St. Petersburg finds two awesome ideas

What do you think is awesome?

St. Petersburg has a board of trustees to answer that very question. And after wading through multiple idea submissions about what is awesome, the board found a winning idea - two, in fact.

Reuben Pressman, the city's Dean of Awesomeness, said the search for a great idea can be almost random.

"There’s no necessarily thing (of) what awesome means," Pressman said. "It’s kind of open. And the more open we leave it, the more awesome things we end up getting in our hands."

The awesome winners also receive $1,000 in cash - in dollar bills.

The cash comes with no strings attached to the winners in their efforts to turn their awesome ideas into reality.

The St. Pete Board picked Sarah Davis and Ryan Mitchell on Monday night.

Davis wants to use the vast collection of books she owns to start a public reading library space.

"It just became this idea of what if we could get them out in the community," Davis said. "So that people could have access or just trade them out."

Mitchell, meanwhile, wants to establish a creative writing space.

"Taking the idea of community writing and community arts spaces and trying to extrapolate that across a greater downtown St. Pete area," Mitchell said. "So, that people would have an area where they can engage in art and then kind of interact with each other."

Davis and Mitchell plan to work together on merging their awesome ideas.

"I had my idea of the creative writing space and she had her idea of the public kind of reading library space," Mitchell said. "We’re going to combine those together and I think we’ve got a pretty solid way of intermingling those two."

Event officials said they plan to hand out the $1,000 grant every quarter. The deadline for the next grant is Oct. 1.