The Virginia Beach City Council met on January 7, 2026, and the primary focus was a presentation by the Atlantic Avenue Task Force, which provided recommendations for allocating $30–35 million in capital improvement funds to revitalize Atlantic Avenue. Council members also received a briefing on upcoming planning items, heard liaison reports, and addressed several administrative items.
Hey we're calling this meeting. Welcome one, welcome all. And happy new year to everybody. And uh once again, welcome. And uh Mr. Dehaney, let's go ahead and get started. All right, so Mr. Mayor, members of council, the first briefing from the first session back from break would be from the Atlantic Avenue Task Force. If council recalls, council um convened this task force to provide options on how best to address the Atlantic Avenue improvement project. And the task force been meeting dutifully for several meetings, and this is where they're they're coming forward with their recommendation recommendations and their suggestions for your consideration. The next voice you'll hear will probably be Julie. And she'll kick off the presentation, followed by co-chair Mike Mauch. Welcome. Good afternoon, happy new year, Mr. Mayor, Vice Mayor, members of council, I'm Julie Brennan with Fountain Works, and happy to be here to talk about the Atlantic Avenue Task Force. As the manager just said, the as a reminder, the council um uh passed a resolution to establish the Atlantic Avenue Task Force to develop recommendations for council. Actually, I'm looking at this, I think it wasn't actually a council resolution, it was a mayor, mayor task force. So I apologize, I've read this so many times, I forgot that. So this is a mayor's task force, um, but the purpose of the task force was to look at how to allocate the 30 to 35 million dollars in capital improvement funds for the Atlantic Avenue capital improvements, looking specifically at the appearance, so things like facade, art and decorative elements of Atlantic Avenue, looking at mobility and safety. Um those are sidewalks and transportation issues, and looking specifically at on street parking on Atlantic Avenue itself. The council, um, the mayor's task force also was charged with looking at how to allocate funding across the different sections of Atlantic Avenue, breaking it up into three sections, North Beach 25th to 40th Street, Central Beach, 17th to 24th Street, and South Beach, 5th to 17th Street. So the question in terms of how to allocate was do we want to do a little bit of something everywhere? Do we want to concentrate something in different parts of uh Atlantic Avenue? So the task force was asked to look at all of those things. The members that were appointed to the task force, several of them are here today. A few had conflicts, but if I can get those in the audience to raise your hand and wave. Thank you for being here, and thank you for your dedication to the task force. Mike Mach is also here with me. He'll be presenting the task force's recommendations. And um of the seven members on the first meeting, they voted and elected Mike Mach and Bill Graham Brell as co-chairs. Um and Bill is one of the people that had an unavoidable conflict today, so he's not here. Uh, Vice Mayor Wilson and Councilmember Remick served as City Council liaisons, and they were at almost every meeting of the task force. In addition to the task force members, we had a tremendous amount of support from city staff. Not everyone was at every meeting, but most of these people were at most of the meetings. Uh, so we wanted to highlight that there is a lot of interest and support in the task force recommendations. They served as subject matter experts, and we're able to answer a lot of questions and provide details and do some research to answer the task force questions. I'll note we listed Clay Dills on this page. He's clearly not city staff, but we invited him to one of our meetings to do a presentation, and it was um a sort of aha moment for the task force members. So we wanted to acknowledge his presence. Um Fountain Works, me and my team served as neutral facilitators for the meetings to make sure that we provided support and everyone was able to share their concerns openly and no one dominated. The task force met five times between July and November for a total of 20 hours per person. So that's a lot of time dedicated to this and recognition of the importance of these decisions. Um you can see the schedule of how and when we met, and we are here today at the presentation to council. We used human centered design as a framework in the beginning of the task force to ensure that different perspectives were represented on the task force. So at the first meeting, we asked task force members to put on the hat. If you were a member of council, if you were city staff, if you were a resident visitor, a tourist visitor, a hotel year, restaurant tour, a real retailer, what are their different perspectives and what are their interests in Atlantic Avenue? What do they want out of the renovations, the capital improvements on Atlantic Avenue? In addition, we asked all of the task force members to bring their own selves to the meetings. They all were appointed because they represent important constituencies for Atlantic Avenue. We also provided a number of opportunities for the task force members to bring in statements or resolutions or just share thoughts from their respective organizations.