A work session at 4:30 p.m. and a regular meeting at 6:30 p.m. addressed the Army Corps of Engineers' Deep Creek Bridge replacement, a Southeastern Public Service Authority (SPSA) update, recycling program options, and two advisory referendums: one on establishing eight single-member voting districts for City Council elections and another on imposing a fee for curbside recycling. The meeting drew an exceptionally large crowd, with over 60 speakers registered on the voting district item alone.
Non-Planning Public Hearing Item A – Advisory Referendum on Single-Member Voting Districts:
Non-Planning Public Hearing Item B – Advisory Referendum on Curbside Recycling Fee:
Non-Agenda Speakers (Citizens’ Comments on City Affairs):
Work Session (4:30 p.m.):
Regular Meeting Deliberations:
Work the sample. Thank you. Welcome to our June 11th, 2024 work session. We have some guests in the audience looking forward to you introducing them, Mr. Manager, and hearing their uh a lot about their topics. Thank you, Mr. Mayor. And as all of the items for tonight are under um Captain Geis' portfolio, I'll turn the floor over to him. Nothing like uh all fun in one night, right? So um our first uh our first presentation today will be from the Army Corps of Engineers gonna give us a uh update on the Deep Creek Bridge. Um I'm gonna like to introduce Colonel Brian Hallwork, and this is uh he's been the the commander at the Corps now at our district for a few years now. He's the one that uh helped us get that shovel on the ground. So uh and and this is his last meeting, and he's gonna introduce his relief, and I'll turn that over to them right now. All right, good afternoon, Mayor West and other distinguished members of the city council. I'm Colonel Brian Hallberg, the district commander for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers Norfolk District. To my left is uh my civilian deputy, uh Mr. Mike Darrow, and to my right is uh my incoming replacement Colonel Sonny Avachal. So he's coming all the way from Germany. He is a resident of Chesapeake, and uh so he looks forward to being the the next district commander number sixty-one uh for the Norfolk district. So one, yes, ma'am. So uh this evening we're gonna brief you on uh the Deep Creek bridge replacement going next slide. Uh so here you can see a couple pictures on uh the left-hand side is April 2000, or I mean, yeah, 2023 before we did the groundbreaking, no construction work, and then you can see to the right it's uh May of 2023 with construction activities uh ongoing. The ongoing construction continues to replace the functionally obsolete bridge with a five-lane, two-leaf, draw bridge, and improve other roadway approaches on both sides. Phase one and parts of both phases two and three are currently in progress. Since the groundbreaking ceremony uh occurred in May of last year, we didn't start construction on the site until September, and you can see pictures on the top there of the demolition in September 2023 that occurred. Um and then we got into the tremie work. So uh there was a bunch of steel with some funnels on it, and we poured concrete down through the water to get the base foundation, and that's what you're seeing on those bottom pictures for February of 2024 is um that work. Next slide, please. Looking at the bottom left picture, we've completed critical concrete works, including the placement of the finished flat layer of concrete and the installation of steel forms for the coffer dams foundation. Additionally, we successfully placed and inspected the rebar mats within the copper dam, ensuring structural integrity. Our team is also completed test pile driving and the driving of concrete piles for the approach span, providing essential structural support. Uh so it's it's a little bit out of the picture focus, is uh much progress that has been made on the stormwater drainage system installation along Moses Grandy Trail, including excavation, pipe installation, and manhole place replacement. We coordinate with the City of Chesapeake Utility Department to replace damaged infrastructure components. Also on this slide, I'd like to speak to the utility coordination. With successful communication and collaboration with the city of Chesapeake, we've resolved many issues with the Lumos uh cabling and verizon fiber utility relocation. We appreciate the city's assistance and support in solving these matters. Um the last brief um we still had issues with the gaining the last two parcels. Uh and so I got good news on that regarding the real estate. The district now possesses all 40 uh parcels uh that we got from the Department of Justice, so we don't have you know the real estate challenge um ahead of us, it's behind us now. So on May 21st of 2024, the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia granted the federal government immediate possession of parcels 126 and 127, completing the two-year process. We'd like to share a video of some construction progress. So last night for the Deep Creek Bridge replacement project, we were placing a uh in a coffee cell a wit trimming, which is about 10 feet of concrete, about 1,300 cubic yards, and the intent for that is to build a support structure to put the bridge house on. Well, that is basically the tremie is the foundation that will support the bridge structure that will open and close the bridge. Because of the traffic that we have here, we had to close down the South George Washington Highway so that we could bring the concrete trucks in, would be about 130 concrete trucks. So the city said that we had to do that at night and on a weekend so that we wouldn't disturb a lot of the traffic. So that was kind of the reason why we had to do it at night. This bridge is nearly a hundred years old, and it was designed for a time period that was much different than today's traffic and the needs of the public. Today we on average see over 30,000 vehicles a day traveling through here. So that's that's the overall mission of this bridge is to provide safe access to both navigation and to the public.