City Manager John Regan will update commissioners on negotiations with the Florida School for the Deaf and the Blind, and Police Chief Loran Lueders will report on a request to film police rookies on the job.

   The commission in June approved interlocal and partnership agreement proposals with the school, calling among other items that "FSDB shall submit governance of the use of the Collins House and President's House properties to the jurisdiction of the City's Planning and Zoning Board, Historic Architectural Review Board and City Commission, all in accordance with the requirements of procedures established by the City's Code."

   And police rookies could become movie stars, Police Chief Loran Lueders says.

   "We have had a production company out of California contact us about doing a show on rookie cops in a tourist setting," Lueders says. "A human interest story more than cop show; how new officers learn to deal with people and their job."

   As City Commission and staff discussed that open area between the Visitor Center and parking facility, Commissioner Nancy Sikes-Kline raised the question: "What shall we call it?"

   City Manager John Regan said the original design was intended to reflect a Spanish street, or plaza, but it's mostly been referred to as the pavilion. Sikes-Kline suggested the name should have Spanish origin.

   Here are some possibilities with their origin and definition:

Pavilion (Eng) - a summerhouse or other often ornamental building in a park.

Promenade (Fr) - A place where one takes a walk for leisurely pleasure, or for exercise.

Esplanade (Fr) - a long level area, especially by the sea, for walking or driving along.

Piazza (It) - a large open square in an Italian town.

Embarcadaro (Sp) - landing place on a waterway.

Mercado (Sp) - market.

Plaza (Sp) - town-square or central place of gathering. 

   Three homes - and garden styles - have won awards from the city's Beautification Subcommittee of the Street Tree Advisory Committee in the first round of a citywide program.

   Karen Sheridan and Chris Clark, Park Avenue, were recognized for their Aesthetics Garden; Patty and Jim Springfield, Althea Street, for their Eco-Friendly Garden, and Rita Pendergrast, Beacon Street, her Organics Garden. 

   The city's sign division prepared yard signs for each, and Southern Horticulture donated gift certificates.

Committee Member Gina Burrell says, "This was the first of many awards that will be given throughout the city.  We will also be giving awards to deserving businesses." 

   This year's Florida Heritage Book Festival features top-caliber authors in both Writers Conference keynote speakers and Literary Legends honorees.

   The Writers Conference September 23 will feature as keynote speakers award-winning and best-selling authors Les Standiford and James Hall with Keys to the Kingdom - the features of storytelling and recurring features in some of the most successful bestsellers of the last hundred years. The conference runs from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. at the Casa Monica Hotel.

   Florida authors Peter Matthiessen and Randy Wayne White will be honored at the Literary Legends Banquet from 6 to 10 p.m. September 23 at the Renaissance Resort at World Golf Village. The menu is inspired by White's Gulf Coast Cookbook.

   Complete details on the festival's website or call Kathy Dvornick at 940-0194. 

   Spanish Borderlands were the Spanish colonial frontier extending along the southern rim of North America from Florida to California and north along the coast to Alaska. The Spanish borderlands vanished as a regional entity in 1821.

   From a dissertation by Philip Matthew Smith, Principia College, 2007

   Florida's Spanish borderland was the result of over two hundred and fifty years of cooperation and contention among Indians, Spain, Britain, the United States and Africans who lived with them all.

   The borderland was shaped by the differing cultural definitions of color and how color affected laws about freeing of slaves, mixed race relations, legitimacy, and citizenship or degrees of rights for free people of color and to some extent for slaves themselves.

   The borderland did not vanish after the United States acquired Florida in 1821. It persisted in three ways. First, in support of the former Spanish system by some white patriarchs who fathered mixed race families. Free blacks and people of color also had an interest in maintaining their property and liberties.

   Second, Indians in Florida and escaped slaves who allied with them well knew how southern whites treated non-whites, and they fiercely resisted white authority.

   Third, the United States reacted to both of these in the context of fear that further slave revolutions in the Caribbean, colluding with the Indian-African alliance in Florida, might destabilize slavery in the United States.

   In the new Florida Territory, Spanish era practices based on a less severe construction of race were soon quashed, but not without the articulate objections of a cadre of whites.

   Led by Zephaniah Kingsley, their arguments challenged the strict biracial system of the United States. This was a component of the persistent borderland, but their arguments were, in the end, also in the service of slavery and white patriarchy.

   The persistent border included this ongoing resistance to strict biracialism, but it was even more distinct because of the Indian-African resistance to the United States that was not in the service of slavery.

   To defend slavery and whiteness, the United States sent thousands of its military, millions of its treasure, and spent years to subdue the Indian-African alliance in the Florida Indian Wars, and to make Florida and its long shorelines a barrier to protect whiteness and patriarchy in the Deep South.