Opponents had hoped for a shot tonight at overturning a controversial complex of 144 garden apartments on Bridge Road, but the man who might have had the power to make that happen says he has no intention of doing so.

In the wake of a December City Council decision to approve a conditional use permit for the project after council members had previously assured Suffolk citizens apartments would never be built on the site, neighbors and other opponents have been looking for a way to get the 4-2 vote overturned.

“We’ve had (Virginia Beach attorney) Sonny Stallings and a bunch of people looking into this and trying to find an avenue,” Kitrell Eberwine, the adjacent neighbor of the project near Bennett’s Creek, said on Tuesday. “But if nothing’s done tomorrow night, that’s it.”

Eberwine and Stallings had considered a variety of options in response to council’s vote to approve the apartments project.

“I’m being told it would cost more than $100,000 to go to court,” Eberwine said. “I’ve spent over $20,000, and you see where that got me.”

Instead, he and Stallings alighted on the idea that one of the council members who had voted in favor of the project in December could ask during tonight’s meeting that council reconsider the issue.

Three of the four councilmen who voted in favor of allowing the project — in the face of strong opposition from neighbors, the city’s Planning Commission and the planning staff — were lame-duck members when they cast their votes. With their replacements now seated, Eberwine said, he had reason to believe a vote by the new council would not go the same way.

That left Whaleyville Borough Councilman Curtis R. Milteer as the linchpin for the strategy. As one of the original four members voting in favor of the project, Milteer, according to Stallings, was the one person with the legal ability to resurrect the issue.

So, Eberwine and Stallings said they asked Donald Goldberg, the new councilman from the Suffolk Borough, to speak to Milteer and ask for his help. Even if he wouldn’t change his vote, they reasoned, a Milteer motion to reconsider might very well result in the project being overturned.

But Milteer said he would not go along with the plan.

“The vote was final,” he said Tuesday. “One of the new council members mentioned (the scheme to reconsider) to me. You’re asking me are we considering flip-flopping back and forth, and the answer’s no.”

Milteer added that he believes the choice to allow an apartment complex on that site — alongside a major thoroughfare, near the creek and in a cramped school zone — was an appropriate one.

“I believe with the knowledge that was given at the time that it was the best decision,” he said.

Those words ring like nails in the coffin of the movement to fight the apartment complex.

“It looks like it’s dead from a legal point of view,” Stallings said. “I don’t know about the political part.”