The Chesapeake City Council held a work session at 5:15 p.m. and a regular meeting at 6:30 p.m. on February 24, 2026, at City Hall. The work session focused on the 2026 Parks, Recreation and Tourism Master Plan, while the regular meeting addressed toll rate increases, adoption of the master plan, funding adjustments, public comments on various issues, and amendments to council rules. The council also entered a closed meeting to discuss a prospective multipurpose event center.
I want to welcome everyone to our work session. Turn the uh Mike over to you. Mr. Manager. Thank you, Mr. Mayor. So you'll recall that some time ago we gave you a briefing on an update, a very significant update to our parks and recreation master plan. Following that update, we had a chance to work with the community a little bit to refine that plan. So Mike Barber and his team are here to present to you tonight where we're at and be available to answer any questions. So I'll turn it over to Mike. Thank you, Mr. Price. Good afternoon, Mayor West, Vice Mayor Ritter, and members of City Council. It's been almost 35 years, 35 years since a window into the year 2010, a plan for parks and recreation was adopted by uh Chesapeake City Council. Um tonight we are very excited to um present to you a path to play, which um hopefully will serve us for the the next decade. Um tonight will be for your consideration on adopting of this new master plan for the parks, recreation, and tourism department. First, we'd like to thank our many residents and many community organizations for assisting in development of this plan. This was indeed a community effort. Um many groups and organizations stepped up, gave us feedback, gave us comments, came out to our public events, and really we took all of that into heart in developing of this plan. We feel we've had good direction and solid resources over the last decade and really trying to take care of what we have and investing in modernizing some of our amenities as we moved into the future. So that has been a real concentration over the last 10 years on really fixing a lot of the amenities that we have in our beautiful resources that we are so blessed to have. This is this master plan has not only helped us for the future, but it's also helped evaluate those successes and will serve as a guide for us again for the next 10 years at least through successful models and best practices. Um because we want to make sure at the end of the day, once this um project um plan is adopted, that we will make sure that Chesapeake remains an exceptional place to live, learn, work, farm, and play. So with that, I'd like to reintroduce to you, Chris Destazi from Interface Um Studios, um, who was here last year with us and gave a brief presentation on where we were at that point. And um will bring us to the home stretch tonight, and um uh Chris leads the consultant team of which they had several subcontractors, which he will talk to as well to make sure that we put together the best plan for Chesapeake. Chris. Thanks, Mike, and uh thank you to council for having me here today, the mayor of the city manager um for being a part of this process. It's truly been a pleasure working down here in Chesapeake, getting to know your city, getting to be a part of this process and lending sort of my firm's additional capacity to this plan that is truly driven by and shaped by the people of Chesapeake. Chris did get out of a foot of snow to get down here. Um came from Philadelphia, so he made sure he got here this morning. So I made sure. Um, I'm from Philadelphia, as Mike said, uh, my firm is Interface Studio. We uh do uh um urban planning, urban design, and a lot of park system planning. Uh so you know, we've been working down here for the past about two years on uh Path to Play, Chesapeake's park recreation and tourism master plan, and it's really a pleasure to be here now to present to you the culmination of all that work. So, as I mentioned, the schedule extended all the way back to April 2024. Uh, and all of this is sort of in the packet in front of you. So there's a lot of text in this um presentation. It's sort of an executive summary of the plan. I'm not going to read every single word, but I do want to highlight the tremendous amount of community engagement that went into this plan. Uh the process engaged about 1,000 adults and about 500 youth across the city. There were two dedicated public events. Uh, I have to say, PRT puts on some of the best public events that I've had the pleasure of participating in as a consultant, uh, really showing off what makes the city great, what makes the department great, and gathering great input from residents. The department dropped in on four different community events, held 11 different events at public schools across the city, getting over 500 uh youth involved in the process. We had an advisory committee made up of uh members of city government, members of the public. Uh we held four different meetings throughout the process. They contributed uh their help, sort of guiding the process. Uh a really essential part of the process. We held a citywide statistically valid survey that was fielded by the National Survey Research Firm ETC Institute. And that made sure, you know, we heard from 623 randomly selected residents from across the city. And that makes sure that we're not only hearing from sort of the usual suspects who come out to meetings, but to the folks who don't always know how to participate or um don't have the time to participate necessarily.