ORANGE BEACH, Ala. – News that Gov. Robert Bentley had decided against building an extension of the Foley Beach Express through Gulf State Park came as quite a surprise to officials on Pleasure Island.

But Orange Beach Mayor Tony Kennon, while disappointed, remains undaunted.

“My concern was OK, if you don’t want to go through the state park that’s fine, but what’s plan B?” he said Friday morning.

But there are no concrete plans to find some relief for growing traffic concerns in his city.

“Where we’re at is I don’t know where we’re at,” Kennon said with a chuckle.

Bentley, who had been a proponent of building the cross island connector from the end of the toll road to beach road, said in a Wednesday meeting in Foley he no longer backed the plan. He did say, however, he still wants a convention center on the beach.

The governor was in Foley on Wednesday to announce support for passage of insurance legislation and to support other insurance legislation still pending. During the luncheon he also mentioned the nixing of the cross island parkway.

“We met with the governor after the luncheon and he committed to getting Director (John) Cooper with ALDOT together with us reevaluating the whole situation and looking at all options,” Kennon said. “The point being we’ve got to be able to move traffic down here in all directions if we are going to continue to grow the tourist economy. We cannot ignore traffic issues. And we can’t put them on the back burner for another five or 10 years.

“It seems like he took all that to heart and was trying to get all the folks that should be involved at the table.”

City officials had been told that the widening of Canal Road to five lanes was considered an important and immediate need by the state. When the idea of the cross island parkway was hatched, Orange Beach officials began a study on how to make Canal Road more pedestrian friendly and more like a traditional downtown.

Using a $30,000 grant from the Mobile Bay Estuary Program and the Dauphin Island Sea Lab, the city planned to study what changes are needed in zoning laws to allow changes to give Canal Road that downtown look.

“All I know was they told us the Canal Road project and/or the expressway extension or cross island parkway or whatever you want to call it, were at the top of the priority list and that’s what we’ve been told since Gov. Bentley took office,” Kennon said. “It was very surprising when we heard this the other day because none of us down here had been told that was not an option anymore.

“And again, if they deemed that that’s not appropriate then tell us what plan B is. But to do nothing just doesn’t make any sense.”

The governor still has hopes of building what Kennon said he called a “lodge and conference center.” The governor, Kennon says, hopes to use NRDA or RESTORE money to build that complex.

Natural Resource Damage Assessment is a grant program to help out areas hit by environmental disasters and is administered through the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, or NOAA.

BP will be fined under the Clean Water Act and the Restore Act is an attempt to redirect that money from the U.S. Treasury to communities hit hardest by the oil spill.