Hundreds of people crowd downtown St. Augustine in November 2024 to see the annual Nights of Lights. | Noah Hertz, Jacksonville Today
Published on March 25, 2025 at 11:53 am
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After months of discussion, St. Augustine has decided to scale back its Nights of Lights display in an attempt to reduce crowds and traffic gridlock.
The St. Augustine City Commission voted Monday to shrink the event by a week and shift the dates earlier. The vote came after Vice Mayor Barbara Blonder had pushed for a bigger change — trimming the event by nearly a month.
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Blonder’s suggestion drew backlash from the city’s business community, as well as from people who enjoy the annual display.
Everyone agreed on at least one count: that St. Augustine needs to find a better way to accommodate the amount of vehicle and foot traffic that Nights of Lights draws.
But many speakers who attended Monday night’s City Commission meeting opposed shortening the event.
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“This resolution feels like a knee-jerk reaction that addresses none of the concerns outlined by your own staff’s Nights of Lights report,” Karen Zander, speaking for the St. Augustine Business Coalition, said.
Those problems include a lack of enough public restrooms for attendees, unclear rules surrounding ride-sharing drop-offs and more.
Business owners argued that paring back the event’s schedule would mean fewer customers during a time of year when steady traffic is integral. Another concern some voiced was that if the goal is to reduce vehicle traffic, cutting the number of days the event runs could mean the same amount of people descend on St. Augustine, but in a shorter timeframe.
What the City Commission ultimately settled on was a compromise between Blonder’s original proposal and the calls to leave the event’s schedule alone.
When Nights of Lights begins later this year on Nov. 15, it will kick off around 10 days sooner than it did the previous year. City leaders hope an earlier kickoff date will reduce the “fatigue” they say some residents feel by the time the event is in its third month of operation. In addition to the early start, Nights of Lights will wrap up Jan. 11, two weeks sooner than it has before.
While it’s a smaller cut than Blonder originally suggested, City Commissioner Jon DePreter said he hopes it signals to residents that the city is working to find solutions and taking their complaints seriously.
The measure passed by a 3-2 vote, with Mayor Nancy Sikes-Kline and City Commissioners Jim Springfield and Jon DePreter in support. City Commissioners Cynthia Garris and Barbara Blonder voted against the measure.
Blonder said she just couldn’t support a move that was so different from her initial proposal. What she wanted was to let residents feel like they could “take back their town,” and while the city is planning a handful of changes to mitigate the worst of the traffic that Nights of Lights brings downtown, Blonder said she wanted to keep the city’s residents top of mind.
Root issues with Nights of Lights
Nights of Lights is a St. Augustine event, but its scale is beyond what St. Augustine alone can operate and fund. That’s where the St. Johns County Tourism Development Council comes in.
The council leads the charge on advertising and allocates the county’s bed tax funds to help fund Nights of Lights.
Irving Kass, chair of that board, believes St. Augustine’s proposed changes to Nights of Lights are Band-Aid solutions, not getting at the root problem.
“You need to look at this more as a major event, more like how the Players Championship is run, versus having it as a city event,” Kass told Jacksonville Today. “That just puts everything into a different light.”
Kass said the city’s Nights of Lights issues, at their core, are mobility problems. The Players lets attendees book their parking in advance of the event on an app, for example. Changes like that, Kass said, would do a better job of setting expectations for Nights of Lights and cutting off gridlock in advance.
He said problems with parking, overflowing traffic and pedestrians run amok aren’t solved by trimming days off of the event.
What the city can’t afford to do, Kass said, is wait for a consultant’s recommendations to come in after the city’s 2025-26 budget is already set.
“They’re going to kick all of the solutions down the road to the following year, which means next year, at this time, residents will be more upset than they are right now because we haven’t solved anything,” he said. “It has to be dramatically better this year, and we have to start managing it in a much more macro way, or we’re going to have a bigger problem a year from now.”
The Tourism Development Council is committed to working with St. Augustine to make Nights of Lights a smoother and more-enjoyable experience for residents, tourists and everyone in between — even if that won’t all come in just one year, Kass said.
“We want to make sure this time next year everyone says ‘Nights of Lights is 20% better than last year and we’re headed in the right direction,’” Kass said.
The Tourism Development Council next meets April 21. Kass said he expects Nights of Lights will be a topic on the council’s agenda.
An earlier version of this story listed incorrect dates for Nights of Lights in 2025-26. The story has been updated.
