The city's plan to change Visitor Center parking facility rates to a flat $10 all-day is paying off, according to figures for the first quarter (October-December) figures.

   But city officials are watching the numbers closely, hoping the change will bring an additional $1,050,000 in new revenue for city projects.

   Projecting the first quarter average revenue increase of 60%, by year's end the city would see a revenue increase of $781,183, falling $268,817 short of its additional revenue goal.

   The numbers so far show an average 60% jump in revenue, but drops in vehicle count of 5,000 to 6,000 in October and November. The count increased by 3,864 in December, with 32,553 rolling into the facility - perhaps with increased national publicity for the city's Nights of Lights.

   The city went from hourly parking rates to a flat $10 all-day, while ParkNow card users can park all day for $1.

   City Comptroller Mark Litzinger says the reduced vehicle count could be because monthly and long-term pass holders like Flagler College students are not being recorded. A software upgrade will correct that, Litzinger says.

   The chart shows eight years of tracking with income and vehicle count for October-December.

   The yearlong project will extend from the marina south to St. Francis Street and create a new barrier twelve feet into the bay from the current seawall. The original historic seawall will be left exposed, with a promenade between it and the new wall.

3 years, 7 months, 1 day to St. Augustine's 450th anniversary 

   "They seem to be a noble race," St. Augustine Founder Pedro Menendez remarked in notes to his king, Philip of Spain, after his first encounter. Fishermen, hunters and farmers, he would later report. "They possess human physical characteristics, but were clothed only in loincloths of animal skins, their hair done in topknots, and their flesh covered with tattoos."

   As Menendez explored the vast peninsula of La Florida, he met this "noble race" in many ways. He would wine and dine the leaders, then suggest that they could help him recover shipwrecked Christians and be rewarded - or deny him and die.

   His weapons might be an orchestra of fifes, drums, trumpets, harps, and fiddles, or a phalanx of arquebusiers (musketeers) with lit fuses at the ready.

   He learned that the tattoo colors and arrangement indicated rank within the tribe. And he learned, as his countrymen had in the Caribbean, that some Indians, like unruly children, could turn ugly.

   Saturiba was one such. His band went to that first fort, less than a year after its establishment, to trade for food, clothes and other goods. The settlers, as poor as the Indians, and had nothing to trade. The enraged Saturiba proceeded to burn the fort to the ground.

   Florida's Indian population was estimated at 25,000 in Menendez' time, then dropped to almost none in the 1700s due mostly to diseases brought by the Europeans, but swelled again in the early 1800s as northern settlers forced Indian migration south.

   These scattered bands came to be called Seminoles, or wild people, by the whites. Eventually joining forces to hold their homeland, the Seminoles engaged the young United States in its longest and most costly Indian war, a war to remove them to the west.

   St. Augustine's Castillo de San Marcos, renamed Fort Marion when the U.S. took over the territory in 1821, was prison to numerous captured Indians during the Second Seminole War of 1835 to 1842. Among its prisoners was Florida's most famous Indian leader, Osceola.

   In the late 1800s, many leaders of the plains and western Indian tribes were moved here, away from their tribes out west - Kiowa, Comanche, Cheyenne, Arapaho and Chiricahua Apaches.

   The Indian confinement at St. Augustine and its Castillo play a major role in U.S. history, as it was here that Army Captain Richard Pratt began an Indian education program, which led to new Indian policies and the establishment of the Carlisle Indian School in Pennsylvania.

  Excerpt from 'The Indians,' in St. Augustine Bedtime Stories. Click for further information on this fascinating historic series.

   Image: Timucua fisherman, Florida Lost Tribes series by St. Augustine artist Ted Morris