The Chesapeake City Council held a work session at 4:45 p.m. and a regular meeting at 6:30 p.m. on July 23, 2024, in the City Hall Council Chamber, 306 Cedar Road. The work session featured presentations from Norfolk International Airport, Hampton Roads Transit (HRT) on the High-Capacity Transit Study, and the Parks, Recreation and Tourism Master Plan. The regular meeting included presentations of certificates, citizen comments, consent agenda approvals, a development rights easement purchase, and appointments to boards and commissions.
Norfolk International Airport
HRT High-Capacity Transit Study
Parks, Recreation and Tourism Master Plan
On Agenda Items:
On Non-Agenda Items (Affairs of the City):
I want to welcome everyone to our work session, July 23, 2024. Mr. Manager, we have several uh three very interesting topics. I just like to make a quick comment. Uh Ms. Newins and I were at a conference together with uh the airport direct executive director, Mr. Perryman. We saw his report on the state of the airport, and we're very excited about what he had to say. So thank you for getting here tonight, and certainly want to be very happy to have our Mr. Harrell back and in transit and looking forward to our uh parks and recreation reports. So thank you. Looking forward to tonight's uh work session. Thank you, Mr. Mayor. Lots of friends in the region, uh, some really good quality of life initiatives that are happening, both in the transportation uh space, but also right here locally with with Parks Rec and Tourism. So we're gonna hear a lot of different things tonight. And up first I will turn it over to Mr. Perryman. Thank you very much, and it's uh pleasure to be here today. Um it's great to get out to uh Chesapeake as one of our communities that we serve uh so much. And uh I'll try to get through this presentation pretty quickly so I can take some QA from you at the end. But uh this is my traveling road show, so some of you may have seen or parts of it or pieces of it before, and I apologize for that, but uh a lot of good new information as well along the way. So I always like to start a little bit about who we are, uh, because I think there's a misunderstanding about who we are. Uh the airport is a uh the airport north the Norfolk Airport Authority is an independent subdivision of the state of the Commonwealth of Virginia. Uh we are governed by a board of directors that are supported by the Norfolk City Council, but other any other way we are truly independent uh from the City of Norfolk. Uh really no other municipal bound body uh do we report to. We are really a city within a city, just like Chesapeake is. We have over 240 employees now. Uh and we have every department that a city would have. Uh in fact, we have two of the three powers that constitutes a municipality. We have the power to condemn, and we have the uh and we have police power. The only thing we can't do is tax. I wish I had that power, but I don't have that by the by our charter right now. Um in many ways, we're really a business, not even a municipality. Uh we operate as a business, we have profits, we have losses, we have revenues. Uh we we earn all of our revenues to make ourselves a self-sufficient operation. And we do that through a variety of uh sources. And uh the listed up here is parking and rental car services, really is about sixty percent of our revenue stream that we get. Uh leases and airline fees and concession commissions round out their other 40 percent. Um key thing to note is we don't receive any subsidies from any local municipality. We are truly self-sufficient uh from an operational uh perspective. We do get some federal and state grants uh similar to uh you do that you do as a as a municipality uh for construction projects, but those are only for construction. Our operations are all very self-uh funded and self-sustaining. From an economic impact standpoint, uh you know a lot of uh companies and businesses and entities like to do this. This this is a bit dated. We're in the process of updating it right now with ODU. Uh but back in 2019, they uh there was a economic impact study that was done where we contributed two point two billion dollars in over 17,000 jobs to the local economy. We anticipate uh through uh this update that we're gonna see that number c double or triple in terms of our overall economic impact just because of the amount of growth and activity that we are seeing at the airport these days. Uh little bit about commercial uh our commercial aviation market, because this is what's core to us. We fly people, we fly planes in and out of the airport.