Tomorrow is National Night Out!
With participation from the City's public safety agencies and the support of the many City government agencies that preserve our quality of life, this annual event is a great way to get to know your neighbors.
The full list of parties is on the City's website. I'll see you around the City!
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Friendship Fire Festival Saturday!
Celebrating the founding of the historic Friendship Firehouse in 1774, this festival is a great event for residents and visitors of all ages!
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The Alexandria Police Department does an excellent job of keeping our community safe.
By participating in the Citizens Police Academy, you spend 10 weeks learning about the department's unique mission and meeting the men and women who perform it every day.
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The Alexandria Office of Voter Registration and Elections is hitting the streets this month to help voters register to vote.
- Burke Library on August 2nd from 3 PM until 6 PM
- Durant Center on August 5th from 5 PM until 8 PM
- Duncan Library on August 8th from 5:30 PM until 8:30 PM
- Cora Kelly Rec Center on August 16th from 3 PM until 6 PM
- Lee Center on August 24th from 6 PM until 9 PM
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First Thursday Returns!
This Thursday is the next "First Thursday" of the year!
This month's event highlights music and dance in our community!
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Sales Tax Holiday
In the past, the Commonwealth of Virginia had three separate sales tax holidays: one for back to school time, one for hurricane preparedness, and one for Energy Star efficient appliances.
Use the opportunity to shop at some wonderful Alexandria businesses and enjoy the tax discount!
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Sunday Library Hours Return
Fiscal Year 2017 began today. In adopting our Fiscal Year 2017 budget, the City Council included funding to restore Sunday hours to Burke, Duncan and Barrett libraries.
Please take the opportunity to enjoy the expanded availability of our great system of libraries.
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What Programs Interest You?
The City's Department of Recreation, Parks and Cultural Activities are working to determine the best program offerings to serve our City.
Thanks for helping us serve you better!
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Sidewalk Sale!
With over 50 boutiques participating and offering deeply discounted summer merchandise, this is a great opportunity to shop local!
Parking in Old Town at the meters will be free all day Saturday and Sunday. Parking in Del Ray is always free.
I'll see you there!
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Irish Festival
On Saturday, August 13th, from 11 AM until 7 PM, the festival returns to Waterfront Park at 1A Prince Street.
With food, dance, and music, this festival cannot be beat.
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Request a Bike Rack
Know a good place in the City where we should place a bike rack?
Racks are installed on a seasonal basis and cannot be installed on private property.
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While the Council has been in recess over the summer, it has been anything but quiet.
While the City's economic development initiatives focus on attracting new employers to our community, we also must maintain what we already have.
This past month we were able to celebrate the retention of a great Alexandria employer,
The Motley Fool.
We are excited to have The Motley Fool here, and we look forward to their continued growth.
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With the murder of police officers in Dallas, Baton Rouge, San Diego, and locally in Prince William County in addition the deaths of citizens at the hands of police in Louisiana and Minnesota, the practice and profession of policing has dominated the headlines this summer.
Local incidents have now taken on a national presence as each incident contributes to a national narrative.
Local police departments and policymakers must react to events taking place throughout our nation and not just in our community.
Our Police Department has an authorized force of 304 sworn officers. Every day, these women and men do a dangerous and difficult job and do it well. They are paid to disobey natural instincts and actively seek out danger to protect our neighbors and our possessions. We give them extraordinary powers, but ask that they exercise care, caution, discretion, fairness, and restraint in enforcing the law. They protect our communities from chaos and mayhem.
More than a few times, my "lead foot" has resulted in me on the side of the highway, awaiting a police officer walking to my window to inquire why I was in such a rush.
Whether justified or not, there are many Americans who approach their interactions with police with dread. Instead of the the sheepishness I felt for being caught speeding, many approach that situation with fear of how the officer might react to them or the assumptions an officer might make about them. A perception exists that our system has different outcomes in police interactions depending on race. That perception
is supported by data in many cases.
We can argue these perceptions away. We can present data
 challenging the premise. Yet none of those tactics will address the underlying problem or reduce the fear and apprehension felt by some citizens in our nation and specifically in our community.
Where does that leave us in Alexandria? How do we react to the national narrative? How do we as a City look in the mirror and determine how we can learn by what is occurring around our nation?
We begin this discussion from a position of strength.
We have a highly skilled police force that represents the diversity of the community that they police. The department is taking new steps to improve the diversity of the workforce in future recruiting efforts. We are fortunate to have a Sheriff's Department with a sworn workforce that similarly represents our community's diversity.
