Norfolk wants protection from future flooding. Agreeing on how isn't easy.

Washington Post

11-07-2025

After residents of Norfolk's historic Freemason neighborhood objected to proposed floodwalls snaking through their community, blocking river views, potentially depressing property values and leaving condominium buildings exposed, staff members from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers walked the planned path with local leaders in January.
Jack Kavanaugh, a retired admiral who heads the neighborhood civic league, said he was encouraged when an Army Corps official assured residents that 'we're not going to do anything that is stupid or anything that Norfolk is really going to scream about.'
As details about the plan to protect the city from major storms and hurricanes have become clear to residents, the cost has risen and the beginning of construction has been pushed back, clouding the future of the project.
A month after the walk, Norfolk's city manager, Pat Roberts, sent the Army Corps a 57-page report completed by consultants and engineers at a cost of $180,000 that explored changes, including abandoning some of the planned walls and building a surge barrier in the Elizabeth River on the southern edge of the neighborhood. 'The current proposed alignment has been met with widespread skepticism and opposition, and we are, therefore, requesting that USACE investigate alternative alignments,' he wrote in an email.
Organizing by residents of Freemason against the proposed floodwall is one of a number of challenges facing the $2.66 billion Norfolk Coastal Storm Risk Management Project. Questions about the state helping fund Norfolk's 35 percent local share — $931 million over a decade under the current cost estimate — have grown louder after the Virginia General Assembly declined the city's 2026 appropriations request. Two years ago, after residents of historically Black, lower-income neighborhoods protested that no floodwalls were planned for their communities, the City Council passed a resolution requesting the Army Corps reconsider. But that study has not been funded. Meanwhile, environmental groups have complained that the agency has shut them out of discussions about a water quality study on the effects of the plan.
Roberts has said that without changes, the city will not fund its share of the project. 'The Corps has the final say on design,' he said. 'We have the final say whether or not we build it. … There has to be a consensus that it's the right design.'
Norfolk is one of several cities discovering that residents and environmental groups are rebelling against waterfront walls and the effects of miles of concrete barriers on natural systems.
But the city is in a bind. Miami and New York have declined to sign partnership agreements with the Army Corps, rejecting plans that called for miles of concrete walls, sending the agency back to create new designs focused on softer, nature-based solutions. However, Norfolk's City Council in 2023 unanimously approved a partnership agreement for the largest infrastructure project in the city's history. The agreement codifies a plan that will reshape the city, with more than eight miles of walls as high as 16 feet along its wealthiest neighborhoods and across the Lafayette River, and solutions such as house raisings, oyster reefs and shorelines planted with grasses in other areas. Eleven gates in the walls would allow for tidal flushing and be closed during storms. Ten pump stations would clear stormwater.
The Freemason changes and others sought by the city, including transforming a levee protecting the downtown park into a floodwall close to a major office building, may not be feasible, will be time-consuming and could be more expensive. If the city's requests significantly increase the cost, the Army Corps can label them 'betterments' and require Norfolk to pay the difference, not just its 35 percent share.
That increased expense and delay would come as city officials and the Army Corps told the City Council in May that the cost would rise and completion of the project would be pushed back five years to 2037. The first phase of construction, a wall protecting the city's minor league ballpark and a casino, is not set to begin until 2027.
A study to update the overall cost isn't scheduled for completion until 2028 and is necessary because the project now exceeds what Congress authorized in 2020.
Norfolk's plan is the first of the Army Corps' proposed storm risk projects nationwide to edge toward construction. Without the project, the Army Corps says all but a sliver of the city's interior would be at risk for flooding from a major storm by 2075. Once completed, Norfolk will reap annual net benefits of $122 million from reduced damage to businesses, homes and critical infrastructure, including health care facilities, according to the Army Corps' study.
Michelle Hamor, chief of policy and planning for the Army Corps' Norfolk district, said in an interview that for the agency to consider significant alterations such as putting the floodwall in the Elizabeth River, it would need to fund a change study that could take four years and cost up to $5 million. According to an Army Corps spokesman, the feasibility study completed in 2019 did not examine constructing a wall in the river because Congress requires Army Corps projects to protect against unavoidable damage to natural systems.
