The Virginia Aquarium building is reaching the end of its usable life and it might be time for the city of Virginia Beach to rebuild it.
Virginia Beach projects spending about $28 million on maintenance at the aquarium in the next six years, but Deputy City Manager Ken Chandler’s presentation also said the city should start planning for a full rebuild.
“What's key here is, as we've mentioned a few times before, if we're doing the repair work, we're going to buy ourselves probably eight to 10 years, hopefully,” Chandler said. “If we're talking about new facility design and construction through this process, that's a seven-year process to complete. So there's not a lot of time or leeway there.”
When council originally heard about the aquarium’s needed repairs in 2023, one of the most urgent was tank replacements for animal safety. During a presentation this week , Chandler said seals, sharks and turtle tanks still “require prompt attention.”
City council didn’t commit to a rebuild or a timeline, but starting an aquarium reconstruction project would require adding the project to the city budget.
“If we all can agree on one thing, the ultimate goal is not only to have the aquarium survive, but thrive,” Mayor Bobby Dyer said. “I think every possibility and thing should be tried … to see if it can be done (and) exhaust all the possible paths that we have.”
One of those paths is state funding.
The Virginia Aquarium Foundation told Virginia Beach leaders they can seek more state funding to cover rising costs but they need the city to maintain its obligations to the aquarium.
Virginia Beach leaders started discussions in 2023 about giving up its ownership role in the Aquarium because the facility needed $250 million in renovations and repairs.
City leaders ultimately directed the aquarium’s foundation to explore other options and provide more detailed financial information.
The Foundation, which handles fundraising and co-owns the aquarium with the city, presented options to offset rising costs to City Council this week.
That included getting more state funding, but, “the reality of it is … it's a city of Virginia Beach-owned asset, so it's going to take the Foundation, it's going to take the city, and the city's got to commit, and it's also going to take the Commonwealth to get it done,” said Buffy Barefoot, treasurer of the Aquarium Foundation.
The city owns aquarium facilities and exhibits and employs the staff who run it. The foundation owns the animals that populate the aquarium.
Councilmember Joash Schulman said the city isn’t trying to skirt its responsibility, but he wasn’t sure it was the best entity to handle all the aquarium’s needs.
“Given our new realities, and given some of what we heard about the health of the animals … (we were) being as responsible as we possibly could have to evaluate possible investment and partnerships from private industry,” he said. “I don't see very many cities in the business of owning and managing aquariums these days.”
