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St. Augustine news highlights – August 3, 2012
Aug 3rd
One full week of early voting starts tomorrow at six locations across St. Johns County. The voting period runs from Saturday, August 4 through Saturday, August 11, from 8:00am until 6:00pm every day except Sunday when the hours are 11:00am until 5:00pm. All voters in St. Johns County may vote at any of these six early voting locations (click on each name for a map to the voting site):
- Supervisor of Elections Main Office
- St. Augustine Beach City Hall
- Southeast Branch Library
- Hastings Town Hall
- Ponte Vedra Branch Library
- Julington Creek Annex
Before going to vote, take a minute to visit the St. Johns County Supervisor of Elections site for sample ballots, to check your registration, locate your regular polling place and lots more information for the voter.
Know it or not, having lift stations #51 & #52 completed is a big deal
Anytime a project costs less than expected, that’s good; and anytime a project is completed without any major setbacks and comes in ahead of schedule, that’s also good. So of course anytime you get a project under budget and ahead of schedule and that also fills a major infrastructure need, it’s really a great day in Public Works and in the City. Learn all about the very successful replacement of lift stations #51 and #52 by reading Essential part of sanitary sewer system installed and working successfully.
Your opinion counts so make it known in 450 branding survey
Don’t wait…express your opinion now!
Riberia St. Phase 2 is is right on schedule
Phase 2 of the Riberia Street Rehabilitation project is progressing well with the contractor having completed nearly half of the project and estimating that the whole project will be completed ahead of schedule.
The $4.8 million project includes new underground utilities, storm drainage system, a sidewalk on the west side of the road, and reconstructed asphalt roadway between Bridge St. and Cerro St. at the Willie Galimore Center. Currently, the contractor is installing the storm water system, which includes sediment basins to collect trash and sediments helping to keep the waterways clean from debris.
While the set completion date is July 2013, the contractor, Masci General Construction, expects the project to be completed in February. Construction inspection services for the city are provided by England Thims & Miller, Inc.
To learn more about the project, read Riberia Street Rehabilitation Project enters Phase II
Up next for Concerts in the Plaza — The Rick Arcusa Band
Widely known as “one of Jacksonville’s best party bands,” the Rick Arcusa Band steps onto The Gazebo stage in the Plaza de la Constitucion on Thursday, August 9 at 7:00pm. Most anyone taking a look at the band’s playlist will see lots of songs that are not only familiar and favorite songs.
So call your friends and have them meet you in the Plaza at 7:00pm on Thursday to enjoy St. Augustine’s great free summer concert series now in its 22nd season. It’s still “the best way to spend a Thursday night in St. Augustine.”
The two-hour concerts are free and attendees should bring lounge chairs for seating. Picnic dinners are popular, but alcoholic beverages are prohibited in the Plaza. For a schedule and helpful map-links visit www.plazaconcerts.com
After a brief hiatus during July, The Break Room returns to the air this week on WFCF/88.5 with guest Jennifer Zuberer, Communications & Resource Manager with St. Augustine’s 450th Commemoration. Join host Paul K. Williamson, the city’s Public Affairs Director, as he and Jennifer discuss the latest initiatives of what is set to be a multi-faceted event as the city commemorates four and a half centuries of history.
Know the easiest way to start a conversation with another St. Augustine resident? Just ask “So, how’d you get to St. Augustine?” Without a doubt, the story will be interesting for it seems that our city has residents who can boast a host of origins, adventures and simply great stories about how they arrived in The Nation’s Oldest City or what has made life here special for them.
Complete contest details and guidelines are available by calling the 450th Commemoration office at 904.825.1053or by visiting the 450th Commemoration web site here.
Important budget dates announced
As summer begins to wind down, local governments start the final stages of preparing their budgets for the next fiscal year. For the City of St. Augustine whose fiscal year begins October 1, the series of meetings begins with theCommission’s annual budget workshop. Then three weeks later there is the initial public hearing on the proposed budget and two weeks after that, the final public hearing. The dates for the three meetings are:
– City Commission Budget Workshop, Thursday, August 16 at 9:00am.
