Month: May 2018

Vicki Roberson, of the Colonial Beach School Board, has just declared she is running for Town Council. That adds her to the three other declared candidates, Bill Dellar, Phil Rogers, and Robin Schick.

 

There are three open seats for the November 6th General Election. Those seats are held by Rogers, Dellar and Burkett Lyburn.

Write-up by Robin Schick

 

Quickly approaching is our 7th Annual Save the Bay Day in Colonial Beach.  On June 2nd between 8:30 – 9:30 am we will be registering volunteer participants for cleaning up the trash along our shorelines and streets in town.

 

The last 6 years we have hosted between 100-150 participants annually in this event, and we are looking forward to this year being Lucky Number 7 and just as great!  When you come register that morning you are provided gloves, large neon orange construction trash bags, bottles water, and a t-shirt promoting awareness for this event (as available).  After volunteers spend 2 +/- hours collecting trash in town they leave their bags by the roadside for the very helpful courtesy pick-up the town offers for the event, then the volunteers return to home base to record what progress was made and to enjoy a hot lunch after their dedicated morning effort.

 

Our mission, aligned with the Chesapeake Bay Foundation, is to actively promote environmental stewardship of the water and shoreline we so enjoy and to maintain the beauty of our community.  We encourage families, youth groups, and people of all ages to participate together, creating a stronger sense of pride and collaboration in our small wonderful town.

 

This one day a year we ask a lot of our volunteers, but we also have to ask a lot of our community in order to support this event.  Each year we ask for signage, supplies, water, promotion, and lunch by donations from our local businesses and civic organizations and we can’t be thankful enough to each one that continues to make this event possible.  We need each and every donation.

 

IF we can exceed our operation costs we hope that this year, lucky number 7, we can expand to host not only our annual clean-up day and the 100+ people that join us but to also begin an oyster restoration project that will continue cleaning the bay all year long.

 

This year we ask if it is possible for you to make even a $20 donation to this event.  Please help grow our wave of improvement to the environmental quality we so love about our community.

 

Honestly, our efforts may be small and may seem very minute to the bigger issues our natural environment faces.  But we have to start somewhere and now for 6 years in a row we have hundreds of people walking, kayaking, wading, and climbing our beaches to remove the plastic, rubber, and waste of years gone by when before no one did any of this.  Each year we take a step and leave it better than we found it, making now years of success, and more than 1,500 man hours of trash pick-up in the town of Colonial Beach.

 

Thank you for your consideration and, if you are able, please join us this year on

June 2nd at Colonial Beach Yacht Center to help us Save the Bay!

 

To make a Donation Contact:

Robin Schick at (804) 761-5366, schick.robinmae@gmail.com

or

Mitzi Saffos at (804) 224-0996, mitzisaffos@yahoo.com

or

Donate via Paypal at: https://paypal.me/pools/c/84r31mMTq9

Colonial Beach is a town of rumors. The town council is known to joke about rumors in the town at various meetings over the years.

Sometimes, however, the rumor mill is actually true. Rumors of statues have been swirling for some time. Statues related to the pedestrian plaza on Colonial Avenue do exist. As part of the Virginia Department of Transportation’s transportation alternatives grant program, a grant had been awarded in the amount of $547,000.

Unfortunately, the plaza will not come to full fruition as the plans designed for it would have cost double what was granted. The town will still be able to resurface a portion of the town’s boardwalk, but the plaza with the intended splash park and statues will not happen.

The two statues were commissioned at a cost of $90,000 a figure of a man and a woman disembarking from a steamship, in the dress of that era, were sculpted. The town was directed to go forward with the statues under the direction of Land Studios, PC. And Jerry Davis of the Northern Neck Planning Division as they would take a long time to finish.

VDOT did not see the statues as worthy of the grant money and would not reimburse the town for them.

Councilman Bill Dellar said, “We wanted to use the grant fund, but we paid for the statues before the grant (monies) had been awarded.”

Steve Cirbee, who is also on the council said, “The people who know what they are doing led us astray.”

With the plaza not happening as originally planned the town has looked for a buyer for the statues with no interest. That is not to say that the statues could not be used elsewhere. There are plenty of places they could be installed to draw interest to the town.

In fact, art and culture tourists spend more time, and money, in various locals than visitors of any other type. Colonial Beach has a thriving art culture with a large Artist’s Guild and many other artists in the town and surrounding areas.

Even though it is no longer open year round the JarrettThor gallery is hosting privately run shows, Shirl Rush has a gallery just down the street and monthly art walks are heavily attended at the galleries, local realtors, and the Potomac River Fisheries Commission.