AUGUSTA, Ga. (WJBF) – The 2026 Arts in the Heart of Augusta Festival will take place September 18-20 at the Augusta Exchange Club Fairgrounds this year, while construction continues on Broad Street.

This year’s theme is “One Big Festival to Support One Small Non-Profit.”

Festival badges will go on sale in mid-July and will be available for purchase at:

• All Richmond County Tag Offices
• Augusta & Co.
• Sacred Heart Cultural Center
• 4P Studios
• The Treehouse
• Relic Coffee

Additional badge sale locations, entertainment schedules, and festival programming are expected to be announced throughout the summer.

“We are incredibly excited about this year’s festival,” said Denise Tucker, Executive Director of the Greater Augusta Arts Council. “Although we’re in a new location, our mission remains the same. We’re creating a beautiful, welcoming, and inspiring festival experience while raising the funds that allow us to serve the arts year-round.”

D.C. officials expressed an urgency Wednesday to begin preparing transit infrastructure for the opening in 2030 of the new Washington Commanders stadium on the old RFK Stadium campus.

The work will impact far more than the single, cramped Metro station nearby.

During a roundtable discussion with District leaders, Metro General Manager and CEO Randy Clarke laid out the need for improvements to the existing Stadium-Armory Metro stop, and touted a new rapid bus transit line with dedicated lanes.

In tandem, those will be key to getting tens of thousands of people to events at the coming stadium, Clarke said.

“I absolutely believe the first couple of experiences that people have going to a Commanders game, going to some of the first big events, is going to dictate how people feel about taking transit,” D.C. Council member Charles Allen, who chairs the committee that oversees transportation projects, said. “So, we don’t have an option to get it wrong. We have to get it right.”

That’s why Clarke and other District leaders agreed that reaching a memorandum of understanding that lays out the roles, responsibilities and financials of these projects by July 23, the next Metro board meeting, is crucial.

“I think we’re all working towards that, and pretty optimistic,” Clarke said. “Then we’ve got to work really hard on design, we’ve got to work really hard on procurement, we’ve got to work really hard on construction.”

Clarke said the stadium’s ability to attract blockbuster events will depend on the transit agency and its ability to move people in and out of the complex.

“We’re not going to try to get, hosting the Super Bowl, we’re not going to try to host women’s World Cup, we’re not trying to get Taylor Swift and Beyoncé back here. I mean, at the end of the day, Metro is going to be the key to the success. We understand the pressure on us,” he said.

For the Stadium-Armory station, that means renovating the mezzanine and adding elevators to handle the increased demand. Clarke also talked about new street-level infrastructure to help manage the flow inside the station.

“So it’s very Disney-esque, where people feel like they’re constantly moving without actually going too far, if you know what I mean,” Clarke said. “Then we filter them where we need to go. That is a good example of what we need to do at the surface.”

But Metro won’t rely entirely on its trains. The roundtable also discussed what’s been dubbed the Gold Line, which would run buses from Union Station to the stadium.

Construction estimates for bus line are in the $75 million range, District Department of Transportation Director Sharon Kershbaum said

The Gold Line is to run through the heart of the H Street corridor, and transportation leaders said the impact will be everything the streetcar was supposed to be.

“This is now going to be the east-west corridor that we never were able to accomplish on the streetcar,” Kershbaum said.

“This is going to have frictionless service, because it will be center-running. So all of the issues — when a car double-parked and it stopped streetcar service — all of those things, we’ll be immune from. We are going to see the transportation service that was really never ever reached by streetcar achieved with this,” she said.

The vision for the Gold Line goes beyond the handful of weekends when NFL football is played at the stadium, and beyond initial Union Station-stadium route. Transportation officials see the buses eventually traveling between the Benning Road Metro Station and Rosslyn, Virginia.

“We want the Gold Line to solve the cross-town problem we’ve had in this community for a long, long time,” Clarke said.

That means providing access to the convention center and also solving the gridlock that fills up K Street NW every day. Clarke said coming up with dedicated lanes on K Street would actually be the most pivotal part of this new transit line.

“The downtown core of D.C. does not move, especially during p.m. rush hour,” Clarke said. “If you want people in Benning Road that may work, say on K Street, to have better transportation, solving K Street is equally as important, if not more important, because of time savings and reliability.”

Officials did not specify a timeline for the full expansion, but it would not be completed by 2030.

Where it does run, Gold Line buses would travel in the middle lanes, to avoid what caused problems for the Streetcar, which could grind to a halt when cars would double park. Building out the Gold Line would mean more changes to the way cars move along H Street in Northeast.

“You can’t do what you want to do and also keep all the parking,” At-Large Council member Christina Henderson said.

“There’s intersections where we’re going to have to take turns away at certain intersections, maybe parking in certain places,” Clarke said. “In other places parking could be kept, because we’re looking at putting platforms.”

Stadium-related transit construction will run far beyond H Street and the Stadium Armory stop.

“We do want to minimize outages, but there’s going to be significant outages to do this project,” Clarke said.

“It’s all about where we can turn trains around and how to manage that,” he added. “So if we do an outage to Stadium Armory, what that really means is we’re impacting customers from New Carrollton and Largo all the way through the system, and some people that are west of the system that want to go east of Stadium Armory won’t be able to.”

But with the project not even really in the design phase yet, it’s hard to plan out how and when those impacts will happen.

“We’ll be doing obviously overnight work,” Clarke said. “We’ll probably do some, what we call, early outs. Sometimes we’ll start at 10 o’clock at night. We might be able to do some single tracking on certain types of work. Other work is going to be complete shutdowns.”

“And the question is, is that going to be X amount of weekends or is it going to be like a two-, three-, four-week block at a time,” he added. “We’ve got to work through all of that.”

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AUSTIN, Texas – The Austin Police Department (APD) Lake Patrol Unit will be enforcing the City Ordnance that prohibits the use and operation of personal watercraft, wet bikes, motorized surfboards, and similar devices on Lake Austin.

The Austin Parks and Recreation Department and the Austin Police Department want the public to enjoy the parks and lakes but urge people to make this a safe holiday.

This city ordinance only applies to Lake Austin.

Personal watercraft ban

The backstory:

This ban will go into effect beginning at sunset on Friday, July 3, and ending on Sunday, July 5, at sunrise as outlined in Ordinance 8-5-81. 

Non-motorized devices such as kayaks, canoes, and paddleboards can still be used along with watercraft designed for the conventional manner of sitting or standing in the vessel.

The annual ban on personal watercraft is necessary to ensure the safety of many people using the lake and parks over the July 4th holiday weekend. 

Police will patrol Lake Austin this holiday weekend and urge people using waterways to follow the Texas Water Safety Act and City of Austin boating laws and ordinances. Police urge all boaters to practice safe boating and to call 9-1-1 for all reckless operation of boats or emergencies.

What is city ordinance 8-5-81?

1. A person may not use or possess a jet ski, wet bike, motorized surfboard, or similar device on Lake Austin:From sunset on the Friday before Memorial Day until sunrise on the Tuesday after Memorial DayFrom sunset on the Friday before Labor Day until sunrise on the Tuesday after Labor DayFrom sunset on July 3 until sunrise on July 5
2. From sunset on the Friday before Memorial Day until sunrise on the Tuesday after Memorial Day
3. From sunset on the Friday before Labor Day until sunrise on the Tuesday after Labor Day
4. From sunset on July 3 until sunrise on July 5
5. A person operating a motorboat on Lake Austin shall stay on the right side of the lake, except when assisting a downed water skier.
6. A person may not operate a watercraft on Lake Austin at a speed that is greater than reasonable and prudent under the existing circumstances.