A tough tenure for departing Army Corps chief

NORFOLK

After military tours in Iraq and Kosovo, among other hot spots, Col. Dionysios Anninos arrived in Norfolk three years ago for a much less dangerous assignment: district commander of the Army Corps of Engineers.

With an office overlooking the Elizabeth River and next to historic Fort Norfolk, it seemed like a laid-back gig. Build some military facilities, make sure ships entering Hampton Roads have deep channels to sail through, mediate some environmental disputes.

No worries, right?

But as "Colonel Dan" - his nickname among colleagues - prepares to step down and deploy for a third time to Iraq, his tenure here has been anything but easy.

Consider a few highlights (or lowlights, depending on your perspective):

• He halted the $280 million King William Reservoir project, intended to provide drinking water to the Peninsula, after two decades of planning and protest.
• He sided with environmentalists in ruling that Asian oysters, an exotic species favored by seafood interests, no longer can be grown in the Chesapeake Bay.
• He angered environmentalists by approving a 76-slip marina in Back Bay, a shallow and sprawling landmark in southern Virginia Beach. 
• He helped to advance a proposed fourth port in Hampton Roads, a billion-dollar project that would expand Craney Island eastward in Portsmouth. He immersed himself in the proposed Southeastern Parkway, a highway project that would connect

Virginia Beach and Chesapeake and has stirred debate and political maneuvering, without resolve, for decades.

• He still is weighing a permit for the equally contentious Indigo Dunes development, which would be built on one of the last and largest pristine land tracts on the Lynnhaven River in Virginia Beach.
• He told one of the most powerful developers in Virginia Beach, Eddie Garcia Sr., that a mega-project of homes, shops and office space planned for more than a decade near Stumpy Lake will not fly.

"It's been busy," Anninos said with typical understatement. "I knew it would be busy, but not this much."

Anninos, who was born in Greece and raised in Pennsylvania, is scheduled to leave his Norfolk post on Friday.

Then, on the Fourth of July, he is supposed to board a plane bound for Baghdad. Once there, he will take command of corps reconstruction efforts in central Iraq, building new schools, water plants, hospitals and roads.

He also expects to finish a recreation center in Fallujah, a city once besieged by Marines in one of the fiercest battles of the Iraq war.

Anninos traveled to Baghdad in April to scope out his new assignment, and he came away impressed.

Compared with his first deployment in 2003, just weeks after the initial push into the Iraqi capital, "security has improved quite a bit," Anninos said. "You see more Iraqis on the street, more markets are open, more road traffic."

Still, whenever he visits a construction site or attends a meeting, a security detail accompanies him.

"It's still a war zone," he said. "You have to watch your back."

Speaking from his fourth-floor office and dressed in combat fatigues, the fit and bulldogish Anninos pointed to a white board hanging on his wall. In tiny scrawl, a mammoth list of "things to do" was spelled out in black marker.

"This is what I'm working on before I leave," he said.

The list included doling out $21 million in federal stimulus money for new bridges, man-made wetlands and dredging projects across the Norfolk

district, which includes much of Virginia, stretching to the Blue Ridge Mountains.

He also had reminded himself to make a move on the Southeastern Parkway, which has stalled again, and to publish a final document detailing how the government should go about restoring native oysters in the Chesapeake Bay.

During his three-year stint, Anninos has won back many local officials who sometimes had a hard time even seeing the previous district commander, Yvonne Prettymen-Beck, who chose not to reside full-time in Hampton Roads.

Anninos, who lives in Virginia Beach, has been applauded by some environmental groups for rejecting several major projects because of expected ecological harm - and for personally participating in cleanup efforts on the Elizabeth and Lynnhaven rivers.

But at the same time, perhaps his most ardent critics also are environmentalists, specifically those working to restore Back Bay.

They believe Anninos made several major errors and refused to listen to them when deciding to issue a federal permit for the Wilkins Mooring and Launching Facility on Back Bay, a project in dispute since 2005.

Few marina opponents wanted to talk about Anninos on the record, saying they hope to reverse his decision and do not want to alienate the corps.

When Anninos signed the marina permit, in October 2008, Cheryl Petticrew commented, "We're all just dumbfounded."

Asked about such criticism, Anninos did not stir.

"I'm 100 percent confident I made the right decision," he said.

Boating, he said, "has never been a problem on Back Bay, and that's what a majority of the residents out there were saying."

Furthermore, he said, the marina permit includes safeguards and restrictions "that should mitigate any ecological problems," such as erosion, pollution and habitat destruction.

"I was definitely more pro-development than he's been," said David Hansen, a former Norfolk corps commander, who now is an assistant city manager in Virginia Beach. "I was harder on the environmentalists, I think, and he seemed more persuaded by their arguments. Anninos was probably more thorough than I was, too."

Anninos, unlike some of his predecessors, made many public appearances, often by himself, and seemed to enjoy speaking at meetings, ceremonies and ribbon-cuttings.

He called this aspect "the easiest part of the job."

And the hardest part?

"When you're faced with a problem and all you have are extremes," he said. "You try to find common ground, but neither side is likely to be happy with you in the end."

He said his toughest decision was devising a strategy to restore oysters in the Bay, a process that took five years, beginning before he even arrived in Norfolk.

The corps has long been criticized for taking too long to make decisions, such as the oyster strategy, and for granting too many permits for construction activities - estimates run as high as 90 percent approval.

Anninos defended the Army, saying the corps is bound to live under certain rules and procedures that other federal agencies are not.

As for the future, Anninos said coastal Virginia should, and must, start factoring in sea-level rise linked to climate change in planning where and when to allow new development projects - especially waterfront developments.

Then he added, "Of course, all this is a collaborative process with our local sponsors. We do not do anything in isolation."

Scott Harper, (757) 446-2340, scott.harper@pilotonline.com