Greening Chesapeake

Come out for Chesapeake's first big Earth Day festival at Campostella Square Park (next to the Cuffee Center). Thank you to the Climate Action Network for organizing the event! There will be games, music, and educational activities. There will be free native trees and plants available for adoption, thanks to the Virginia Cooperative Extension - Chesapeake and the Chesapeake Environmental Improvement Council Tree Board. Come out and celebrate Earth Day! Location: Campostella Square Park, 2019 Windy Rd, Chesapeake, VA, 23224

  The next Green Drinks will be Tuesday, March 26, 2024 from 6 pm to 8 pm at YNot Italian in Greenbrier, 1036 Volvo Parkway, Suite 7 Chesapeake, VA, 23320. We're scheduled to have a guest speakers, Kevin Finn and Emma Jones, from the Planning Department, to discuss on-going activity to update the City Comprehensive Plan. The City of Chesapeake is working on revising its Comprehensive Plan as several sub-plans including a new Trails and Connectivity Plan. Keeping abreast of the progress of these plans and discussing ways to contribute to the development of these plans will be a theme for our meetings this year.

Update 2:  Urge Governor Youngkin to sign HB529 and HB1100 into law to ensure our community is able to conserve and plant more trees that will benefit the health of all Virginians! Contact him today -  https://p2a.co/dT5K6jN   Update: Both of these bills have been passed by the House and Senate and are now heading for the Governor's desk for signature.  Stay tuned for any Action Alerts asking folks to contact the Governor to urge him to sign these bills.  There are several bills in the General Assembly that would give the City of Chesapeake the option to do more to protect trees and restore tree canopy during development.  Current state law limits how much Chesapeake can require of developers during construction.   HB 1100 would enable all counties, cities, and towns in Virginia to adopt tree conservation ordinances to conserve healthy mature trees during construction projects.  HB 529 would increase how much canopy must be replaced when trees are cut down during development.   B

Action Alert: The Hampton Roads Transportation Planning Organization (HRTPO) is asking for feedback on its proposed Exploratory Scenario Planning approach for the 2050 Long-Range Transportation Plan. This is apparently a plan on how to do the plan by "asking what could happen?" rather than try to predict what will happen or picking a preferred scenario.  The stated objective is to "evaluate candidate [transportation] projects across ALL plausible future scenarios."  The big gap that I see is the lack of any criteria for how they would evaluate candidate transportation projects.  While the stated goal is "understanding how our system responds to different 'drivers of change' and increased growth, [and then] make better informed decisions about priorities and investments", my concern is that this will result in self-fulfilling prophecies. If we end up planning to build infrastructure to support the worst-case scenarios, i.e. suburban and exurban sp