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Island Brief

Amelia Island • Nassau County • First Coast

Happy Wednesday, Nassau County. The northeast wind is up today: 85 and breezy on the island, 86 to 88 on the mainland, mostly sunny everywhere, and the National Weather Service has a rip current statement running through early Friday morning, so the surf is for looking at this week rather than swimming in. Two things landed since Monday's issue. The school district finished its investigation of last Thursday's volleyball match and apologized to Andrew Jackson. And the county passed its budget Monday night with a lower tax rate, and the way it got there closes a library. Also, at 2 this afternoon the city takes questions on the marina rebuild for the first time since July.

📰	What You Need to Know

The Nassau County School District finished its investigation of the Sept. 10 volleyball match Tuesday and opened its statement with an apology to the Andrew Jackson students, coaches and families: "We are deeply sorry for the events that occurred in our gym, along with the hurt and distress it caused." Investigators, working from photos, video, interviews and the Florida High School Athletic Association's report, found that the Black baby doll came into the gym with a Fernandina Beach High student who had been issued it for a parenting-class assignment, that other students took it out of its carrier during the match, and that two students, at separate times, were seen holding it in the air and shouting. The district called that conduct "inappropriate and unacceptable." It said the review "did not substantiate reports that racial slurs were spoken during the match," and added in the next sentence that "the absence of substantiated racial slurs does not make the other described acts acceptable." Students found to have violated the code of conduct are being handled under district procedures, with no names or consequences released under student privacy law, and the district says it is tightening supervision and security at athletic events, retraining the staff who run them, putting the FBHS student body through instruction on community standards, and working with Andrew Jackson's administrators to bring student leaders and athletes from the two schools together. Tuesday night dozens of people from Nassau and Duval filled First Missionary Baptist Church for a meeting called by faith leaders, and Fernandina Beach police said their intelligence detectives have been monitoring threats connected to the incident. The Pirates' homecoming game is Friday night.

Read More → Fernandina Observer

County commissioners approved a tentative $452.8 million budget Monday night on voice votes with no dissent, with a countywide rate of 6.5178 mills, down from 6.7457, which County Manager Taco Pope called the sixth straight reduction and the second year running that the general fund has shrunk. (Under state law it is still a 1.91 percent increase over the rolled-back rate of 6.3954, because values rose.) What balances it is the part eight speakers came to object to: the plan closes the Bryceville branch library, keeps the Yulee branch at three days a week instead of five, trims Fernandina Beach library hours by about a day, eliminates all county funding for nonprofits, reduces the Economic Development Board's money, holds the health department flat, cuts roadside mowing nearly in half and drainage maintenance by half. Assistant County Manager Marshall Eyerman said the library and nonprofit cuts may be revisited depending on the November vote on Amendment 3, the homestead exemption question, which he said could take as much as 33 percent off the county's property tax revenue within two years; Commissioner Klynt Farmer told the speakers "we hear you" and said the same thing about November. The same night the board voted 5-0 to create a Northeast Florida Utility Authority to run utility contracts tied to growth, renewed its 6 percent electric franchise agreements, and adopted a plan with FPL to bury and harden power lines along the SR 200 corridor. The final hearing, and the last chance to change any of it, is Monday, Sept. 28 at 5:01 p.m. in Yulee.

Read More → Nassau NewsLine

Buried in Monday's county agenda was a future land use change for the southern planning area of the East Nassau Community Planning Area, the master plan that governs Wildlight: about 333 acres shift from employment center to suburban residential, conservation habitat grows by 13 acres, and the area's overall cap of 24,000 homes does not move. The land is south of SR 200 and west of Liberty Cove, and the county's Development Review Committee saw the shape of it on Sept. 1, when Raydient's engineers described 340 to 350 single-family lots in two phases, the first tying into Liberty Crossing and the second running north to Mentoria Road, with JEA wellhead parcels deeded to the developer in exchange for preserving other conservation land. The same committee recommended the next 167 lots of Liberty Cove for approval, and Monday the board also signed a mobility agreement with Liberty Cove's developer worth about $3.38 million in road construction plus $470,000 in donated property. None of this is new housing on the ground yet, and Wildlight's own line this month is that jobs come before the next homes. But the land use map is where the promise of an employment center either holds or turns into subdivisions, and on this piece it turned.

