A Virginia Beach Neighborhood Association Founded in 1944
Thanks to our helpers (esp the little ones!) who came out on Sunday morning to pick up trash left behind after the fireworks! The beach was pretty cleaned up already- thanks to all the fireworks spectators! You really tidied up behind yourselves! We met at Froggies afterwards and enjoyed an icy cold mimosa (juice for the little ones) ! Also thank you Froggies for delivering ice cold water at the beach access for our helpers! It hit the spot! Thanks to all!
Fourth of July neighborhood walk.. always 10:00 a.m. on the 4th starts corner of Surry and Albermarle.
The Weldon Cooper Center and its UVA partners briefed City Council on June 20, 2023 in their afternoon informal session on the community engagement efforts regarding the Election District structure for the City of Virginia Beach. A decision must be made prior to the 2024 election cycle about whether to keep the current 10 districts + mayor or go to a 7 district+3 super districts + mayor. Here is the PowerPoint from the presentation. Also here are links to the Briefing to the City Council that explains the powerpoint slides and also you can read the complete report: Full Report. The briefing describes the methodology for the probability based survey which provided the raw data which was analyzed in the report. They also conveyed the themes that were heard from the non-probability based open source survey. The comments from the public sessions and the online survey that were submitted to Speakup.gov through June 14, 2023 were downloaded and provided directly to City Council members. The City Council members will address this question in their August retreat and a decision on whether they will also put a referendum on the November ballot will be made. You can contact city council members with your view: citycouncil@vbgov.com
From Mary Faust: Thank you to the lovely folks who came out this morning to help with the cleanup of Pleasure House Point Natural Area! It was certainly a pretty day!! Debbie and Tetsuo were early arriving followed by Michael and Connie Pearman (he was under strict orders to avoid finding huge car parts this time!!) Our OPCL President, Danny Murphy, showed up ready to work as he always does!! Dori and Lindsey with their 4 littles eagerly headed out followed by Chili Cookoff Champ Josh Montgomery with his family Anita and Savannah with their mighty (little dog!!) Cujo!! Reid and Stephanie Baker showed up as did Sandy and Mike Dawe (I have got to find a vegan treat for you guys!), followed by Blair and Jeff Valdivieso and Beth King who spotted monofilament with bird feathers hanging over the pond (of course you did!! Haha!!) Everyone commented on how little trash there was but we ended with 10 bags and approximately 70 pounds of refuse. Many hands make light work!! Thanks to you all!!
From our Fireworks master Jill Doczi comes the second installment of how the Independence Day Fireworks funded by individual contributions came about:
“July 2011: Our first authorized show in 2010, organized by our Ocean Park Civic League president, Rick Mercadante, was a huge hit. In his words, “We started the summer by celebrating our nation’s birth with a fantastic fireworks display that exceeded all expectations. I was proud of the way our neighborhood came together in a grassroots effort to make this happen. What a great country to live in, and even better, what a great neighborhood we live in.
Rick’s accomplishment set the ball in motion for our new, safer tradition, and it did indeed accomplish the goal of curbing the night-long illegal fireworks along our beach. However, at the end of his commitment to our country, he received his final call — to Djibouti. Before he left, Rick asked me to take on his project. If someone didn’t keep it rolling, we wouldn’t have a fireworks celebration of our country’s independence anymore on our beach.
As a child, fireworks seemed magical to me. The anticipation of the explosions followed by the surprise of colorful displays were a once-a-year treat in Roanoke if we were lucky enough to have someone drive us downtown, find parking, squeeze into bleachers with thousands of others and watch our city display over a football field. At the time Rick asked me, I had small children who had only ever known the un-hassled Independence Day tradition of walking down to the beach with family and friends to watch fireworks with reflections on the water and the sound of waves as the backdrop to our “Ooooos” and “Ahhhhhs.” I wanted them to grow up with those memories. I agreed with hesitation. Little did we know, this would be a learning year.”
Walking Club start up! Would you like to join in with your neighbors in a walking club? Gathering info now: when? how often? where? If you are interested contact: Julie Vance or communication.org.
Dear Sponsors of the Ocean Park Civic League’s George Lyon Memorial Scholarship,
I would like to share my deepest gratitude for your scholarship. It will help me greatly in the years to come! Money has been the greatest hurdle for my family to send me to college. I am deeply touched by your generosity to us overcome this obstacle. I am thrilled to start the next chapter of my life studying at my dream university, Virginia Tech, and carry the values of service and community into my studies and future endeavors.
Rest assured that, with your help, I will one day sit in your position and provide my own scholarship to students like myself,
Thanking you again,
Coren Huff
First of all thank you to this year’s volunteers on the Scholarship Committee: Natalie McIntyre, Rachael Beutler, and Blair Valdivieso from committee chair Betty Dierstein. She says, “We had 20 applications and it takes time to read and evaluate each packet so I appreciate the time they spent in helping make this selection. This year’s recipient is Coren Huff who is graduating from the Global Studies and World Language Academy at Tallwood High School. She will be attending Virginia Tech in the fall majoring in International Relations and Spanish with a minor in Ecological Cities. She has a 4.233 grade pt average and volunteered over 400 hours with her church and other groups. She also works a part-time job, is a member of the Global Studies Honor Society, participated in the US Youth Ambassador Study Abroad Program, the Junior World Affairs Council at Tallwood, was a member of the National Spanish Honor Society-just to name a few of her activities. Some of the awards she has received: AP Scholar of Distinction, Future World Language Educator Award, Virginia Seal of Biliteracy in Spanish and English and the Global World Studies Butterfly Effect Award. In her essay, Coren mentions the Butterfly Effect ” the idea that small, seemingly trivial events may ultimately result in something with much larger consequences.“- a fitting characterization of the effect achieved by volunteer service.”
Betty attended the Tallwood Awards Ceremony on Tuesday, June 10 to present the scholarship award to Coren. She reports that Coren is a personable, polite and very grateful student!” Congratulations to Coren!
Jill Doczi tells the story of how our fireworks show came about:
In the past, neighbors celebrated the day of our nation’s independence starting at sundown and continuing into the early morning hours with their own fireworks on the beaches. From Little Creek Amphibious Base to First Landing State Park, we had a stunning array of light and sound from everything between small sparklers and thousands-of-dollars mini-shows, all illegal, but impressive as a whole for a community.
Over the years, the word spread, and people from outside the community flocked to participate. Sometimes those people showed up a little under-the-influence, excited to share their self-taught pyrotechnic skills. Sometimes they didn’t care as much about the safety of neighbors and sometimes they didn’t have the skills they thought they did — resulting errant shots into dry dune grass, onto roofs and into crowds. Hundreds of fireworks shooting in all directions up and down the beach did start to resemble a war movie.
In 2009, we experienced the Great Fireworks Crackdown. Due to some serious safety issues from the previous year, the city launched a very militant effort to stop the illegal use of fireworks on the Fourth of July along the Shore Drive beaches. In addition to increased beach patrols, they staged police and fire marshal staff at every access entrance. They checked coolers, bags and buggies for explosives and meted out severe penalties. It worked. Fireworks celebrations of Independence Day appeared to have ended on our beaches.
The community realized that maybe it had gotten out-of-hand and unsafe, but we weren’t willing to give up the tradition. How could we celebrate our country in the same patriotic way that centuries of Americans before us have, while not setting each other and our neighborhoods on fire?
In 2010, our then civic league president, Rick Mercadante, proposed we raise funds for a professional show. The city agreed. Word-of-mouth and a loan from the civic league launched our first authorized fireworks show in July 2010.
Ocean Park Civic League 