To the Virginia Marine Resources Commission:

House Bill 1834 (2025) transferred administration of the Virginia Waterway Maintenance Grant Program and Fund (WMF) from the Virginia Port Authority to the Virginia Marine Resources Commission. The General Assembly’s purpose in enacting this reform was to ensure that the WMF is managed in a way that is fair, transparent, and responsive to the needs of rural coastal communities — especially those on Virginia’s Eastern Shore, where access to safe navigation channels is indispensable for working waterfronts, seafood industries, aquaculture, and public safety.

While VMRC has taken important steps to assume this new responsibility, several elements of the draft guidance do not reflect the statute or legislative intent, and if left uncorrected, will place Eastern Shore communities at a disadvantage.

One concern is the omission of the statutory “25-year lease exception.” Section 28.2-108.2(B)(3) of the Code of Virginia prohibits WMF grants for a solely privately owned marina or dock, but explicitly allows eligibility where a locality holds a lease of at least 25 years over privately owned bottomlands. This exception is particularly important on the Eastern Shore, where historic land grants have conveyed private ownership of submerged lands in creeks and channels. Navigation routes leading to community harbors such as Willis Wharf or Quinby may cross these privately deeded bottoms. If the lease exception is not recognized in the guidance, projects in these waterways will be excluded from eligibility even though the statute provides otherwise.

A second issue is the guidance’s reliance on “sole discretion” to describe VMRC’s decision-making. The statute requires that applications be evaluated using specific criteria, such as public benefit, urgency, environmental impact, and the availability of other funding sources. Small counties like Accomack and Northampton cannot afford to prepare detailed applications without assurance that they will be judged according to these objective standards. The guidance should therefore replace “sole discretion” with explicit reference to the statutory criteria.

Third, although the statute prohibits any local match requirement, the draft introduces “special consideration” for applicants providing a 3:1 match. This creates a de facto preference for localities with greater fiscal capacity, a standard that Eastern Shore counties cannot meet. Northampton County, for example, has just over 11,000 residents, and Accomack about 34,000, with tax bases heavily dependent on seafood and aquaculture rather than diversified industry. A scoring preference for match contributions undermines the statutory prohibition and disadvantages precisely the communities the WMF is designed to serve.

Another concern is the inclusion of a “no competitive disadvantage to public ports” test. This condition has no basis in HB 1834 or the Code and is a carryover from VPA policy. It is especially misplaced on the Eastern Shore, where the relevant facilities are county-owned community harbors such as Oyster Harbor, Willis Wharf, and Quinby Harbor. These small working harbors support local seafood landings and watermen’s livelihoods; they do not compete with large ports. Imposing this requirement would, in practice, exclude the very projects HB 1834 sought to prioritize.

The draft also interprets federal partnership projects too narrowly. The statute authorizes WMF to fund the nonfederal share of federal projects conducted “by the Commonwealth.” VMRC’s draft guidance appears to read this phrase as excluding local governments from serving as nonfederal sponsors. In practice, however, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers almost always designates counties, towns, or regional entities as sponsors in Virginia. On the Eastern Shore, federal maintenance of channels like Wachapreague Inlet and Oyster Harbor has historically depended on local sponsorship and coordination. If local governments are not recognized as eligible sponsors under WMF, the Shore’s most common pathway to federal cost-sharing will be cut off. The guidance should explicitly affirm the eligibility of counties and towns as nonfederal sponsors.

Another critical issue is the payment structure and timeline proposed in the draft guidance. VMRC has indicated a preference for processing payments on a quarterly schedule. However, dredging projects operate on highly compressed timelines that do not align with quarterly disbursements. For example, the entirety of the Kings Creek dredging project was completed in less than 45 days. During that period, over $1.38 million in payments had to be made to contractors. Neither the Accomack-Northampton Planning District Commission (A-NPDC) nor the counties have the financial capacity to front this amount of funding for three months while awaiting reimbursement. A practical solution would be for VMRC to release approved grant funds in advance to the sponsoring locality, which could deposit the funds into an interest-bearing account such as the Local Government Investment Pool (LGIP) or another Treasury-approved account. The locality could then draw on the funds as invoices come due and submit quarterly reports and drawdown documentation to VMRC. This approach ensures accountability while also preventing project delays or stoppages due to cash-flow constraints.

Finally, the draft guidance structurally advantages federally sponsored projects by layering match preferences on top of the Corps’ standard 65–90 percent federal cost share. This combination ensures that federally partnered projects will dominate the program. But the Eastern Shore’s navigation system is not limited to Corps-maintained channels. Numerous creeks, secondary harbor basins, and access routes — while critical for watermen, aquaculture operators, and recreational boaters — are outside the scope of federal maintenance cycles or receive only infrequent dredging. Even in federally authorized projects such as Oyster, Willis Wharf, and Quinby, federal funding has not been sufficient to meet recurring local needs. If WMF scoring tilts too heavily toward federal partnerships, these locally significant projects will be disadvantaged, leaving gaps in safe access and economic activity.

In conclusion, the WMF was restructured by HB 1834 to ensure that Virginia’s rural coastal communities — and most urgently the Eastern Shore — receive fair and effective support for their navigation needs. To align with the statute and legislative intent, VMRC should restore the 25-year lease exception, apply statutory criteria instead of “sole discretion,” eliminate match-based preferences, remove the competitive disadvantage test, affirm local governments as eligible nonfederal sponsors, revise the payment structure to align with dredging project realities, and rebalance scoring so that non-federal local projects remain fully competitive. By making these corrections, VMRC will honor both the letter and the spirit of HB 1834, ensuring that the Eastern Shore’s working waterfronts, seafood landings, and community harbors remain viable for generations to come.

Respectfully submitted,

 

Elaine Meil

Executive Director
Accomack-Northampton Planning District Commission