Read More → Nassau NewsLine

🌟	Community Spotlight

Three volunteer groups stood up at Monday's hearing to talk about the county's libraries, and they brought numbers rather than adjectives. Angie Hall, president of the Friends of the Bryceville Branch Library, told commissioners that circulation at the branch slated to close is up 90 percent over three years and visits are up 431 percent, and that a library "is more than just books. It is the living room, the classroom and the technological lifeline for our community." Nancy Bowyer, president of the Friends of the Yulee Library, said the system has lent more than 48,000 e-books and audiobooks this fiscal year and that print circulation runs more than three times that. The Yulee branch, at 76346 William Burgess Blvd. on the FSCJ campus, has been open three days a week since July 1, after the college began charging the county for space it had covered since 2001; on its closed days the book drop is not emptied and the rooms cannot be used, in a part of the county that has added thousands of residents. The Fernandina Beach Friends of the Library spoke too, and Friday its branch hosts the museum's 3rd on 3rd talk at 6 p.m., which is the kind of thing a library does that never shows up in a budget line. The Friends of the Yulee Library have written to all five commissioners and are asking residents to attend the Sept. 28 final hearing or write before it; commissioners' phone numbers and email addresses are in the story below. What the county does with that is the county's call, and the answer comes Sept. 28 at 5:01 p.m.

Read More → Nassau NewsLine

💼	Business Brief

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Taste of Amelia is growing from an afternoon into a weekend. The Fernandina Beach Rotary Club's culinary crawl, 39 years old and a regular sellout, becomes a three-day event Oct. 23 to 25: a Friday choice between a sunset Pirate Voyage on the river and a tasting and cocktail demonstration at A1A Marlin & Barrel distillery, the downtown crawl itself Saturday afternoon (check-in at the Palace Saloon at 11:30, tastings noon to 3, more than 20 restaurants), a ZD Wines rooftop tasting Saturday evening, and a Sunday brunch and history program at the museum. Proceeds fund scholarships for Nassau County students; Rotary president Bob Pollock says the point is to "turn great experiences into educational opportunities." Prices were not in the announcement, and the crawl sells out every year. (More)

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The bed tax got spent Monday night, twice. Commissioners authorized up to $4.3 million in tourist development tax money for the city's Seaside Park rebuild and beachfront branding project, the South Fletcher park job the two governments agreed to in August, and separately approved a $5,081,280 extension of the county's tourism marketing contract with Starmark International. Both come out of the roughly $5 million a year in bed tax the county collects and controls, and the Seaside money is what the Observer called in August one of the largest direct returns of those dollars to a city-owned property. (More)

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Another door opens on South Eighth Street. Ocean Piercing, a body piercing and jewelry studio at 1453 S. Eighth St., has a chamber ribbon cutting on the calendar for Monday, Oct. 19 at noon, which is the surest sign a Nassau business is actually open. It joins Amelia's Latin American Grill, the sports bar proposed for 17 S. Eighth and the A1A Cidery building on the list of turnovers on that stretch this year. (More)

📌	Briefly Noted

🗓️	Quick Picks This Week

Wed 16

Marina Redevelopment Public Information Session City Hall commission chambers, 204 Ash St. • 2 p.m. • The first open briefing on the seawall, docks and Brett's demolition since July 28; questions welcome

Thu 17

Historic District Council: Amelia Wharf, third try City Hall commission chambers • 5 p.m. • The riverfront project rejected in June and August returns for conceptual approval, with nine townhomes at 101 Alachua St. on the same agenda

Fri 18

FBHS Homecoming Parade Traditional route through downtown • 5 p.m. • The Pirates play at home at 7, and the museum's 3rd on 3rd talk is at the Fernandina Beach library at 6

The county's budget turns on what a library is for, so we would like the real answer rather than the poetic one. Which branch do you use, Fernandina, Yulee, Callahan, Hilliard or Bryceville, and what do you actually go there for: the books, the e-books on your phone, the meeting room, the printer, the air conditioning, a place to take a toddler on a wet morning? If you never go, that is an answer too. Hit reply and let us know. We read every response.

Everyone who has taken the ferry to Cumberland Island has heard about the white deer, and most people call them albinos. They are not. What are they, and what is the one-glance way to tell?

Answer: leucism, a loss of pigment in the skin and coat only. Albinism shuts off melanin everywhere, including the eyes, so a true albino has pink eyes; Cumberland's white deer have normal dark eyes, black noses and dark hooves. The Observer's nature columnist Angela Ray wrote this week about a white dolphin she watched off our beach for a summer, and a University of North Florida marine biologist gave her the same diagnosis: leucism, not albinism. On a small island, inbreeding lets a hidden recessive trait like that show up far more often than it would on the mainland.

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