The St. Augustine City Commission voted Tuesday to begin allowing public gatherings starting this spring. Events are slated to include arts shows, athletic events and music festivals.
City Manager John P. Regan said each event’s organizers will be required to submit health and safety checklists that comply with CDC recommendations.
“The CDC is recognizing that many people like us are in this current mode of trying to decide what to do with public gatherings,” Regan said. He referenced a recent publication from the federal agency. “It’s a detailed, 8-page checklist, that we would work with each and every event to go through the checklist to make sure we have a COVID safety plan for each event.”
The events will include arts shows, athletic events and music festivals.
Despite the go-ahead from the city, Regan said St. Augustine’s annual seafood festival will not go forward in 2021. And the annual Rhythm and Ribs Festival, which usually occurs in spring, had already been rescheduled for fall.
Regan, who presented his case for allowing public gatherings to occur, cited declining COVID-19 positivity rates - 6.47% as of Tuesday, compared to as high as 20% previously in the pandemic. Additionally, with about 70% of the elderly population vaccinated in St. Johns County, Regan said the city and the county were “hitting saturation.”
“In fact, most of the vaccinations taking place are [people] over 65 from surrounding counties,” he said.
St. Augustine has also implemented wastewater tracking and other systems to alert them to potential spikes in disease up to two weeks in advance, so the city can rescind any event permits if public health conditions warrant.
In a discussion following the presentation from Regan, city commissioners weighed the risk of events leading to further spikes in disease with the burden to area nonprofits of continuing to ban public gatherings.
Ultimately, the vote to allow events to move forward was unanimous.
Contact sydney Boles at sboles@wjct.org, or on Twitter at @sydneyboles.
