• City Council member Faye Rustin has offered a reason why she didn’t vote for anyone for Council president and vice president during last Friday’s meeting. Rustin, who at one time was running for VP, believes there should have been more time between last Tuesday’s runoff and Friday’s meeting, which included the eight new Council members. Rustin said she’s going to ask the General Counsel’s Office for “a legal opinion concerning this sequence of events.”
• Next Wednesday’s a big day for Ch. 7. At 5:30 p.m. station officials will unveil their new digital services. The gathering’s at the station’s tower on Hogan Road.
• With Mayor-elect John Peyton establishing his transition office at the City Hall Annex, most writers and TV reporters are scrambling to find a parking place. There’s media parking at City Hall, but not at the Annex, and many ended up at Adams Street meters Monday. The exception? Us ... we’re right across the street.
• Former University of North Florida president Anne Hopkins was featured recently in The New York Times, talking about a saltbox colonial house she purchased in Wellfleet, Mass.
• We inadvertently left a few names off Mayor-elect John Peyton’s Transition Team in Monday’s City Notes: Barbara Darby, J.C. Demetree, Ricardo Morales III, Duane Ottenstroer and Susan Wilkinson. There’s also an executive staff to the Transition Team: Scott Teagle, Susie Wiles, John Jackson, Kerri Stewart and Rick Mullaney.
• Speaking of the Transition Team, Peyton called them the “Dream Team.”
• It’s official. The City and Skanska USA Building, Inc. have signed the contract making Skanska the construction manager of the new $211 million Duval County Courthouse complex. Expect an official release in the next few days.
• Former Air Force Captain Scott O’Grady will be in town this week. O’Grady was the pilot shot down over Bosnia several years, and he wrote a book on which the film “Behind Enemy Lines” is loosely based. He’s touring the country these days doing speaking engagements and on Sunday he’s speaking at the 9 and 11 a.m. services at Celebration Church.