Enforcement requires beds be available elsewhere. A previous pilot program was considered highly successful, resulting in a number of transients being referred to social service programs.

   Commissioners will be asked Monday to approve the $18,000 annual city share of expenses.

Single bid for Water Works building use

   City staff will recommend to commissioners Monday that a period of request for proposals be extended to August 11 after a single bid was submitted to lease, repair, and put the North City Water Works building to use for community gatherings.

   Colin Bingham, who proposed to the commission last month that the property could be repaired for community meetings, made a bid to lease it for $350 for an initial undetermined term, with 30-year renewal options. A non-profit Community Development Coalition Corporation would be created to enter into agreement with the city, Bingham says.

   St. Augustine where the fort and people now are . . . is almost an island, surrounded by water except for one part where they can pass to the mainland. . . .

   Each year the sea covers much of this land. It is all a forest of evergreen oaks, pines and oaks and palmetto so filled with roots that it cannot be cultivated, except a part that is sandy. There they sow maize; and of this land the governor has most of it and makes the soldiers sow there for himself.

   Each settler will have as much land as a medium-sized garden - about what one man can dig with a hoe: just enough so that he is busy half of each day grinding the maize to eat that day.

   They plant only maize and squash because other garden seeds do not yield well. Neither is there anything that can be done, nor does the land have the capacity for yield even if more work and industry be put into it.

   On the small island where the fort was at first, there are about fifty head of cattle. These fifty head do not increase. If they get ready to multiply, the calves die for lack of food and because of the many big horseflies and mosquitoes there, and the bears and lions. They have no fresh water for the stock to drink except when it rains.

   There are about fifty hogs and these too increase little. They have been disappearing and will die due to not having food nor fresh water and the bears and lions eat them. They have not been useful except when the governor would kill one for himself sometimes.

   There is no land for raising stock, so the people have to eat only what they fish. They raise few hens on account of not having (enough) maize to feed either them or themselves. These chickens eat small mollusks; consequently they taste fishy.

   The fort is (built) on planks with thick timbers for supports. It lasts four or five years, by which time the timbers are rotted by the damp earth and its saltiness. The soldiers repair it; they work all year on this fort and houses for the governors and other houses.

   Despite all this, many months they do not give them rations nor pay; so, beset by hunger and nakedness, they have wanted to leave. But because they have no way to go by land nor ship to go by sea, they have not gone.