Chinquapin Back in Business
Tomorrow, from 10AM until 2PM, there will be a celebration with free activities and food to mark the return of our recreation center. |
Election Day!
Tuesday is Election Day in Alexandria and around the Commonwealth.
We will be electing a new Governor, Lieutenant Governor, and Attorney General at the statewide level.
Here in Alexandria, we will be electing our Sheriff and Commonwealth's Attorney, as well as our representatives in the Virginia House of Delegates.
The polls will be open from 6AM until 7PM, and in-person absentee voting is available today and tomorrow at the Registrar's Office (132 N. Royal Street) and Beatley Library (5005 Duke Street).
I'll see you at the polls!
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Youth Master Plan
The draft of the City's Youth Master Plan has been released for public review and comment.
Please take the time to provide input on this important planning effort.
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Real Estate Tax Due
Friday November 15th is the deadline for the payment of the 2nd installment of real estate taxes.
Payments can be made online, in person or by mail. |
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Beginning at George Washington Middle School, the race winds through Del Ray and Rosemont and has been a traditional start to the holiday season for decades.
The race is expected to sell out, so register today. Please remember to bring canned food to the race in support of the wonderful work that ALIVE! does in our community. |
The Band Goes Marching On
Help send the T. C. Williams Marching Titans to New Orleans!
The Marching Band of T. C. Williams High School has been selected to participate in the 2014 Sugar Bowl.
Please contribute so that our talented kids can represent our City on the national stage!
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Leaf Collection Begins
Last week, the City's 2013 Residential Leaf Collection Began.
Review the map to determine your collection date, and bags are available at 5 designated locations. |
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 Serving in elected office in a 264 year old city, one is constantly aware of the history that has been made by those who came before us.
Last month we lost two residents who embodied the community spirit of Alexandria.
Both Mel Bergheim
and Lois Walker served 6 years on the City Council, but each of them continued their service to our City long after their time in elected office.
A former Vice Mayor, Mel Bergheim took office at a tumultuous time, and helped lead the integration of City events and operations, while advocating for measures that improved the health and welfare of our residents.
Along with his late wife Donna, Mel was a tireless advocate for the arts--and a founding supporter of MetroStage.
I had the opportunity to draw on his wisdom on numerous occasions and will miss his unique perspective.
Lois Walker was a selfless leader driven by ideas more than attention. Her ideas came to shape the transportation solutions that Alexandria is just now bringing to reality. In a line of work not known for courage, hers was a trademark as she grappled with each thorny issue that came before the Council.
We will miss both Mel and Lois, but continue the work that they both began.
Please let me know how I can be of assistance. Contact me anytime.
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In Chattanooga, Tennessee, a community of 170,000, a public electricity utility used hundreds of millions of dollars to build thousands of miles of underground fiber. In doing so, the utility enabled the residents and businesses of Chattanooga to receive the fastest Internet connectivity in our nation.
In Baltimore, faced with little competition and significant needs, the City is now exploring a similar effort to build infrastructure that can be leased to private and public entities to provide more improved connectivity to its residents and businesses alike.
For years Alexandria has sought new private investment in broadband infrastructure. For most of our residents, we have one company providing Internet connectivity. Regardless of the performance of that company, technological innovation and reliability thrives on competition.
In 2009, the City made great strides in bringing Verizon FIOS to our City. Unfortunately, Verizon made the decision to cease any new deployments of FIOS nationally, and Alexandria was left out. 
Whether it comes from public sources or private sources, investment in new broadband infrastructure for our City is an imperative. For our residents, this issue affects their careers and the learning opportunities of their children. For our businesses, it affects their ability to compete outside of our borders. For our government, it affects our ability to provide efficient services.
Broadband infrastructure has now taken its place among bridges, roads, sewers, and schools, as a basic infrastructure need for a community.
Last month, my colleague Del Pepper and I proposed changes to our existing Information Technology Commission to bring a commission that has been around for two decades to the forefront of an effort to bring new broadband infrastructure to our City.
