On one side of the Deep Creek Bridge sits a shopping center, home to 14 tenants — including some fast food chains, an auto mechanic and grocery store.
Drive over to the west side and you’ll find about two-thirds of an acre belonging to the Peterson family, property that once held an orthodontist practice but now sits mostly vacant.
Otherwise relatively ordinary, the two properties are the last holdouts of a multimillion-dollar project to build a wider replacement to the narrow 87-year-old bridge that connects them.
Listen to the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, which owns and maintains the bridge, and you’ll hear an agency keen on getting the project done. It’s much needed — the current two-lane bridge, built in 1934, is structurally sound but can’t sustain the amount of traffic it now sees.
A replacement has been pushed back time and again. Chesapeake residents have been hearing about the idea for about 20 years since the federal government first said it would need land to build a new, wider bridge.
Last year, Corps officials said they expected to finish the bridge by 2024. This week, they told City Council members it won’t happen until spring 2025.
If the two remaining property owners don’t want to accept what the Corps offers them as market value, they can have appraisals conducted and show the government the results.
“That is something we’ve continued to extend to landowners even as we got a second round of appraisals last fall,” Col. Patrick Kinsman, who leads the local Corps, said during a Tuesday night presentation to the council.
But talk to the property owners and you’ll hear frustration over a lack of fair negotiations and life under threat of condemnation. Despite the Corps’ saying landowners can get independent assessments, the Petersons feel strong-armed.
“All they do is they offer you a figure and if you don’t agree to that, that’s it,” said Brian Kunze, an attorney representing the Peterson family trust, which owns the .64 acres on the bridge’s west side. His client, Margaret Peterson, and her son, Mark, have had to “live with the cloud” of condemnation for several years, Kunze said.
Josh Baker, an attorney at Kunze’s firm, represents the shopping center. He says negotiations on his end have been slowed and made more cumbersome due to the owners having to work out multi-sided deals with utility companies that eventually will have to relocate for the project.
“Every ‘deadline’ that has been given for using the eminent domain power has come and gone with a new one being set for another six, nine or twelve months or none at all,” Baker wrote in an email to The Virginian-Pilot. “Placing property owners in this kind of limbo and uncertainty is fundamentally disrespectful and unfair to them and smacks of governmental tone deafness, if not arrogance.”
A Corps spokeswoman, Breeana Harris, said it’d be inappropriate for the agency to address concerns or complaints of a specific landowner in a public forum or in the newspaper.
“We are fully committed to providing due diligence in all aspects of the land acquisition required to successfully complete this project,” Harris wrote.
Last year, the Corps said it had acquired 32 of 40 parcels. They added one more in June and two more in December.
The two remaining properties are technically five parcels, two on one side of the creek and three on the other. Kinsman said they provided an updated appraisal in September but an agreement wasn’t reached.
“So we’re moving forward with condemnation,” Kinsman said.
The agency originally offered $425,000 for the Peterson property about three years ago, Kunze has told The Pilot. The offer rose to $490,000. Mark Peterson has said he believes the property is worth close to $1.5 million.
Kunze declined this week to talk specific numbers. He said the Corps already has threatened condemnation but hasn’t moved forward.
The Corps expects to be done with “real estate actions” by May, Kinsman told City Council members, meaning they will send a letter to the property owner advising them the government will begin the condemnation process to acquire the property. A “declaration of taking” is then routed to the U.S. Department of Justice, which Kinsman expects to take three or four months to finalize.
With the properties in government control, the agency expects to move forward with relocating the nearby utilities by September.
Property owners would then negotiate with the Department of Justice on a price for their land. If that didn’t work, the matter would move to federal court for a jury trial. All the time, the Corps could move forward on construction.
Peterson said he didn’t listen to Kinsman’s update this week. He’s been frustrated for years on the project. He regularly updates his elderly mother, who’s in an assisted living facility. He says she’s been losing out on money because she still has to pay taxes but can’t rent out or develop the land.
Who would want to be a tenant there knowing they might have to leave because the federal government wants to buy it up?
“She almost doesn’t want to talk about it,” Peterson said of his mother.
Peterson says his family are not the bad guys or trying to hold up progress. They want the bridge built.
“We’re not saying we want hundreds of millions of dollars,” he said in an interview.
Peterson welcomes the condemnation process because it would mean negotiating with a different agency and provide some light at the end of the tunnel.
The city calls it a vital project and supports the Corps’ efforts. Councilman Matt Hamel called it the No. 1 traffic infrastructure priority in the city.
For Kinsman, there’s no question of if.
The bridge will be built, he assured the city.
Gordon Rago, 757-446-2601, gordon.rago@pilotonline.com
