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Virginia Beach — This past year has been a turbulent one for the council.
With the pandemic still looming, the next wave of council members will have the difficult task of steering the direction of the city.
Due to COVID-19, residents have voted early in record numbers to decide whether they approve of the current leadership. Five of 11 City Council members, including the mayor, are on the ballot. Voters select representatives for each district regardless of where the voters live.
The Virginian-Pilot earlier published election guides laying out each candidate’s biographical information and their answers to the same three questions. You can read those at pilotonline.com/voterguide2020.
Here’s what you need to know about the candidates in each race.
At-Large
Virginia Beach city council has two at-large representatives who are tasked with staying on top of issues affecting all districts in the city. One of those seats is up for election.
Three candidates are vying for the position: Councilwoman Rosemary Wilson, a realtor, who has held an at-large council seat since 2000; Brandon Hutchins, a network support consultant for a healthcare company and Navy veteran; and Nadine Paniccia, an advertising sales executive for Vacation Sales Associates.
Wilson, 70, was a teacher and has served on the Virginia Beach School Board. She has steadily gained endorsements through the years from police and teachers. This year she was endorsed by Virginia Beach Republicans. Wilson has raised more than $70,000, which includes a handful of $5,000 donations from Virginia Beach developers.
In 2019, when the Beach district seat opened for a special election, Wilson decided to run for it. She lost to Councilman Guy Tower who was temporarily serving in the position. Wilson was able to keep her at-large seat.
She served on a steering committee that drafted a 10-year plan for the resort area. She has promoted an idea to pair the city with a nonprofit to create public amenities at Rudee Loop. Wilson was also a proponent of establishing a resort management office to deal with zoning and safety issues on Atlantic Avenue.
Hutchins, who earned an endorsement from local Democrats, kicked off his “Reimagine Virginia Beach” campaign in September with a weekly district-by-district tour.
“I’m running for City Council because we need new voices and new ideas,” Hutchins, 39, said in a press release.
He’s a proponent of creating new jobs that help the city retain young people.
Hutchins has raised about $14,000 from mostly small-dollar donors.
Among his endorsers are Congresswoman Elaine Luria and Tower.
In a campaign video on his Facebook page, Hutchins implores voters to choose him. “What if we were the same beautiful city but we added culture, we added youth, we invigorated our city with new investment, new opportunities to allow everyone to participate in economic development, not just influential friends of council people," he said in the video. "That’s the Virginia Beach that I want to reimagine.”
While Virginia Beach city council members are nonpartisan, at-large candidate Paniccia is touting herself as an independent who won’t be swayed by what a political party dictates.
She’s a board member of the Back Bay Restoration Foundation and self-proclaimed activist “for all things flooding.”
Paniccia, 57, has informed voters that she “won’t accept shiny new project funding before flood mitigation, infrastructure maintenance and sustainable development.”
She prides herself on being a fiscally conservative businesswoman.
Centerville
Councilwoman Sabrina Wooten, 45, was first elected almost two years ago. More than 61% of voters selected her to finish the remainder of Bobby Dyer’s council term, which opened up when he ran for mayor in 2018. She is facing funeral director Eric Wray, one of the candidates who lost to her in 2018. As of Aug. 30, Wooten reported fundraising $35,734, and Wray reported $2,745.
Wooten is a former member of the city’s Minority Business Council. She has continued her passion for growing small businesses owned by minorities, women and military members, otherwise known as SWAM businesses, during her time on the council. At a recent candidate forum, Wooten said if she is reelected, she will continue to prioritize helping small businesses and residents connect with resources that will help them weather the pandemic.
She has been an advocate for police reform and racial equality. Wooten taught Introduction to African-American Studies during the fall semester of 2019 as an adjunct professor at Old Dominion University.
After a mass shooting at the Municipal Center on May 31, Wooten wanted to ban guns from all city buildings. While city employees are not allowed to carry weapons inside city buildings, the public can. The council did not vote to support this idea.
Wray, 40, said he supports people carrying weapons in city buildings and throughout the city.
The Virginia Family PAC, authorized by Wray, released an ad on Oct. 8 condemning Wooten’s financial issues and a petit larceny charge from 1994, according to court records. “She sits on City Council controlling your tax dollars when she couldn’t control her own reckless and irresponsible spending,” the ad said. The PAC is registered to property located in Bedford County owned by Teofil Grochowski Jr., according to state financial disclosures and property records.
