VIRGINIA BEACH, Va. (WAVY) – For over a year, Broad Bay Island residents have worked to stop barges full of mud from coming up a creek and crossing in front of their waterfront property.
Tuesday night, they won that battle.
Virginia Beach City Council agreed with the residents and backed down.
“Stop the sludge means we don’t want other people’s sludge on our waterways,” said Broad Bay Island resident Lynn Hume last March.
The city wanted to use hopper barges to dump sludge, dredged from inlets across Virginia Beach, onto a piece of privately owned land. That property, which is zoned as residential, is a 100 yards across the creek from Hume’s home.
Fifteen months after the fight began, it ended with city council pulling the site on Long Creek from consideration.
“With what we’ve gone through, nothing surprises me. When it comes to the City, we have been deceived so many times and misled by city staff so many times, that is why it got out of hand and that’s what upset us,’ said resident Ed Cunningham.
It took Tom Fraim and the Beaches and Waterways Advisory Commission to finally convince Virginia Beach that the Long Creek site isn’t the right location. The Zoning Administration also told the city that, but the city pushed ahead anyway.
“It gets on our plate because it is controversial, and yes, the people of Long Creek were very well organized” Fraim said.
“Stand up and be heard, and the system can work if you get people involved,” exclaimed Broad Bay Island Resident Mike Megge. “We worked that system. It took a lot of hard work, a lot of organization and a lot of dedicated people.”
Getting a little media attention doesn’t hurt.
“A lot of time, you don’t know what happens with a story, but it give people closure to a story when you exposed it. You followed it through to the end, and I think that helped the whole process,” Megge added.
The alternative site for neighborhood dredging is up the creek at a city-owned property, between the Lynnhaven Marine Boatel and the Marina Shores Shoppes.
The land is owned by Gale Levine Higgs who did not want to do an interview, but told 10 On Your Side on the phone, “So much has to happen for this to happen…I gave the strip of land to the City for drainage purposes only…not for a sludge transfer station.”
Higgs made it clear legal action could follow if the city plans on using the site for anything other than drainage.