While those changes will be considered by the Council this month, I have proposed a framework for the Commission's efforts moving forward.
Specifically, I have asked that the City consider a Broadband Strategy that:
- Explores strategies designed to encourage the deployment of new conduit. Conduit is essentially the "container" of broadband deployment; typically an underground path that can be utilized or leased to carry the fiber that enables communication.
- Inventories existing assets in our community that can be used to expand broadband availability.
- Advances uses of future broadband infrastructure to more efficiently and effectively provide government services.
- Considers numerous opportunities for public/private partnerships for the expansion of broadband infrastructure.
Our City staff will be exploring the possibilities along with our Information Technology Commission, and returning to the Council with recommendations to move this important initiative forward.
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The Kids Are Back In Town
Nearly every newsletter this year, I have written about our efforts to keep up with the rapid growth in student enrollment in our schools.
One of the most important tasks we have been working through is creating a mechanism for reliably forecasting future enrollment. We have incorporated development trends, economic factors and recent history.
 Now that the school year has started, we have the opportunity to validate those assumptions and calibrate for the future.
Our overall student enrollment projection was less than a half of a percentage point off--which is a promising sign. Looking at the numbers, we saw less growth in our Kindergarten population than we expected, but we saw greater growth in students at the middle school and high school level.
One year does not make a trend, but our school growth continues, and each year we learn more about the factors behind that growth. That will make us more effective as we craft solutions to address the need for additional capacity.
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Relax...Massage has been Deregulated
In previous newsletters, I have written about my proposal to reform the City's laws regulating massage. Our laws, adopted during a very different time in our City, provided a very strict regulatory framework that largely prevented in-home massage services.
They treated every massage, an important health and wellness service, as a potential criminal act, while leaving other in-home personal services largely unregulated.
Since the adoption of the City's existing laws decades ago, the State Board of Nursing has created a certification and regulation process for Massage Therapists, which has made the City's laws largely duplication.
With that in mind, the City Council approved a proposal to de-regulate much of the industry, while imposing a new requirement that therapists operating within the City receive their certification from the State.
I believe this change will provide new services for our residents, ensure public safety, and eliminate unneeded regulation.
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Every year, the City Council adopts a Legislative Package for the upcoming General Assembly session. While the state government is certainly a significant financial supporter of the City's budget, Richmond also sets a legal environment that affects how we provide services to our residents.
Contained in the package are specific pieces of legislation that we would like to see proposed, as well as the City's position on  legislation that may arise during the session.
I included a number of new proposals in this year's package, including:
- A request that the City Attorney be allowed to also offer legal representation to the School Board, in addition to the City. The current City Charter does not allow it.
- A request for State funding for the significant work required to remediate the City's Combined Sewer System in Old Town
- A request to expand the right of a renter to assign their purchase right during a condo conversion. Current law allows an elderly or disabled resident to assign their right to purchase to a housing non-profit or government agency. Expanding this right will allow residents to remain in their homes after a conversion occurs. This addresses one of the significant ways we lost affordable housing.
- A request for State funding to partner with the City in efforts designed to lower premiums for residents required to purchase FEMA Flood Insurance.
While it is difficult to get legislation passed in Richmond, my hope is that we will be able to make progress on many of these important issues this year.
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 Host a Town Hall in Your Living Room! My regular series of Town Hall Meetings are back!
You supply the living room and a bunch of your friends and neighbors. I will supply a member of the Alexandria City Council (me) with the answers to any of your questions about our City.
Just drop us a line and we'll get a Town Hall on the calendar! Thanks for the interest! |
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Upcoming Issues
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Parking Lot or Park/Flood Mitigation?
In recent months, I have written about the numerous efforts the City has taken to implement the Adopted Waterfront Small Area Plan. We have taken measures to end pending litigation and ensure that the City intends to evolve our precious waterfront in fidelity with the vision laid out in the adopted plan.
With that in mind, the City held a community forum last month with Laurie Olin, a nationally recognized landscape architect, who will be working to design the landscape and flood mitigation components of the waterfront. The forum was extremely well-attended and the video is available for review.