– First Budget Public Hearing, Thursday, September 6 at 5:05pm.
– Second Budget Public Hearing, Thursday, September 20 at 5:05pm.
All meetings will be held in The Alcazar Room, City Hall, 75 King St.
Have you seen the the archaeology exhibit at The VIC ?
A new exhibit at The VIC offers a look into the extraordinary life of 18th century St. Augustine through ordinary items uncovered by the city’s archaeologist and volunteers. Organized into displays focusing on various aspects of colonial daily life, the exhibit offers items commonly associated with home life, the routines of a military lifestyle, and even those depicting entertainment including games and tavern items. The free exhibit, recently featured in a St. Augustine Record article, 450 Years of unbroken history, is open 8:30am-5:30pm in The VIC. For a map, click here.
New zoning maps available on-line
Agendas
Planning and Zoning Board meets on Thursday, August 7 at 2:00pm. The agenda is available here.
City Commission meets on Monday, August 13. When available, the agenda will be here.
Code Enforcement, Adjustments and Appeals Board meets on Tuesday, August 14. The agenda is available here.
The Historic Architectural Review Board meets on Thursday, August 16 at 2:00pm. The agenda is available here.
Budget related meetings
City Commission Budget Workshop, Thursday, August 16 at 9:00am. When available, the agenda will be here.
First Budget Public Hearing, Thursday, September 6 at 5:05pm. When available, the agenda will be here.
Second Budget Public Hearing, Thursday, September 20 at 5:05pm. When available, the agenda will be here.
All agenda, minutes and GTV info
Agendas and minutes for all city meetings can be found at www.staugustinegovernment.com with a schedule of upcoming meetings listed under City Calendar. City Commission meetings are broadcast live via GTV (Comcast Channel 3 in St. Augustine) each second and fourth Monday at 5:00pm. Commission meetings are also recorded and rebroadcast as are Planning and Zoning Board and Historic Architectural Review Board meetings. For a current schedule of all programming on GTV, click here.
Source: City of St. Augustine
Quick Guide to Social Media using WordPress
Jul 9th
Top three reason to use your wordpress site as your Social Media Distribution system rather than the competitions.
1. If you have a WordPress site or some other CMS like it then you should take this as a rock, not a grain of salt.
2. If you’re using social media for your company like twitter, Facebook etc… You should listen, it wont take long.
3. If you’re tired of using multiple Social media accounts or paying someone to do so in order to promote a product or event. You can still do this but now all in one place.
Let’s start.
Using WordPress and a few simple but powerful tools can get this all done in a flash.
First and foremost I suggest that you start all of your content from your home (your website) and then tree out to the social media sites. Why give them the all your hits and probably never see them kick back any in return.
Some tools I use for our wordpress sites are. RSS Graffiti, WP to Twitter and Twitter Feed. Are simple to setup and you’ll never need to touch anything except for wordpress for a while. Especially if all your doing is saying things like. How was your weekend, come see this, come on in and check this out etc… And last but not least is Shareaholic an easy to install plugin for WordPress.
All wordpress RSS is handled in a simple way. To find your feed you may need to look at the wordpress feeds page : http://codex.wordpress.org/WordPress_Feeds and figure out what format you may be using depending on if you use permalinks or not it could be as simple as just adding /feed/ to the end of a WordPress category URL…. That’s how we roll.
First off find your feed. Example: http://c1n.tv/feed/
Chrome reads feeds fairly standard so if you’re interested in the appearance I suggest FF IE, Safari. On a sidenote: Wow Google have you not even checked or I guess they make you use a reader?