Our officers participate in training aimed at de-escalation of volatile situations.
We outfit our police officers with non-lethal force options to assist in the de-escalation of these incidents.
While body-worn cameras do not solve all problems, they do provide an additional level of accountability and protect both officers and the public. I am hopeful that we can learn from the experience of our neighbors around the Commonwealth (and the nation) and implement such a program.
While approaching the issue from different perspectives, these two reports found much in common.
Both reports focused on the need to address issues outside of policing that impact how policing occurs. Examples of this include poverty, incarceration, mental health, diversion, education and overall criminal justice policy. While many of these issues must be addressed at the state level, there are local implications.
The reports both emphasized the need for good data throughout the criminal justice system. Good data helps us measure the impact of policies and calibrate our responses.
Both reports spoke to training and resources as well as internal and external oversight.
While Alexandria has avoided some of the most significant issues that have occurred around the country, we have not been immune. The national dialogue presents us with the opportunity to be proactive.
Making progress on these engagement opportunities must be a priority of our next Chief.
I am hopeful that we can engage in community dialogue and craft a package of policy solutions that maintains the safety of our community, maintains the safety of the police that serve our community and helps us expand the trust and accountability in our police that must exist among our entire population.
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Waterfront Update
Our Potomac River waterfront is the reason Alexandria exists as a community.
The history of this waterfront
is the history of Alexandria. It is what has brought people and commerce to our community for generations.
Unfortunately, for the past few decades, the future of our waterfront has also been the source of discord and community division. Far too often it has led to litigation. This litigation has, in some cases,
persisted for decades.
When the last City Council was sworn in over three years ago, it was an early goal to resolve all on-going litigation, craft settlements with disputed landowners, and move forward as a community together. I believe that has been a success.
The implicit compromise of the
approved Waterfront Small Area Plan was as simple as it was controversial. Can we allow some increased development on three derelict sites in exchange for the following: new waterfront
 parks, public accessibility throughout the shoreline, new flood mitigation, environmental sustainability, and economic vitality?
While achieving this vision has not always been easy, we now stand closer than ever.
The Waterfront Commission has been working to determine the governance and funding for programming and improvements in the new public spaces on our waterfront.
This conversation has now merged with advocacy for the creation of a Business Improvement District (BID) for Old Town. If the City Council were to authorize a BID, business owners in the district would pay a higher real estate tax rate. The additional revenue would support a new entity that would annually provide a budget to the City Council for approval.
This idea was pursued several years ago, but efforts ended when there was not sufficient support from the businesses who would ultimately pay the tax.
The idea is back again, with business community support.
I believe that Business Improvement Districts have been very successful tools across the country. They help leverage private investment and encourage small business growth. I look forward to further consideration of this concept.
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Summer School Work
 While much of the planned capital investment will go to make large scale capacity investments, we cannot lose sight of the important maintenance that is required in existing facilities.
With students occupying these facilities during the school year, the summer is the time to address these importance maintenance efforts.
I look forward to continuing our investment in this basic infrastructure work to maintain the learning environment for our children.
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AAA/Aaa Affirmed
Each time the City goes to borrow money for its capital budget, it must go before the rating agencies to have its credit worthiness assessed.
Much like individuals must have a credit check performed before acquiring a mortgage, a car loan, or a new credit card, the City must go before Standard & Poor's and Moody's to have the two organizations assess whether we are doing a good job managing the City's finances.
While Council had authorized $80.5 million of general obligation borrowing, the current municipal finance environment allowed the City to avail itself of a $10.5 million bond premium in addition to the $73.7 million of borrowing.
Those high ratings qualify the City for the cheapest borrowing rates available, which will save our taxpayers millions over the 20 year life of these bonds.
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Our capital budget is funded primarily through a mix of debt and current year funding also known as "cash capital." Relating this to
your home mortgage, the cash capital is the down payment. We also pay interest each year on the debt that was issued in previous years.
Alexandria is very conservative with our use of debt.
For example, Arlington County limits its debt to 4% of its Fair Market Real Property Value. Both Fairfax and Prince William Counties limit their debt to 3%. Alexandria's self-imposed limit is 1.6%, and this budget year we achieved 1.37%.
The median for other similarly rated and sized jurisdictions is 2.42%.
Debt is a tool that allows us to balance the costs of large capital investments across the generations of Alexandria taxpayers that will benefit from them and to pay for our investments from the returns we reap from them.
