Fernandina's downtown meters come off in November, not this weekend

Saturday runs about the same, 90 on the island and 93 inland, with storms filling in from early afternoon and a 60 percent chance by evening. Sunday is the clean one: 91 here, 94 on the mainland, mostly sunny, 20 percent. If you only have one outdoor thing in you this weekend, put it on Sunday.

If Saturday afternoon gets rained out, here is somewhere plenty of people who live here have driven past a hundred times without stopping. The Plantation Artists’ Guild & Gallery is a cooperative run by 35 local artists, tucked into the shops at Amelia Village Circle on the south end, and whoever is minding the desk is one of the artists on the walls. Ask about a painting and you will usually end up talking to the person who made it, which is a strange and good way to spend forty minutes. It is free, it is thoroughly air conditioned, and the members’ shows rotate often enough that going twice in a season is worth doing.

📍 94 Amelia Village Circle • Open daily 11 a.m. to 5 p.m., closed Tuesdays • (904) 432-1750

Commissioners voted 4 to 1 on Wednesday night to cancel the city’s contract with One Parking as soon as it legally can, two days after 75 percent of city voters backed the referendum. Then City Manager Sarah Campbell read out the termination clause at the end of the meeting: the contract requires 90 days of notice, the notice went to the vendor Thursday, and that lands the end of the program around the middle of November. Meters, enforcement and revenue all keep running until then, and the city owes up to $33,150 in staff-salary costs on the way out, paid from the parking fund rather than the general fund. One correction from us: Wednesday morning’s issue said the earliest the commission could act was September 1, and that was wrong.

That was the other half of Wednesday night. Commissioner Genece Minshew accepted the result plainly, then pointed out that ending the program does not erase the roughly $1.5 million in parking money the city had penciled in against the waterfront park, and asked the city attorney to look at whether Fernandina Beach could create a special taxing district over the downtown business district instead. The Observer went through Florida statutes and comparable districts in Sarasota, Jacksonville and Miami and found workable routes, plus a real catch: a dependent district’s first millage needs either a unanimous commission vote or a referendum of its own. The paper is careful to say that is research and not a legal opinion, and City Attorney Teresa Prince still has to answer the question properly.

Monday’s issue had Fernandina Beach rower Paul Lore and his British partner Dawn Smith ending their North Atlantic crossing eight miles short, towed into harbour by the lifeboat. The finish line was never the harbour. Row Aurora announced Wednesday that the official line for a crossing out of St. John’s is the longitude of Bishop Rock off the Isles of Scilly, and the tracking data shows Penny B crossed it unassisted in 48 days, 7 hours, 47 minutes and 55 seconds. That makes them the first mixed pair to row the Atlantic west to east, and it makes Smith, on her seventh ocean row, the woman who has rowed both the most crossings and the most miles, 16,815 of them.

Downtown loses its meters in November. So what is the thing down there you have been putting off? A shop you stopped browsing, a lunch you stopped making time for, a Saturday morning that got easier somewhere else. Or tell us parking was never the reason and you have just been busy. Hit reply and let us know. We read every response.

The Smithsonian exhibit opens tonight at 233 South Third Street, in a building that spent its earlier life doing something a good deal less welcoming. What was the Amelia Island Museum of History before it was a museum?

Answer: The Nassau County jail. The museum still describes itself as the first spoken history museum in Florida, which is why so much of what it offers is a docent talking rather than a plaque to read.

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