RSS Graffiti: http://www.rssgraffiti.com/ / https://apps.facebook.com/rssgraffiti/
A little slow but works beautifully, Simple to register and feed your post category to Facebook. Enough said. Search for RSS Graffiti on Facebook and they walk you through the steps to get a feed setup for a Facebook page you made or at least have admin access too.
WP to Twitter: http://www.joedolson.com/articles/wp-to-twitter/
Probably the most time consuming to setup but by far the best one I’ve found for twitter. This one lets you not only send your new posts to twitter but also resend a post to twitter without having to republish one and duplicate content just by clicking update (Just beware if you don’t want things going to twitter if you update a lot.). As well it provides you with a way to push content to a Hash-tag ! Sweet! Login to twitter and select API down there at the bottom and/or visit https://dev.twitter.com/ to get started. The plugin designer also wrote a nice walk-through on how to do this as well. But you’ll need to creat a new Application, call it what you will, put your URL in (Not yoru feed) and make sure you have it set to read and write access level. That should get you all the keys and tokens you need to copy into the WP to twitter settings. Once setup it works great. Believe me.
Twitter Feed: http://twitterfeed.com/
Simple to register and feed to twitter. Can also be used for more than one account and not just for twitter, however I only use it for secondary accounts, for example. You have a category that you want to feed to a separate twitter account, this is made possible by twitter feed. It’s not instant like WP to twitter but like RSS graffiti it sends a category feed to an account you define. Great if you have multiple twitter accounts and directly relate to categories you have made in wordpress, like News, Movies, Music etc… Not as pretty, but then again are tweets pretty? lol. I don’t think they allow that yet.
Shareaholic: http://www.shareaholic.com/
Simple to install plugin for sharing posts, pages etc… I usually use this after I have sent things out to Facebook and twitter. This pretty much encapsulates the rest of places you can socialize your post with in one simple click. The key to sharing using shareaholic I think would be that whatever you are sharing is share with whoever you’re logged in as. To make sure your sharing as the right person just make sure you’re logged in as them or else it will share from your personal account.
Hope these applications give you a little insight into what you should be using for social media rather than spending your time on 3 or 4, why not just press a button and feed the family all in one, on top of that you’ll be sending people to your website rather than keeping them outside and so easily moved to something else in 5 seconds or less. Let’s hope that’s not the case. Feel free to comment, if it’s related I’ll approve it.
Thanks!
Aaron Smith
webmaster@boulderchannel1.com
Tropical Storm Debby kept city crews busy
Jul 6th
The city maintains a rapid response team for just such incidents and during TS Debby, credit goes to that team for minimizing the impact. Crews with pumper trucks were dispatched to locations where overflows were anticipated, but the extraordinary amount of rain caused an in-flow into the sanitary sewer system overtaxing its capacity at six locations:
Oglethorpe Blvd. at Arredondo Ave.;
St. Augustine Blvd. at Inlet Dr.;
Pine St. between San Marco Ave. and Abbott St.;
Macaris St. at Douglas Ave.;
Cordova St. at St. Francis St.; and
the Wastewater Treatment Plant at the southern end of Riberia St.
Crews captured and removed nearly 1.4 million gallons of wastewater /rainwater from the sites preventing backups into homes or discharges into waterways.
Following strict protocols for such overflows, signs were posted at each location where surface water bodies have been affected to warn the public of the event, whether they happen to be boating or fishing. Additionally, water samples are taken at each location and if contamination is found, then the signs will remain in place until the water is safe in accordance with state criteria. Generally, depending upon the size and location of the spill, it could take up to a week for the levels return to normal.
At no time during TS Debby was the city’s drinking water in any danger as only surface water (i.e. runoff water, streams, etc.) came in contact with the waste water.
In a follow-up review of the city’s practices after the storm, the Florida Department of Environmental Protection compliance inspectors deemed the city’s actions appropriate and in compliance.
For more information, contact the Public Works Department at 904.825.1040.
Source: City of St. Augustine