Paul Olsen, an engineer who led the Norfolk district of the Army Corps until 2015 and initiated the feasibility study, backs the plan including the wall's path through the Freemason neighborhood. But he said in an interview that constructing a wall in the river would have 'massive complexities,' making it difficult to justify. The river is a federal navigation channel. Large ships must pass through to the shipyards. Engineering a wall that can withstand a barge impact during a storm, an Army Corps requirement, would be expensive. An environmental-impact statement, which costs millions and takes years, would be necessary.
'Putting it in the river, that's not sound engineering professionally, in my opinion,' said Olsen, who now is a consultant and president of Honor Builders, an engineering firm specializing in sea-level rise. 'That wouldn't be cost-effective, and we never would have gotten the project if we went with that.'
The city's report, labeled a draft when sent to the Army Corps, comes six years after the publication of the feasibility study outlining the wall alignment in Freemason and along the downtown. For the first time, it includes graphics showing how the wall would affect street-level views on the neighborhood's waterfront. The report says the alignment would cut off access to residential buildings when gates are closed during a storm, probably spawn lawsuits over necessary easements and face the expense of mitigating dozens of utility conflicts.
Freemason residents, like others throughout the city, said they were unaware of the wall's details until a briefing by the city's Office of Resilience at a civic league meeting last summer. They quickly began organizing. About 175 people attended a September meeting where they voiced their displeasure. City officials heard them. 'I get that [Olsen] says the thing in the water doesn't work, but we want them to take a hard look at that,' Roberts said.
Courtney Doyle and Jeremy McGee, the two council members whose wards cover the neighborhood, said in an interview that they would only support a wall in the river. Mayor Kenneth Alexander (D), at the conclusion of an update about the plan during a City Council meeting, said if the Army Corps found the city's river option was not feasible, 'it's a problem.'
While opponents in the wealthy Freemason neighborhood are opposed to the plan for walls, residents on the city's lower-income, largely Black south side have demanded floodwalls to protect their neighborhoods after learning the Army Corps' feasibility study said they were not justified through a cost-benefit analysis, which focuses on property values. They note that values there have been depressed over the years because of redlining. 'Looking forward, it feels really bleak,' said Kim Sudderth, a community activist. 'We're told that everyone's working really hard to get the request into some form of a bill or funding sources. But it seems like everything they try just doesn't quite pan out.'
Environmental groups are complaining about being left out by the Army Corps. 'We're not being taken seriously at all, and our concerns clearly have zero bearing on this project,' said Mary-Carson Stiff, executive director of Wetlands Watch, a local environmental group.
Stiff is concerned that Army Corps staffers said they have not determined how often gates in the walls and the river surge barriers will be closed during tidal and rain flooding as well as during storms, altering the water flow. Without determining that, meaningful environmental modeling can't be done. 'If you're still in the design phase, all of your environmental work should be discounted,' she added.
Norfolk also faces a funding challenge. Roberts has said repeatedly that the city will not move forward without half its share funded by the state. Norfolk received $25 million in each of 2024 and 2025 from the General Assembly, but nothing for 2026. Because construction has not begun, that money, plus the city's contribution, has covered costs so far.
Norfolk is the first Virginian city to partner with the Army Corps, but feasibility studies are moving forward for Hampton and Newport News, Northern Virginia, and Virginia Beach, where the price tag is expected to dwarf the cost in Norfolk. But the commonwealth has no plan to help fund the projects. The General Assembly passed a bill this year authorizing a three-year study by the Joint Legislative Audit and Review Commission to create criteria for state contributions to the local share. Whether state funds will flow to Norfolk during those years is unclear.
Steve Sigmon is a financial planner who has lived in the Freemason neighborhood for two decades. He spoke against the wall at the September meeting and later joined the group walking the wall's path with Kavanaugh, the neighborhood civic league head, and Army Corps officials. Views of the water from his home would be blocked by the proposed wall. He's hoping the city and the Army Corps can find a solution that provides a template for other cities facing similar pushbacks.
'There is a win-win to be found here,' he said. 'Norfolk gets federal funds to help a project to protect the city. Who doesn't want that? At the same time, the Army Corps can demonstrate to other municipalities that it can pivot when valid concerns arise and work with folks. It could be the poster child of a successful relationship.'