St. Augustine's marquee Hotel Alcazar building glitters during the annual Nights of Lights event. | City of St. Augustine
Published on February 10, 2026 at 2:40 pm
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After implementing a number of changes to the city’s annual holiday lights display, St. Augustine’s city leaders say the most recent Nights of Lights event was a success. Still, they acknowledged they have work to do, especially when it comes to paying the bills.
“Was it perfect? No,” Mayor Nancy Sikes-Kline said during briefing Monday night about the event. “Can we do better? Yes.”
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From a heightened police presence to a beefed-up shuttle service free to visitors, city leaders implemented a number of changes to ease the effects of the thousands of visitors who descend on the historic city’s streets for the annual event.
City Manager David Birchim said the changes made for a much smoother event than the previous year, but those changes didn’t come cheap.
St. Augustine spent more than $100,000 alone on portable bathrooms and staff to clean them. There also were the added costs of running free shuttles from designated parking areas for 33 days and more than 1,500 hours that St. Augustine police and St. Johns County sheriff’s deputies spent working the event.
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After funding from St. Johns County, St. Augustine was left with costs around $379,000. That’s an increase over the $325,000 cost to the city last year, but this year’s funding sources included a boost of $200,000 from the county that St. Augustine leaders previously said they do not intend to ask for again.
That comes even with the city’s decision to shorten the event by a week — one that a number of business owners blamed for reduced revenue.
In total, on days when the shuttles were operating, city staff say the cost to operate Nights of Lights for one day lands at $18,353.
Nights of Lights $$$
As the number of people visiting St. Augustine for Nights of Lights has grown, so too has the city’s funding challenges.
Take the shuttle that the city offered free to attendees.
Compared to the 2024-25 event, more than three times as many people opted to park their cars in satellite lots and ride shuttle buses to the city’s downtown core instead of clogging up the narrow, historic streets with more cars.
With 69,000 riders, the city manager said efforts to run more shuttles and better market them — with the help of the local tourism bureau’s Nights of Lights app, which was downloaded roughly 80,000 times — was a success.
But, in total, the cost to run the shuttles compared to the previous year quadrupled.
And beside parking tickets and fees, that’s all without the city itself having a clear revenue source for the event. Mayor Sikes-Kline says she would like to keep trying to find ways to make the event lucrative for the city government, not just local businesses.
That’s something her predecessors have tried, too.
“How do we get revenue out of Nights of Lights? That is a question I have seen every mayor struggle with,” Sikes-Kline said. “As a city, we can’t do it. We’re always going to struggle with that.”
But it’s the city’s goal to find ways to continue to pay for the changes implemented during the previous Nights of Lights in future years, especially since city leaders told St. Johns County that their request for more funding was a one-time ask.
As of Monday night, the city manager did not have any concrete plans for funding. That’s something city staff will be working on in the coming months.
The added bathrooms and shuttle services are expected to be available next year if the city can find the money, but the city won’t bring over every change it made for the 2025-26 event. One initiative city leaders admitted fell flat was the creation of a workforce parking lot on Tocques Place, just behind St. Augustine’s busy St. George Street.
Sikes-Kline says the city “meant well,” but several St. George Street business owners complained that the lot is regularly used by customers with mobility issues who can’t get handicapped parking closer to the bustling street.
Going forward, Sikes-Kline says the city has a request out to the North Florida Transportation Planning Organization to conduct a traffic study of the event’s shuttles, and city commissioners agreed to revisit standards for what the mayor called “tacky” holiday decorations.
