A week after a divided Norfolk City Council postponed a vote on it’s long-term infrastructure spending plan, city leadership pivoted Tuesday night, passing an amended Capital Improvement Plan budget in a 7-1 vote.
The breakthrough came after City Manager Patrick Roberts proposed an additional $1 million for the preliminary design and site planning of a new library and recreation center on the East Side.
To avoid delays tied to the Military Circle Mall site, the city selected the former Poplar Hall Elementary School for the project after considering alternatives and assessing site readiness, Roberts said.
The move was a direct concession to intense public pushback from the Equity for the East Side Coalition, which represents seven local civic leagues. Neighborhood advocates spent weeks blasting the city for removing the promised recreation center from earlier drafts of the budget. They were frustrated about the city prioritizing multi-million dollar investments for downtown.
Kathy O'Hara, a representative for the Equity for the East Side, called the council's sudden shift very encouraging and attributed the reversal to local organizing. "We have faith that they're listening, but also faith in the power of the people,” she said.
Yet, the compromise has already sparked a new wave of skepticism.
Councilman Tommy Smigiel cast the lone vote against the CIP, critiquing what he called a reactive and uncoordinated approach to city planning. Smigiel argued the budget should only commit to an East Side recreation center in principle, leaving the site of the projectccbbirds to a study rather than a budget amendment.
Smigiel criticized the city’s five-year capital budget process, saying council retreats had become forums for new ideas instead of reviewing existing plans, resulting in broken promises as newer priorities displaced older projects. He noted a badly needed fire ladder truck for Ocean View was cut from this year's proposal despite a construction surge in that area.
"I don't know if Norfolk knows what it wants to be when it grows up," Smigiel said, pointing directly to expensive, unmapped long-term projects like the casino development taking priority when it was not in the plans a decade ago.
Central to frustration around the spending plan was the more than $50 million allocated to reimagine the downtown MacArthur Center site. Both Smigiel and neighborhood advocates said that the plan was an example of downtown tunnel vision. They criticized the council for locking down massive funding for the mall property without a definitive development plan in place.
Even as community advocates celebrated forcing city hall's hand on neighborhood funding, they echoed Smigiel's concerns regarding the lack of a comprehensive strategic roadmap. O'Hara acknowledged that Smigiel made a valid point about selecting the Poplar Hall site prior to fully examining all potential sites and developing a broader plan.
"Our question is, ‘is that site large enough?’" O'Hara said, noting that neighborhood groups expect city leaders to follow through on their verbal commitments to keep residents involved in the planning process. Those are details that the coalition expects to work through in continued dialogue with the city, but for now, O'Hara said, it is a good start.
