On Saturday February 20th, the City Council will accept public testimony and then take final action on an ordinance to double our Stormwater Utility Fee. This increase will cost a condo owner an additional $39 annually, a townhouse owner an additional $58, a small single-family homeowner an additional $140 and a large single-family homeowner an additional $233.

The Council voted last month 6-1 to introduce the ordinance and voted unanimously to create a new community advisory committee to provide guidance to the City Council on the execution of a new, far more aggressive stormwater infrastructure plan. You can watch the Council's discussion from last month online.

This increase will bring in an additional $8.5 million annually and support a newly accelerated 10-year program of investments. While these funds will address many smaller "spot improvement" projects, this funding will allow the City to undertake 11 of the top priority storm sewer capacity projects over the next decade:

In November, the City Council received the initial output from our recently-formed interdepartmental team working to address these challenges. You can watch the full worksession online.

In June of 2018, property owners in Alexandria paid a Stormwater Utility Fee for the first time ever. The creation of this fee was driven by the need for additional revenue to comply with the City's MS4 Permit. The permit reflects Alexandria's obligations to reduce pollutants contained in storm run-off which makes its way to the Chesapeake Bay and other waterways.

The fee applies to all properties (regardless of their taxable status). For commercial properties, it is assessed based on the impervious surfaces on the property. For residential properties, there are four tiers (apartment, townhome, small single-family home and large single-family home). There is a credit system in place to encourage actions that assist the City's storm sewers. Essentially the fee is structured to be a user fee for the City's stormwater handling.

For over 3 decades, Alexandria has designed and planned for our storm sewer system to withstand a "10-year" storm event. Said another way, a storm that is expected to have a 10% chance of happening every year, is the designed capacity of our system.

Alexandria spends a significant amount of money on infrastructure designed to manage water. In April, the City Council approved a $2.1 billion, ten-year Capital Improvement Program. Of that, over $150 million is to address stormwater and sanitary sewer infrastructure. Alexandria Renew Enterprises, the City's sewer authority, plans another $593 million of capital investments over the next decade, primarily the RiverRenew project to remediate the Combined Sewer (sanitary and stormwater) system that serves Old Town.

Together, nearly $750 million is planned for water investments. This spending dwarfs planned investments in schools, transportation and other major priorities. Only a decade ago, planned investments in water infrastructure were less than a quarter of this total, but addressing these challenges will require a sustained increase in that investment level of a long period of time.

In 2016, the City conducted a comprehensive Storm Sewer Capacity Analysis. This exhaustive study looked at each of the City's eight watersheds (Backlick Run, Cameron Run, Four Mile Run, Holmes Run, Hooff's Run, Holmes Run, Potomac River, Strawberry Run and Taylor Run) and identified problem areas where current capacity does not meet our 10-year storm design standard.

From the maintenance perspective, it is also clear that we have work to do. The City is currently undertaking a $2 million effort to clear approximately 7,000 feet of the Hooff's Run Culvert. This 70+ year old urban culvert is designed to be "self-cleaning." After the July 2019 flooding event, the City commissioned a firm to do a robotic assessment of the condition of the culvert. That assessment showed an average of 5% obstruction across the culvert and some areas of 15-20% obstruction. The clearing of the culvert commenced last year and is expected to take several months. It does not appear to have been done before, certainly not in recent memory.

We will also work to expand efforts to assist homeowners in making their properties more resilient. The City has long had a program in place to fund the installation of Sewer Backflow Prevention devices. These devices help prevent sanitary sewer backflow from entering homes during severe rain events.

In addition to maintaining this program, the City will explore the creation of grant programs to assist property owners in making improvements. Recently enacted state law allows the City to provide real estate tax abatement for certain flood improvements. Implementation of these and other programs to assist property owners will be explored.

For development, whether large-scale, mixed-use development or a small residential addition, Alexandria's stringent stormwater requirements stipulate that conditions after development to be the same and oftentimes better than they were. As a consequence, the flooding we have experienced in the City is typically in established neighborhoods, areas of our City where we have not seen new development (aside from infill) in decades. Yet, there may be options to further strengthen these existing requirements. We have sought additional authority from the General Assembly for these expanded requirements.

In two weeks the City Manager will present his proposed Operating Budget for Fiscal Year 2022 (July 1, 2021 - June 30, 2022) and his proposed Capital Improvement Program (CIP) for Fiscal Year 2022 through Fiscal Year 2031.

The upcoming budget will be proposed and adopted against the backdrop of an extraordinary set of constraints and uncertainty. In November, the City Manager presented his initial outlook for the upcoming budget to our annual Council retreat.