In 2017, Wooten filed for chapter 7 bankruptcy. She reported having more than $467,000 in liabilities, including nearly $210,000 in student loans, more than $30,000 in credit card debt, and a loan from a 2011 Mercedes Benz she got in 2015, according to court records.
“This was an unfortunate situation that culminated from a failed marriage and the mounting debt that was left behind while being a single mother,” she wrote in a statement on Facebook.
Much of Wooten’s debt, however, was assumed after her divorce filing in 2008 and she was remarried at the time of her bankruptcy.
As for the larceny charge, Wooten said she was a teenager who demonstrated poor judgment while working as a cashier at a department store and authorized discounts on merchandise to friends, which resulted in the criminal charge.
“Today, I am here to inform you that I am a better person for this experience as I understand the cost of such a mistake,” she said.
Kempsville
Incumbent councilwoman Jessica Abbott, a flood insurance agent and small business owner, faces Bill Dale, a financial advisor, for the Kempsville seat.
Abbott, 31, joined the council in 2017 as the youngest member to be elected. Flooding has always been one of her top priorities.
“Our city’s future is only as bright as the commitments we make today in preparing our stormwater infrastructure to be resilient,” Abbott said.
Abbott has raised around $25,000 and has been endorsed by the local Republican party.
She’s married to a Virginia Beach public school teacher. Among her recent activity on council: Abbott co-sponsored budgets that increased pay for school and city employees, reduced class sizes and expanded full-day kindergarten. She voted to add first responder positions and funded a workforce development program to improve recruitment and retention of police officers.
Abbott also supported the resolution this year for Virginia Beach to become a “Second Amendment Constitutional City.”
Bill Dale, 72, who has run for the city council in the past, is challenging Abbott. Dale has lived in Kempsville for 40 years and is a former Roman Catholic priest. He has been endorsed by the Virginia Beach Democratic Committee.
Among his concerns: how the pandemic has disrupted citizens lives and how it will impact businesses that rely on tourism dollars.
“This in turn can have a serious impact on the financial well being of our city and the required funding of our schools and city services,” Dale wrote on his campaign’s website.
He believes he can bring to the city council the qualities that are needed during this challenging time, including empathetic leadership.
Dale has served on the Human Rights Commission and other community committees. He has raised around $10,000.
“None of us can claim to have all the answers or the solution for every problem we face,” Dale said. “Nevertheless, if we can listen to each other with a spirit of openness I have no doubt but that we can find some resolution.”
Rose Hall
In 2019, Michael Berlucchi, 40, was appointed to replace Shannon Kane after she decided to resign from her position to relocate to another district with her family and run for the House of Delegates. Voters overwhelmingly supported his election last November and he is back on the ballot seeking his first full four-year term. He has fundraised more than $65,000, as of campaign finance reports last filed on Aug. 30. He also has the backing of the local Republican party.
He is facing challenges from Conrad Schesventer, 33, a front desk worker at an Oceanfront hotel, and Garry Hubbard, 72, a construction contractor and U.S. Navy veteran. Both have run unsuccessfully for City Council before. Schesventer lost to Berlucchi last year. Neither candidate had fundraised more than $5,000 at last report.
Berlucchi is a community and government relations manager at the Chrysler Museum of Art.
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Before joining the council last year, Berlucchi was a member of the Virginia Beach Human Rights Commission. He also served as the former president of Hampton Roads Pride and the founding co-chairman of Virginia Beach for Fairness, a group created to advocate for statewide LGBT protections.
The Rose Hall district includes several neighborhoods that have been heavily impacted by flooding and the city has a backlog of projects that would alleviate the problem. Some of those projects have been delayed due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Schesventer and Hubbard said the council should not delay the projects any further, and aid should be distributed faster to businesses impacted by COVID-19.
“We need to get capital into the hands of businesses so they can function,” said Schesventer, who earned the endorsement of the Virginia Beach Democratic Committee.
If re-elected, Berlucchi said he would develop plans to allocate federal CARES Act funding to ensure residents, businesses and nonprofits get assistance needed to recover from the finance stresses caused by COVID-19. During a recent candidate forum, he said he will prioritize making sure businesses have a chance to succeed and find ways to keep tax burdens small.
Stacy Parker, 222-5125, stacy.parker@pilotonline.com
Alissa Skelton, 757-995-9043, alissa.skelton@pilotonline.com.