Virginia Beach City Council Meeting Summary - October 21, 2026

Staff from our parks and recreation department will give city council an update on the Rudy Park project.

Good afternoon, Mayor, Vice Mayor, members of the council.

It's good to be here.

Pleased to provide this update on the Rudy Park project and where we're at today.

We made some great progress.

So wanted to share those items with you today.

We also have Clay Dills here with us with uh Dills Architects, who is our architect of record for the for the project.

It's just good to good to have him here.

Also going to go over today a few things to talk about.

I'll talk over the design and progress in the timeline and the and go over the project design insights, and then I'll turn it over to Michael Kirschman to go over the fundraising update and the conservancy where we are to date with that.

Of course, today's briefing is uh totally informational for you all.

And um, this is also part of Focus Action Plan 2.19 to move forward with uh construction drawings for the Rudy Park project.

So,

of course, this all started uh from August 25th.

City Council gave us the the go ahead to move forward uh from this concept plan, which was uh uh highly vetted, and we had extensive public engagement through this process and and was able to land on this as the approved concept plan.

Um to move move forward with this uh concept plan and convert that into construction drawings.

Um we stated that would be about a 12 to 18 month process, and we are uh still tracking on that schedule as you'll see in in a few few moments.

Some of the concept plan renderings that were showed during the public engagement, and this is uh showing the the vibrancy and the improvements to be made in this iconic park destination location.

Um upper left is a view from the boardwalk showing the uh elevated walkway coming into the beach village, and then the access way, which is currently the second second street promenade.

Uh upper right would be the uh what we're calling the get down area, just to get a little bit closer to to Rudy Inlet.

And then the lower left is the elevator walkway that goes over, spans over the beach village and overlooks uh the jetty.

And then the uh image on the lower right is the uh interactive water play area, which will be uh very exciting and create that um excitement and joy as a focal element as you enter into the park.

Uh

a couple of further renderings, uh, the upper left being the the nature play area, uh creating some uh natural elements for children to wander and climb and explore.

Uh the upper right being the uh indoor pavilion and the picnic grove.

And with the lower left image is the either the beginning or the end of the Virginia Beach Trail, depends which way you're traveling, um, or right at that endpoint at the at the boardwalk.

And then on the right is just kind of an overhead bird's eye shot showing all those elements working together, the indoor pavilion, the the nature play area, the interactive water play, and then the get down area to the inlet.

So

for the design process, we are currently at 60 percent design.

Um start off as um the schematics and then the 35 per 30 per 35 percent and now 60 percent.

We receive those back in late August.

Uh staff and the team are currently reviewing all those and making comments for that.

And this round of plans were submitted to the Development Services Center too.

So we'll be getting feedback and comments from them as well sometime in the next uh four to six weeks or so.

Um with that, we'll gather those that information, rework the plan some more, refine, and uh we'll be due a 90% design set, progress set on December 22nd of 2026.

With that, we'll continue, still get more resubmit that back to Development Services Center, get more comments, refine the plans, and then with a final design, ideally um in February of 2027.

Um

all goes well.

We have an approved set of plans, we can put those out to bid, and um about a six to eight month uh bidding and award construction award with that.

We would be on schedule to um start construction of the project in uh late fall of 2027.

And it's expected this would be a two-year construction period to be very uh scheduled and phased approach um and kind of complicated on how that's gonna work.

But um the key is we really need to start construction by late fall of 2027.

Some things have changed slightly.

I want to make those uh bring those to your attention as far as uh this concept site plan.

I've circled three highlighted three areas on this graphic.

Uh in the upper right is the beach village.

We made some modifications there, um, and I'll talk about it in more detail in a couple minutes about um the uh coastal uh storm risk management plan and then and where a future sector gate is going to be coming in um the site sometime in the future, 10, 15, 20 years.

We don't quite know yet, but we had to allow for that infrastructure to come into place uh on the site.

So we had to make some modifications to the elevated walkway and how that would look and create the um the ramps and the switchbacks is and make that work and still move everything kind of to the north a little bit.

So there was some slight changes there in the middle circle.

You can see the that call de sac there to work on and getting the adequate circulation patterns for larger vehicles, bus drop off, any type of emergency vehicle access.

That that call de sac had to be reworked and made a little bit bigger to make that adequate circulation and make those uh maneuvers for for larger trucks.

So we had to that kind of change got bigger.

Ultimately, when that happened, um it kind of pinched where the indoor pavilion was located.

So we moved that indoor pavilion to the to the north, which that's what this other circle is in the bottom of the page there.

And moving that uh was critical because we uh ended up having a lot of congestion, a lot of um activity in that that hub that created some some issues.

So moving it and separating that out was was a was a pretty good decision to move that move that

out.

Uh

some of the other design elements that coming forward, and some of these will require uh council approval.