The next session focusing on the design of the landscape and flood mitigation components of the Waterfront Plan will be held on Monday evening at 6:30 PM at TC Williams High School (3330 King Street).
Additionally, the City has been working to resolve long-running  disputes regarding the existing Old Dominion Boat Club parking lot on the Waterfront. In June, the City released a very reasonable approach for resolving the dispute and providing for public access to this portion of our Waterfront, while allowing the City the best opportunity to implement our flood mitigation solutions.
We have now received a few responses to our proposal, none of which allow the City to achieve the vision of public access and lowered flood risk.
On Tuesday November 19th at 6PM in City Hall, the City Council will hold a special public hearing to discuss implementation of the approved plan. This hearing will solicit input on a variety of solutions to this impasse, including the use of eminent domain.
As I have mentioned in previous newsletters, my preference remains a negotiated solution to resolve this situation and achieve the community vision for public access on our waterfront.
If you have thoughts on implementing the vision, please take the time to come speak at the public hearing on the 19th.
Affordable Housing
Unfortunately, one of the issues that has frequently divided this City Council has been how we as a City work to create and preserve affordable housing.
Like other urban and sub-urban communities around our region and around the country, the rapid increase in market values has lead to the loss in Alexandria of thousands of units of market rate housing that was affordable to residents of modest incomes.
As I wrote about in January, the City will be soon considering a draft Housing Master Plan, which lays out a vision for increasing affordability in our community. As the Council has considered this plan, I have worked to expand the land-use tools (such as density bonuses, parking incentives, etc) to ensure that the City is using all of its zoning authority to create additional affordable housing.
There continues to be considerable controversy relating to this area of funding. In Spring we had a very spirited conversation regarding what I believe to be a dangerous practice of dedicating portions of our real estate tax revenue, in this case for affordable housing. In that situation, I was in the minority in suggesting that affordable housing spending should be considered in the context of our normal process, and weighed against our other priorities of education, public safety, human services, basic infrastructure, and transportation.
The incentive package was comprised of real estate tax revenue, and waived fees for affordable housing and Eisenhower Avenue Improvements.
A majority of the City Council, chose to later restore $500,000 of the affordable housing abatement, committing future, unrealized revenues to that purpose.
My colleague Paul Smedberg and I submitted a letter to the editor citing concern with a troubling trend. While we strongly support our City's efforts to preserve affordability, we object to the efforts that seem to place affordable housing above all other priorities in City government.
As we prepare to tackle the Housing Master Plan in the next month, I am hopeful that we can reasonably approach this very important issue, while acknowledging that it is not the only difficult issue our City faces.
The Future of Our Trash
It has the capacity to convert 975 tons of solid waste every day into 23 megawatts of renewable power that is then sold back to Dominion Virginia Power.
In 2012, the City Council and Arlington County jointly approved an extension of the lease and operating agreement for the facility through 2025. A component of that extension was an additional option to extend the agreement through the end of 2038. This would keep Covanta operating the facility for the remainder of the useful  life of the plant.
In approving the initial extension, the City Council asked the City Staff to perform an economic analysis of the extension proposal and ensure that it works in the best interests of our taxpayers. With that analysis now complete, the City Council will be considering a recommendation to exercise the extension option now.
Extension of the agreement locks in the rate that the City pays today; thus providing significant savings on the per ton fee that we pay to the facility. That fee makes up a significant portion of the Residential Refuse Fee that residents pay to receive City trash and recycling services. The savings that we will realize will allow the Council to both reduce the fee, as well as expand recycling services.
The analysis found that opting for the extension this year saves the City taxpayers $26.1 million over the remainder of the agreement, and that delaying exercising that option will cost $520,000 next year.
While there are considerable benefits to exercising the extension option, the City must consider the risks. The property is potentially very valuable for redevelopment, sitting a stone's throw from the Van Dorn Metro Station.
A public meeting was held earlier this week to receive input, and the Council will be acting on the extension request this month.
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