that need to be protected for the next generations, hundreds of years from now,” Rakoncay said. “And with the focus being strictly on tourism and making a fast buck, we’re not protecting the resources.”
While some people are hoping the city will preserve its history, some are hoping it will continue to build on making the city more walkable. Bates is hoping the vision plan will continue to focus on mobility.
“We have a really cool scene developing in West King,” Bates said. “Always a cool scene downtown, and then I think the island is really pulling together to try to make it a cool scene. So it’d be great to be able to get people from one place to another to really experience all the cool sides of St. Augustine and uptown too.”
As this process goes on, Skinner said they’ll be listening to what residents want for the Vision Plan. But she thinks the plan could be updated to include storm vulnerability.
“I think we’ve experienced some of the hurricanes since 2014 you know, when we had Matthew come through, Irma come through, and then several other storms since then,” Skinner said. “We’re talking about resiliency and sustainability and things like that, that maybe we mentioned in 2014, but we didn’t understand the extent of how vulnerable we were with those types of storms.”
There are four more Vision Plan public workshops happening over the next two months:
- Oct. 2 at 6 p.m. at the Galimore Center
- Oct. 16 at 6 p.m. at the Waterworks Building
- Oct. 29 at 6 p.m. at Shiloh Baptist Church
- Nov. 13 at 6 p.m. at the Alcazar Room
For more information about the Vision Plan update, click here.