Beach can't close gap over site for new Lesner Bridge

VIRGINIA BEACH

Sleeping 78 feet from a busy bridge is tolerable.

But when city officials started designing a wider and taller new Lesner Bridge, closer to their buildings - 25 feet in one case - the members of the Maryland and Virginia pilot associations protested.

The noise levels from traffic would disturb their sleep, take away too much of their property and potentially force them to move, the pilot associations said.

"I was afraid our station would be degraded," said John Hamill, the first vice president of the Association of Maryland Pilots.

The pilots, who escort commercial ships up and down the Virginia coast, weren't the only ones to complain about the proposed alignment of the planned $90 million Lesner.

Dimitri Hionis, who owns Bubba's Restaurant, the Lesner Inn and a shellfish company, all next to the pilots, feared he would lose parking spaces and business.

The City Council reluctantly agreed earlier this month to a more northerly path for the new Lesner, bypassing the pilots' and Hionis' properties.

But that has sparked something of a civil war with condominium residents to the north and some civic leaders along Shore Drive.

The northern alignment brings the bridge 16 feet closer to the 3556 Condominium, said Dorinda Ennis, a condo owner.

"The northern alignment takes a premier building, ours, and squishes it near the bridge," Ennis said. "It was very disappointing."

After almost two years of public meetings about the new Lesner Bridge, Todd Solomon, a civic activist along Shore Drive, said he is surprised by the city's decision to go north, considering that most local residents preferred the initial proposal.

The city is trying to design the bridge replacement quickly so it can qualify for a potential second round of federal stimulus funding.

"Just to get it fast-tracked for funding, we shouldn't shortchange the community," Solomon said.

The bridge, built in 1958, is slowly deteriorating, though weight limits haven't been posted yet. Plans to replace and expand the bridge to six lanes have been in the works for several years. The City Council has set aside $10.1 million for the project, with another $44 million planned for the next five years.

But without federal money, the project is unlikely to be done soon.

"I think we're putting ourselves in a good position to get the funding," Councilman Jim Wood said.

Wood and Vice Mayor Louis Jones, whose districts include portions of the bridge, said they initially supported the first proposal too but were swayed by the objections from the business owners.

The Lynnhaven Inlet gets frequent dredging by the federal government because the pilot boats travel in and out of the area, Wood said.

That dredging provides sand replenishment for some of the Chesapeake Bay beaches.

Beach officials also feared legal wrangling over how much property they would have to take with the first proposal.

The city will still have to acquire some property from the former Duck-In site to accommodate the northern alignment, but that may not pose as much of a problem because the condominiums planned for that site are no longer viable in this economy, Jones said.

"The bottom line is the negative impacts on the northern alignment is so much less than the southern alignment," Jones said. "We just had to make a choice."

Deirdre Fernandes, (757) 222-5121, deirdre.fernandes@pilotonline.com