Gov. Ralph Northam announced earlier this week that the state’s largest recreational beach — the Virginia Beach Oceanfront — would open up for Memorial Day weekend.
But the governor kept other beaches statewide — including popular local spots in Hampton, Norfolk and Yorktown — mostly closed for the traditional beach season kickoff.
Those who want to take in the holiday at one of those other beaches are out of luck, leading some to ask why Northam opened one beach but kept others tightly locked down.
Government officials and City Council members in Hampton, Norfolk and elsewhere say they are now fielding calls from residents asking why their beaches are still closed even as people can flock to Virginia Beach.
Hampton City Manager Mary Bunting said she didn’t want to question Northam’s decision, saying she needs to “maintain a good working relationship with the governor’s office.”
“I don’t like to second-guess the decisions other public officials make,” she said. “Because unless you’re sitting in that person’s place, you don’t know all the information they have available.”
But “our residents are very eager to go to the beach,” Bunting said, and many are asking city officials why Hampton’s beaches — including Buckroe and Fort Monroe — are not reopening, too.
“I will say that our residents feel it’s unfair,” Bunting said. “The mayor and I and other council members have had to try to explain why we are not reopening the beaches, as if we have that opportunity. I think there’s a lot of confusion among the public as to who makes those decisions.”
Hampton Mayor Donnie Tuck said he’s gotten several calls, including from people who can’t understand why they can’t “go out there and sit in chairs and fish” on the beach.
He got another call from a Hampton woman Thursday night. “She said she is prepared to be fined,” Tuck said. “She wants to go sit on the beach, and says it’s her constitutional right to be able to do so.”
Some Hampton residents, he said, have contended that the city is “blindly following” Northam’s orders. “I said, “No, we’re not following blindly,'” Tuck said. “He has broad powers, and we have to follow those.”
But the mayor, for his part, says it would have been better for the governor to open all beaches statewide at once. “If you can do it for one, you can do it for all,” Tuck said. “For us, it’s not an economic issue, but is a quality of life issue for residents.”
Norfolk City Manager Chip Filer issued a statement Tuesday saying City Council members were being inundated with questions from residents asking why Norfolk’s beaches weren’t reopening.
Filer said he was in touch with Northam as the decision to reopen Virginia Beach was being made. The city manager issued the statement Tuesday to emphasize that Norfolk’s seven miles of bayfront at Ocean View are different from Virginia Beach.
Ocean View, Filer said, is largely used by locals for recreation, and is still open for exercise and fishing. Virginia Beach’s waterfront, meantime, is geared toward tourism — and the big business that follows.
“Norfolk is hopeful that Virginia Beach visitors adhere to the guidelines so the Governor will ease restrictions on other Virginia localities with beach amenities,” Filer said in the statement. “Norfolk will be ready when that day comes.”
Under Northam’s coronavirus restrictions, put into place in March, beaches are closed except for “exercise” — widely interpreted as running and walking — and fishing.
But other beach activities — such as sunbathing, swimming, surfing, picnicking, and playing in the surf and sand — are barred.
At his Monday press conference, Northam announced that Virginia Beach’s 28 miles of waterfront — as well as the nearby First Landing State Park — could open up with social distancing restrictions.
“Virginia Beach officials have been working for some time on a comprehensive plan for how to reopen the beaches while maintaining safety and social and physical distance,” Northam said.
The governor said that when he saw the first draft of Virginia Beach’s reopening plan, he directed Virginia Secretary of Natural Resources Matthew Strickler to work with the city to “toughen” it up.
The result, Northam said, was a robust program.
It allows “sunbathing and swimming,” he said, but bars group sports, alcohol, stereo speakers and groupings of tents and umbrellas. It also requires social distancing, enhanced cleaning of “high touch areas” and parking capped at half the normal capacity.
Virginia Beach spokeswoman Julie Hill said Friday that the city worked with the business community on the reopening plan, first submitting it to Northam on May 1.
