Jacksonville, Florida | featured news

Jacksonville’s Main Street Bridge will be shut down this weekend for repairs, according to the Florida Department of Transportation.
The closure was originally planned for last weekend, but the threat of rain caused the contractor to postpone the work.
The shutdown, weather permitting, will start at 6:30 p.m. Friday and end at 6 a.m. Sunday, as improvements are made to the span’s mechanical, electrical and structural systems. Contractors will sandblast and paint structural portions of the bridge and install electrical system components.

Mayor Lenny Curry will give “opening remarks” at a Thursday morning collective bargaining session between the administration and the Jacksonville Supervisors Association, the mayor’s office announced.
It will be Curry’s first appearance at a collective bargaining session since the Aug. 30 voter referendum that approved a half-cent sales tax to help pay for the city’s massive pension debt. The upcoming stage of Curry’s push for pension changes will be negotiations with the city’s six unions representing city workers.

A proposed distribution center for Jacksonville’s Cecil Commerce Center is expected to create 1,200 jobs, according to city documents.
Dubbed “Project Velo,” the facility is proposed to require construction of a 1-million-square-foot building that would house a distribution center and the 1,200 workers would be on site by the end of 2019, according to a summary by the Office of Economic Development at City Hall. But the company that has not been named has not committed to the Jacksonville site, yet.

St. Augustine Mayor Nancy Shaver’s most recent call for increased paving dollars in the city budget — via a letter sent to and published in The St. Augustine Record earlier this week — has sparked support from some residents.
But one commissioner has a different view.
“It’s either misunderstanding of what our budget is or it’s just political stuff,” Commissioner Todd Neville said. “It’s one or the other.”

A former leader in the Jacksonville medical and banking industries William A. “Mac” McGriff III passed away this week.
McGriff died at the age of 72 Sunday after a prolonged bout with progressive supranuclear palsy. McGriff was interim CEO of University Medical Center — now known as UF Health — from 1996 to 1999.
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The JEA board set the stage Tuesday for a vote next month to change electric rates, with staff expecting the changes to save customers $100 million over the next eight years and avoid rate increases for the next five years.
“It would lower bills for all customers today,” Chief Financial Officer Melissa Dykes told board members at their Tuesday meeting.
Every JEA electric customer would see a rate reduction in the coming months, but commercial customers would see larger drops in rates, according to an outline of the proposal.

KINGSLAND, Ga. | Karl Porfirio hopes people will remember his son as a vibrant young man who chose to serve his country by joining the Air Force in 2007 after graduating from Camden County High School.
The proud father hates looking at emaciated pictures of his son, Tre Porfirio, from the months after a ground-breaking procedure that prolonged the senior airman’s life.
He prefers to scroll through images on his phone that show Tre smiling when he was an athletic young man with his whole life in front of him.

Weeks after Hurricane Hermine damaged docks in downtown Jacksonville, plans for repairs are still being developed.
“We’re currently in the process of evaluating damage and seeking cost estimates to repair/replace,” city spokeswoman Tia Ford said this week by email.
City-owned floating docks along the Northbank Riverwalk were largely closed after a glancing Sept. 2 encounter with the storm, which had weakened into a tropical storm before reaching Northeast Florida, left behind low-grade but widely distributed damage.

Duval School Board Chairman Ashley Smith Juarez issued an “open letter” to Superintendent Nikolai Vitti on Tuesday that lays out the reasons she asked him to resign last week.
She has also called a special meeting of the School Board on the district’s future this Friday.
Vitti, in a news interview, made it clear that he wants to continue working with the School Board on the issues she brought up, though he does not know and wouldn’t predict if he will get that chance Friday.

The St. Johns County Fire Rescue’s special operations unit earned its stripes Tuesday morning when they carried a 700-pound tiger into a truck for a trip from St. Augustine to a Gainesville.
Then members of the same unit hoofed it to Bunnell to help the Flagler County Sheriff’s Office rescue a horse stuck in a flooded septic tank. (See video above)
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