Julia Bell has lived near Pleasure House Point for more than three decades, often traversing the rare stretch of green space along the Lynnhaven River.
“I’ve walked this park from day one,” she said. “It’s what sold me on buying my townhouse.”
Some of that landscape has changed dramatically within the past year. On a recent evening, Bell gestured to what’s now a flat expanse toward the eastern side of the park.
“All of this was thousands and thousands of trees,” she said. “We ended up with this — an environmental disaster as far as I’m concerned.”
Bell is one of many Virginia Beach residents who unsuccessfully fought the city’s clearing of trees here to make way for a $12 million wetlands mitigation project.
She and three other citizens are now taking a different tack: suing the federal government.
Bell, Windy Crutchfield, Walt Stone and Kim Mayo are representing themselves in a case against the Norfolk District of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, alleging that the agency’s permitting of the project was unlawful because of impacts to the environment and the public.
The group filed the suit in May. The Army Corps has since asked a federal judge to dismiss it and the parties are awaiting a ruling. The Corps declined to comment for this story, citing the ongoing litigation.
“I’m just heartbroken by what’s happened here,” Mayo said. “It just doesn’t make sense to me on any level. The community opposed this. And it fell on deaf ears.”
The controversial project has been on the books since 2012, when Virginia Beach acquired 118 acres at Pleasure House Point to protect it from development. The site was once a dumping ground for material dredged from the Lynnhaven Inlet.
Seven years ago, the city got a permit from the Army Corps for the wetland restoration and completed more than 90% of the design. The project then sat on the shelf until late last year, when Virginia Beach officials suddenly found it more urgent for a legal reason.
When a public agency or private developer impacts wetlands while building a project, they are required to make up for it elsewhere, using a legal mechanism called wetlands mitigation credits. The system works by earning credits traded in a “mitigation bank.”
Virginia Beach officials last year said they needed mitigation credits to move forward with infrastructure projects around the city, including several under the Flood Protection Program funded by a 2021 voter bond referendum.
Public works director LJ Hansen told council members that the city had intended to purchase the needed credits, but couldn’t find any immediately available.
“That was our hope, that was our desire, that was our plan. But the credits that we were told would materialize did not materialize,” Hansen said. “This was our contingency plan for how to get the credits, and we are down to our contingency.”
Residents pushing back against the plan identified another opportunity for the city to buy credits, through a project at New Mill Creek in the Elizabeth River area, but the city said it would not have worked and did not pursue it.
With approval from City Council, workers began clearing about eight acres at Pleasure House Point in March, cutting down more than 5,200 trees. Most were loblolly pines, but there were also black cherries, Eastern red cedars and 105 live oaks.
The city says it will plant more than 600 new trees, and more than half of them will be live oaks.
In an email in March, spokesperson Ali Weatherton-Shook said the city appreciated “the passion of residents and supporters of the Pleasure House Point Natural Area.”
“Restoring natural tidal wetlands is essential for filtering pollutants, supporting wildlife, strengthening flood resilience, and more,” Weatherton-Shook wrote. “This initiative provides a sustainable solution for dredging, flood protection, and roadway development by minimizing wetland impacts and reducing long-term maintenance.”
She said this week that Virginia Beach is aware of and monitoring the new lawsuit.
Residents have complained recently that flooding at Pleasure House Point increased after the project’s construction. The city could not immediately provide comment on Friday about those concerns.
In their lawsuit, citizens claim the project has caused “irreversible damage to environmental resources and habitat.”
That includes, they allege, dredging through oyster reefs and destroying nesting sites for migratory birds and diamond-backed terrapins.
“The first day they started cutting trees down, it sounded like a murder was going on with the birds. I have never heard such screaming as we heard that day,” Bell said. “That's what broke our hearts, because we knew that their homes were being destroyed.”
Plaintiffs also say they’re being harmed by the project inhibiting access to and enjoyment of the public park.
Bell was part of the push more than a decade ago to protect Pleasure House Point from development, leading to the city’s purchase in what was seen as a conservation win. She now worries the tree clearing was pushed through to give planned local development a water view. The city has denied that claim.
In legal filings, the Army Corps argues that the plaintiffs have no standing to file the lawsuit, calling their claims “factually unadorned legal conclusions.”
“The District Engineer conducted a balancing test and found that there are not more than minimal individual and cumulative net adverse effects to the environment from the Project and that there is a net gain in aquatic resources,” government attorneys wrote in September.
Stone, one of the four plaintiffs, said they want the court to order officials to restore the area, including replanting the same number of trees.
He said he knows the lawsuit against federal officials may be an uphill battle, but he also wants to send a message.
“If we cannot get them to stop what they're doing, at least we are going to put up some resistance to any future thoughts about taking out the rest of this park,” he said.
If other organizations aren’t putting up a fight, he said, “that’s fine. We’ll step up, and we’ll go to war.”