In issuing the City's rating, Moody's wrote: "The stable outlook reflects the likelihood that the city will maintain its satisfactory financial position due to proactive management, sound financial policies, and continued tax base growth and diversification."
It is important for us to maintain the careful stewardship that will protect our taxpayers and our City's infrastructure.
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Host a Town Hall in Your Living Room!
My regular series of Town Hall Meetings continue!
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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Increasing our Tree Canopy
Our tree coverage is one of the most basic quality of life indicators for our community.
Alarmed by the steady reduction of the City's tree canopy, the Council created a committee in 2004 to develop an Urban Forestry Master Plan for our City.
In 2009, the outgoing Council approved the Urban Forestry Master Plan
and instructed our staff to work to implement the approved plan. At the time, the City had cataloged 17,000 street trees and an additional 50,000 trees on parks, schools, and other public property.
The Plan included an extensive series of specific recommendations, but the guiding principles were:
- Adopt the American Forests' recommended tree canopy goal of 40%
- Plant 400 additional tress annually
- Improve maintenance of those trees planted on public property
- Work to encourage additional tree plantings on private property
Armed with the approved plan, the City has gone to work in improving both maintenance and the planting of new trees.
This increase will allow the City to meet the Urban Forestry Master Plan goal of an additional 400 trees planted annually and will provide an overall funding level to replace or plant a total of 850 trees this year.
In Fiscal Year 2018, the City will commence with an update to the Urban Forestry Master Plan including new landscape guidelines and implementation strategies. The goal of this effort will be to create new mechanisms to continue our progress in increasing tree coverage in our City.
Providing Better Care for Mental Health In Alexandria
Deficiencies in how we provide mental health services in the Commonwealth of Virginia has been a focus of policymakers in Richmond for several years. The mass shooting at Virginia Tech coupled with the family tragedy for State Senator Creigh Deeds have kept these issues in the spotlight.
Alexandria has maintained the highest per capita rate of individuals hospitalized under Temporary Detention Orders
for severe mental health emergencies. A recent review found that 80 individuals with serious mental illness have refused treatment or have other barriers to receiving services.
With new funding from the General Assembly, the Virginia Department of Behavioral Health and Developmental Services published a grant availability to assist local governments in creating new Program of Assertive Community Treatment (PACT) teams to better serve these individuals. These PACT teams are already in place in other jurisdictions including
Arlington and
Fairfax County, and have shown success in serving those with these mental health challenges.
This initiative will allow the City to continue to pursue the highest quality, evidence-based services to our residents suffering from severe mental illness.
I am hopeful that we will see improvements in the outcomes for these clients.
As we speak, the City's Capital Bikeshare network is again growing. This summer we are adding 13 additional stations to showcase the bike sharing public/private partnership that now counts the District of Columbia, Arlington, Montgomery County and Alexandria as members.
The City's Capital Bikeshare system was originally funded using
 Federal Congestion Mitigation and Air Quality (CMAQ) funds. The CMAQ funds and developer contributions now purchase new stations, while the City's Transportation Improvement Program (TIP) now fund operations for existing stations.
Public transportation systems of all kinds depend on heavy public subsidies. In Alexandria, the DASH Bus system recovers approximately 30% of its costs from fare box revenue. Original estimates of Capital Bikeshare's performance were expected to be similar. Surprisingly, Alexandria's cost recovery in the first year reached 72% from rentals and now hovers at 63% with the expanded network.
Motivate International is the private contractor who administers the network for Capital Bikeshare. As they recently assumed the operations agreement, they also accepted a 25% reduction from previous pricing, thus driving down the City's cost for on-going operations.
The system has provided a critical, low-cost connectivity option for short trips, used frequently by our residents and visitors alike. Current plans will allow continued expansion over the next few years.
Please use this link to suggest station locations.
The new stations in this year's plan are:
- St. Asaph Street at Madison Street (Harris Teeter)
- Commonwealth Avenue at Cameron Street (King Street Metro North)
- Madison Street at Henry Street
- Royal Street at Wilkes Street (Old Town Safeway)
- Radford Street at Osage Street
- Commonwealth Avenue at Monroe Avenue
- Commonwealth Avenue at Oak Street
- Potomac Avenue at Route 1 (Station 650)
- Bruce Street at Mount Vernon Avenue (My Organic Market)
- Four Mile Run Park parking lot (Four Mile Farmers and Artisans Market)
- Lee Recreation Center
- Franklin Street (District Taco)
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Elsewhere on the waterfront,
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