The city of Norfolk will have a new Ward 1 representative on City Council come November.
Vice Mayor Martin Thomas decided not to run for reelection after holding the seat for 10 years. Longtime Wards Corner civic leader, Scott Guirlinger, who is running unopposed, will take over the seat.
Guirlinger's uncontested campaign is one of three non-competitive Norfolk council races on this year's ballot, joining incumbents Courtney Doyle in Ward 2 and Tommy Smigiel in Ward 5. Wards 3 and 4 feature multi-candidate contested races.
While Wards Corner is known as a business corridor, Ward 1 covers a diverse footprint in Norfolk, including neighborhoods like Suburban Acres, Titustown and residential communities surrounding Naval Station Norfolk. Issues like traffic management, school performance, and public safety frequently intersect.
When asked how his practical approach will differ from Vice Mayor Thomas’s decade of leadership, Guirlinger summarized his identity in a single word: builder.
"Whether that's building community or building the business or building, I mean honestly, building things around the house too," he told WHRO. "I'm looking to collaborate and hopefully build partnerships and connections and networking to all the places that we can."
Guirlinger moved to Wards Corner in 2005 and has been heavily involved in the community through the civic league and other city boards and groups. He led the Wards Corner Civic League for nearly a decade and represented Ward 1 on the NFK2050 advisory committee to help craft the city’s 25-year comprehensive master plan guiding land use and economic development.
Guirlinger is also on the Hope House Foundation’s board. He works as an executive manager of user experience for the technology company, Octave.
Guirlinger said he has a four-part vision for Norfolk: fostering a culture of collaboration, improving public safety, supporting public education and driving smart economic growth.
Central to this vision is creating what he calls a "culture of yes" across city hall, addressing bureaucratic hurdles that he said have slowed community progress and driven families to neighboring cities.
Public safety
Public safety stands as the first pillar of Guirlinger's platform. He said he knows Norfolk can’t always beat salary offers in other cities, but he believes that improving workplace culture and operational support is a more sustainable approach to retain employees.
"No one's going into those professions to come out a billionaire," he said, referring to police officers, firefighters and teachers. "They're doing it for public service, and so anything we can do to make sure they're feeling supported, I think, goes a long way."
Education
As a parent with two children enrolled in Norfolk Public Schools, Guirlinger said he wants structural changes in how the city funds and manages its educational system.
He advocates establishing formal, year-round joint work sessions between the council and school board, replacing the traditional end-of-year budget crunch that decides nearly a third of total municipal spending. "We're having conversations throughout the year, so that when budget time comes, we're just acting on a lot of the discussions and decisions that we've already made," Guirlinger said.
Beyond fiscal oversight, he emphasizes that updating aging school buildings and addressing persistent teacher shortages are essential to keeping young families from moving to Virginia Beach or Chesapeake.
Economic development
Guirlinger wants to prioritize commercial corridors like Wards Corner, where he helped guide a 2019 business district master plan.
He noted that surrounding neighborhoods support thoughtful density increases, which he views as a tool to attract independent retail and local dining.
"What I'd really like to see is Wards Corner become a destination, a place in itself," Guirlinger said. "It's a place on the map, and there's certainly businesses and things you can do there, but it doesn't have that same destination feel that you might get out of a Ghent or a Riverview."
Drawing on his professional background in user experience and engineering, Guirlinger also envisions stronger links between Ward 1 and the Norfolk Innovation Corridor around downtown and Norfolk State University. Guirlinger wants to leverage local tech start-ups and digital infrastructure to retain college graduates. He also sees potential in converting vacant second-story office spaces above local storefronts into shared co-working hubs.
Infrastructure
Guirlinger’s fourth focus is to streamline city projects to reduce long, sometimes repetitive work. He highlighted West Little Creek Road as an example of systemic disconnects in city planning. Uncoordinated, piecemeal utility work along the corridor has led to repetitive repaving schedules over the years.
Guirlinger plans to push for synchronized project timelines across city departments and external utility vendors to minimize prolonged road closures and neighborhood disruptions.