It’s a $3 million plan, she said, that includes the hiring of up to 150 “beach ambassadors” to deal with the public, new cleaning crews and lots of new beach signage.
“It’s not an inexpensive proposition to stand up the infrastructure on top of all the things that we normally do to groom the beaches and that kind of thing,” Hill said. “The resources the City Council agreed to put toward it does reflect the importance of (the beach opening) to us.”
At a Monday news conference, Northam encouraged “other beach localities to use the Virginia Beach plan as a model” for operating “once they are allowed to open back up.”
A spokeswoman for Northam, Alena Yarmosky, said Northam’s office was in touch with several localities regarding beach access.
“As of last Monday, when the Governor announced expanded access in Virginia Beach, they were the only locality that had submitted a comprehensive, enforceable plan to ensure safety,” Yarmosky wrote in an email. “The Governor welcomes similarly robust plans from other localities, if and when they are ready to do so.”
Bunting, Hampton’s city manager, said she spoke with the state Natural Resources secretary before the governor granted the Virginia Beach exception. “I explained that we are prepared to follow the same plan that Virginia Beach outlined,” she said.
But based on that conversation, Bunting said, “it was clear … that it was never anticipated that anyone else would be able to get (to open) in terms of Memorial Day.”
“They didn’t foresee letting us open until the second phase,” she said. “They said the governor was only going to open Virginia Beach, and he saw that as a pilot — to see how their protocols worked, and how people responded to those protocols.”
On Thursday, Bunting sent Northam a 43-page plan to open Hampton’s beaches at Buckroe, Fort Monroe, Grandview and Salt Ponds.
“I didn’t want anyone thinking that our failure to submit something was impacting a potential beach reopening,” she said Thursday evening.
It’s a scaled-down version of Virginia Beach’s plan.
“The City of Hampton respectfully requests consideration for reopening City-owned beaches as soon as possible,” Bunting wrote in a cover letter to Northam.
“Although tourism is encouraged and the economic impacts of remaining closed are considerable, these beaches are largely residential and frequently used by those citizens who live nearby for recreation and relaxation, a much-needed respite under current COVID-19 conditions,” she wrote.
In the meantime, Bunting said, the city is enforcing Northam’s restrictions: When people aren’t running or walking on the beach, she said, they are politely asked to move along.
“We’re constantly working with people to make sure they have the proper information,” she said. “When we give people the proper information, they may not like it, but they comply.”
In York County, County Administrator Neil Morgan said the county has no plans to reopen the beach until beaches are reopened statewide.
There’s no comparison to Virginia Beach, he said. “The Virginia Beach waterfront is a gigantic commercial operation … and a gigantic economic driver for the city,” Morgan said.
“They have thousands of hotel rooms and hundreds of restaurants and are dependent on people coming there to the beach,” he said. “In their case, it makes good sense to spend a significant sum to render the beach partially usable in a safe way.”
But Yorktown Beach, Morgan said, is only 20 yards wide — compared to 200 yards in Virginia Beach — and isn’t an economic driver.
“I don’t believe it would be practical for us to develop and pay for a plan analogous to what they did,” he said. “By the time we figured all that out, and a way to pay for all that, we’re probably going to be in phase 2 in a couple weeks, and it’ll just be reopened.”
Morgan said the Yorktown Beach’s small size is why the county has kept it closed even for exercise in recent weeks.
“We were running into tons of gray areas,” he said. “People would say, ‘What’s wrong with letting your kid wade in the water?’ And the answer is nothing’s wrong with it. … It’s just so small that very few people are enough to break the social justice distancing rules.”
In the meantime, Morgan said, people are free to use a large grassy area at the waterfront that is sometimes called “the picnic area.”
“You can lay down a blanket and look at the water, throw a Frisbee,” he said. “You can physically enjoy the Yorktown waterfront … We’re just asking you not to bunch up on that little 15-yard-wide piece of sand until we get the all-clear that it’s safe.”
Staff writer Ryan Murphy contributed to this report.
Peter Dujardin, 757-247-4749, pdujardin@dailypress.com
