It’s a beautiful afternoon as Howard Weinberg makes his way through the Pleasure House Point Natural Area in Virginia Beach, just west of the Lesner Bridge.
Weinberg points out his favorite scenic spots, wearing a bright yellow hat.
“I've got my Lorax hat on today, because I am the Lorax,” he said. “I speak for the trees.”
Weinberg and other neighbors of Pleasure House Point are worried about these trees, including pines and live oaks, because the city aims to soon cut many of them down.
Virginia Beach is finalizing plans for a $12 million project that will clear about eight acres to convert them back to tidal wetlands. The goal is to earn wetlands mitigation credits that will allow other city projects to legally move forward.
The city says the restored wetlands will also provide wildlife habitat and help clean the surrounding watershed.
“This is not the same as taking down trees to put a road on top of it. This is taking down trees so that we can restore the area to its more natural and original condition,” City Councilman Joash Schulman said at a council meeting last month. “And wetlands themselves have unique environmental value that trees don't.”
City officials point to Paradise Creek Nature Park in Portsmouth as an example of a similar project site, which includes restored wetlands surrounded by forest.
But many residents are pushing back on the project, arguing the existing ecosystem is just as important.
Julia Bell lives nearby and said she’s walked the property every day for 30 years. She saw the area slowly recover from being a dredging dumping ground.
“Everything that was done in the past has been repaired by nature,” she said. “It’s breathtaking and there’s just nothing else like it. And I want to keep it this way.”
On Thursday afternoon, dozens of citizens packed a meeting of the city’s Bayfront Advisory Commission to express concerns, including high school students from the local Environmental Studies Program.
Students recently surveyed the project site and said they identified more than 5,000 trees that will be cut down. Virginia Beach says they will plant 600 new ones.
The wetlands mitigation project has been in the works for over a decade.
The area at Pleasure House Point, formerly a broad expanse of wetlands, was once a spoil site for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, allowing officials to dump material dredged from the Lynnhaven Inlet.
The city says more than a million cubic yards of such material were placed over the wetlands in the early 1970s.
In 2012 with help from a land trust and local nonprofits, Virginia Beach acquired and preserved Pleasure House Point. Residents had successfully fought a development proposal there that would have raised 1,000 homes.
The city worked on a plan to use a dozen of the total 118 acres for wetland mitigation credits, and got a permit from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers in 2018 before the project was put on hold due to lack of funding.
Now, the city’s returned to the project because officials say it’s the only way to move forward with others around the city, like several funded by a $567 million bond referendum passed by voters in 2021. (Costs for the program have since soared to more than $1 billion, and staff may ask council to approve an increase to the stormwater utility fee to compensate.)
If the city or a developer impacts wetlands while building a project, they are legally required to make up for it elsewhere, using a legal mechanism called wetlands mitigation credits. The system works by earning credits traded in a “mitigation bank.”
But right now, there are no local credits available for Virginia Beach to use, public works director LJ Hansen recently told City Council.
That’s because of ongoing private development as well as the massive Hampton Roads Bridge-Tunnel expansion that has eaten up a lot. Localities have to compete with private builders for the same credits.
Hansen said that means the city needs to come up with its own.
City engineer Toni Utterback said at this week’s advisory commission meeting that if the Pleasure House Point project is delayed, Virginia Beach could face delay claims from contractors already hired for the flood protection work.
City Council will vote on an ordinance to fund the project on Jan. 7. If approved, the city hopes to start construction in February and finish next fall.
