DATE: Saturday, March 29, 1997              TAG: 9703290279

SECTION: LOCAL                   PAGE: B1   EDITION: FINAL 

SOURCE: BY BILL REED, STAFF WRITER 

DATELINE: VIRGINIA BEACH                    LENGTH:   87 lines

MERCHANTS FEAR POSSIBLE LASKIN ROAD CHANGES VIRGINIA BEACH MAY ALTER TRAFFIC, PARKING NEAR THE OCEANFRONT.

Laskin Road has been around for 70 years, carrying locals and tourists alike from Virginia Beach Boulevard in a straight shot to the Oceanfront at 31st Street.

There have been a few changes since the Laskin family built the four-mile strip in 1926 as a direct route to a housing development that never materialized. Plans are in the works for more changes.

And that has a group of today's Laskin Road merchants, especially those closest to the Oceanfront, worried.

Service station owner Gary Kimnach, spokesman for the group, said the merchants fear that plans being formulated by the city and the state will put them out of business by altering existing traffic patterns and removing on-street parking at the east end of Laskin Road.

What worries them even more, Kimnach said, is that they're having little success finding out what is going on.

``The property owners don't know,'' said Kimnach, owner of Beach Amoco at 332 Laskin Road. ``And if you call the city, they say they don't know.''

Actually, Kimnach, who has done most of the legwork on the project, and fellow merchants have learned in the past year that the city and state are contemplating a road improvement plan that eventually will be tied in with beautification efforts along Pacific Avenue.

Those plans, while not yet sanctioned by the City Council, offer two alternatives, City Engineer John Herzke said.

One calls for swinging eastbound traffic on Laskin Road around a Farm Fresh store at Baltic Avenue and onto 30th Street in a one-way flow to Pacific Avenue. Westbound traffic from the Oceanfront then would be routed on a one-way path along Laskin Road three blocks to a point near the entrance to the Farm Fresh store. Once rejoined somewhere near the supermarket entrance, Laskin Road would become a two-way street again.

This plan also calls for doing away with on-street parking in the three-block Laskin Road corridor between the supermarket and Atlantic Avenue, an area lined with restaurants, service stations, dry cleaning establishments and specialty shops.

The three-block area contains 22 businesses, employs more than 700 people and produces about $60 million in revenue, Kimnach points out.

A second alternative calls for maintaining existing traffic and widening Laskin Road to six lanes all the way from Birdneck Road to Pacific Avenue. On-street parking would be eliminated under this scenario as well.

``They're promoting one-way traffic down here and doing away with parking - we don't have parking down here now,'' lamented Louinda Jones of Wayne Jones Florist at 329 Laskin Road. ``I agree Laskin Road needs to be redone, but it will take a lot of traffic away.''

Eric Cohen, owner of North End Cyclery Ltd. at 400 Laskin Road, agrees. ``I'm opposed to them taking parking,'' he said. ``And I don't see the need for changing the traffic pattern. We're saying we were never really involved in the process.''

The process, it turns out, has consisted of two public hearings in the past year and a half on the proposed Laskin Road improvements and a recent public advisory that an ``environmental study'' is about to get under way as a preliminary step to drafting design plans for the road improvements.

This was confirmed last week by Winston D. Phillips, an engineer with the Richmond office of the Virginia Department of Transportation, which is overseeing the project.

It is the middle section of Laskin Road that will get immediate attention, Phillips said. This is the segment between First Colonial and North Birdneck roads. Plans call for widening the road to six lanes with a median strip and replacing the bridge halfway between the two roads. The cost for this middle section is an estimated $14 million, Phillips said. The money is in the state's six-year road building budget and construction is set to start in the spring of 2000.

The estimated cost of the entire project is $34 million, but there is no money budgeted for the two remaining Laskin Road segments right now, Phillips said. The city, meanwhile, has withdrawn its 2 percent contribution to all but the middle section of the planned Laskin Road work and is rechanneling it to the $261 million Southeastern Parkway and Greenbelt project, which has yet to get under way.

Money remains the main obstacle to the completion of the road improvements well into the 21st century, but this is of little comfort to property owners like Jeffrey Murden, whose family owns a strip shopping center at the northwest corner of Laskin Road and Baltic Avenue.

``I would probably have to say it's a joke,'' Murden said of the road improvement plans. ``It totally makes no sense to me. I don't think it's in our best interest.'' ILLUSTRATION: Graphic

Map

Area shown: Laskin Road KEYWORDS: LASKIN ROAD CONSTRUCTION

Send Suggestions or Comments to webmaster@scholar.lib.vt.edu