• Interesting 2006 facts from hotels around the state: According to Florida Trend magazine, state government collected $260.5 million in bed taxes last year. Also, the average daily room rate was $109.98, the occupancy rate was 67.29 percent and the revenue per available room was $73.89.
• According to Jim Suber, the City’s dockmaster, the funding for a new pump station at Metropolitan Park has been approved. There is also talk of building a control station at Metro Park that would allow Suber and his staff to monitor much of both sides of the river from a central location during peak times and busy events.
• Club Paris at the Landing will no longer be named after celebrity hotel heiress Paris Hilton. According to the Associated Press, club owner Fred Khalilian said he “fired” Hilton because she did not attend scheduled appearances at the club’s Jacksonville and Orlando locations. Khalilian said he is not going to change the name of either location and the name will now stand for the French city – although he’s looking for a new “face” for the club.
• If you watched the Cotton Bowl Monday and recognized the voice of the guy doing the play-by-play, there’s a good reason. It was Pat Summerall, who spent years covering professional football and golf and lived in Ponte Vedra for several of them. He’s back in Dallas these days — where the Cotton Bowl is played — and he has a book out: “On and Off the Air.”
•Air travel was safer in 2006: According to the Aircraft Crashes Record Office in Geneva, Switzerland, the number of air crashes worldwide fell 12.4 percent in 2006, making the year one of the safest in aviation history. Last year, there were 156 crashes in which planes capable of carrying at least six passengers in addition to crew were damaged beyond repair, compared to 178 in 2005.
• The City is not going to allow the structural problems with the Northbank Riverwalk in front of the Hyatt to linger. Work to repair the section that collapsed over Christmas weekend will begin immediately. Divers determined several of the steel pilings in the area were damaged, but divers and City engineers haven’t been able to figure out what caused the damage. In an effort to prevent this problem from occurring in other areas of the Riverwalk, the City also plans to remove some of the heavy landscaping from the Riverwalk and limit the tonnage of vehicles that are allowed on Coastline Drive from Newnan to Liberty streets. The work will take a few weeks and the cost hasn’t been determined.