The Virginia Beach City Council convened a special formal session on February 25, 2026 (called to order on February 24, 2026) to receive briefings on the state legislative agenda, projected real estate assessments for fiscal year 2027, the Imagine VB 2040 Comprehensive Plan update, proposed Smart Scale transportation grant applications, and upcoming planning commission items. The meeting also included a closed session for property and personnel matters.
Welcome everybody. How are we all doing today? And we are ready to go to get things started in accordance with Virginia Beach City Code. 21 and by the authorities vested in me as mayor of the city of Virginia Beach. I hereby call for a special formal session of the Virginia Beach City Council. A Tuesday, February 24th. 2401 courthouse drive. We got a long address. The purpose of the special uh session is to allow the city council follow regularly schedule formal session as listed in the attached agenda to convene into a closed session to consider the following matters. Publicly held property. Task force and appointees. At the conclusion of the closed session, the city council will convene into an open session for the purpose of certifying the closed session. The special formal session will be broadcast on uh table TV, Virginia Beach.com and Facebook Lives your Bobby Dyer. Okay. And we're ready to go. All right. So Mr. Mayor, members of the council, the first presentation will be given by Brent McKenzie, Director of Legislative Affairs. He's in Richmond. He's gonna give City Council overview of the General Assembly's actions and where we are in that process. So Brent, go ahead. The floor is yours. Thank you, Mr. City Manager. Good afternoon, Mr. Mayor, members of city council. Um today's uh briefing is gonna cover um status of our legislative agenda items, uh update on the budget that was released on Sunday by each chamber, and then we'll give you just a quick overview of some of the where some of the legislation is post-crossover that we are still working on and keeping an eye on. Um so that's what we'll kind of cover today. So on our legislative agenda items, uh hasn't been a ton of movement since last week. As you all remember, uh, most of our legislation was had action taken on it prior to crossover, but since crossover, we have seen a couple of items. Um, our EMS four for life funding legislation uh had passed the House 98 to zero and was sent to the Senate. It was heard in Senate transportation earlier this week and passed 15 to zero, but they re-referred it to finance. We were trying to keep that from happening. It doesn't um doesn't increase funding, it just changes how the funding is spent. But any time legislation goes to the finance committee, it gets a little dicey, and so we were hoping that wasn't gonna happen, but um it followed it followed the same pattern as the Senate version of this legislation did. So we've got some uh some additional work to do on that piece of legislation. Uh later this afternoon, HB 390 from delegate ask you is going to be heard in the Senate Agriculture Committee. We're expecting a positive result there, but um we will see how that one goes. You will likely recall that as part of our original legislative agenda, we had an additional item that we had hoped to get legislation introduced on. Um, rather than seeking legislation, we decided to take it in a different route and try and administrative uh I don't know result. And so this is uh just a quick update on that. So our friends at Dominion have really taken this project on. Uh we owe them a debt of gratitude. They've done a great job with this. But on March 3rd, Dominion is going to go before the SCC damage preventing advisory committee to talk about creating a pilot program on uh using spot marking for utility markings at the ocean front. So we've been working with them on this. Um this map here, the resort area SGA is the area that we're proposing for this pilot program to take place. Um the pictures to the right are some pictures that we've shared with Dominion and with the SCC just to show to demonstrate the challenges that we're seeing at our ocean front with the markings and how we would like to try and reduce those impacts. Uh so we're hoping that the SCC will uh work kindly on this request and create a what would likely be a one-year pilot program, and then we come back next year to see how it was working, how utility lines are being protected, how the uh spot marking is is uh reducing the impacts of the markings and see if it's all working for both sides and see where to go from there. And then we come back next year to see how it was working, how utility lines are being protected, how the uh spot marking is uh reducing the impacts of the markings and see if it's all working for both sides and see where to go from there.