The budget adopted last spring, at the beginning of he pandemic, reflected a loss of an estimated $92 million of revenues divided between the previous Fiscal Year 2020 and the current Fiscal Year 2021.

To formally commence that process, the City Council adopted our annual budget guidance for the City Manager. Given the considerable uncertainty, the adopted guidance asks the City Manager to propose his budget with a "bookends" approach, showing a budget that resolves the budget gap without tax increases (all reductions), a budget that resolves the budget gap without service reductions (all tax increases) and a budget that includes a mix of the two options.

Days before Christmas, the City joined with a few partners, some familiar and some new, to announce the future of the Landmark Mall site. The new development plan will move Inova Alexandria Hospital from its home for the past 58 years on Seminary Road to a new modern facility on the site of Landmark Mall.

The site, one of the largest sites inside the Beltway awaiting redevelopment, will see a billion dollars of new investment, including a new Level II trauma center, medical office buildings, residential, retail, parks, a new fire station replacing Fire Station 208, new committed affordable housing and a new transit hub anchoring the City's new bus rapid transit network, DASH and Metrobus.

The first community meeting related specifically to the development of the Landmark Mall site. You can watch the full meeting online.

The second meeting related to the land-use changes requested on the existing Inova Alexandria Hospital site on Seminary Road. You can watch this meeting online as well.

Conquering those obstacles requires a unique partnership and financial arrangement. A local firm, Foulger-Pratt is leading a joint venture in partnership with Howard Hughes Corporation, the current owner of the mall site, and Seritage Growth Properties, the owner of the Sears site. They were able to bring Inova Health System into the arrangement to anchor this redevelopment.

During the last calendar year, our residents and businesses experienced large-scale power outages on April 13^th, May 10^th, June 16^th, June 17^th, July 7^th, July 20^th, July 22^nd, August 2^nd, August 8^th, October 12^th, October 17^th, October 23^rd, November 1^st, November 2^nd, November 19^th and December 1st. That is unacceptable.

Last month, I wrote to the CEO of Dominion Energy expressing concerns on behalf of Alexandria's residents and businesses. In the letter, I requested:

The City has a long history of working with Dominion Virginia Power to improve reliability and it will be important to extend that partnership again.

Since 1971, the City Code has required that all new utility construction generally be placed underground. Yet, for a City whose history stretches back more than 200 years prior to that point, it leaves quite a bit of overhead utilities remaining around our community. 

If you have not been receiving my campaign updates and you wish to receive information on this new campaign, please drop my campaign a line and we'll get you on the list for the campaign. 

There will be a point, probably not tomorrow, probably not next month, but eventually COVID will be in our rear-view mirror for good. The vaccines are here and we have reached the "beginning of the end."

We also know that when COVID is past us, the dramatic impacts of COVID on our community will not be past us. So while we continue a "whole of government" response to end this public health crisis, we must also plan for the recovery.

With that goal in mind, the Council accepted our "Coordinated Community COVID-19 Post-COVID Recovery Plan." This plan will frame the City's approach to:

These recovery initiatives will shape various efforts proposed for funding in the City Manager's proposed budget later this month.

We have had success in the past year creating partnerships to address the needs of vulnerable populations in our City. We will need that very same collaboration and partnership as we work to recover as a community.

Last month, the City Council unanimously adopted a new resolution on racial and social equity, recommitting the City to advance "ALL Alexandria."

Alexandria is a diverse, progressive City. We celebrate our diversity and we are proud to be a community where we have made great progress in escaping some of the worst events in our history.

Yet, in Alexandria today, we know that:

So while we can be gratified at the progress we have made as community, we must not be complacent in the face of the work left to do.

Last summer, a murder by a law-enforcement officer a thousand miles away turned our attention again to the injustices that remain in our community. These were my thoughts at that time as to how we move forward as a City.

In adopting this resolution, the Council directed specific actions and processes to be implemented immediately, but also instructed our Racial & Social Equity Officer to engage with the community and prepare a Racial & Social Equity Plan for subsequent approval by the City Council.

To inform that process, I provided my colleagues with a memo proposing several initiatives that I hope will be part of that discussion.

Equity is not a singular achievement, but a process over time. Alexandria's work continues and I am gratified that the City Council is focused on making more progress in this area.

At various points over the years, I have written in this newsletter attempting to relate the national conversation on policing to our experiences in Alexandria. 

Before the end of last year, the City Council received the initial feedback from our staff on Council efforts to explore alternative response techniques, focused on efforts to use non-police response for quality-of-life complaints, homelessness, behavioral health crisis, intoxication and beyond. A pilot program to implement these alternative response techniques will be coming to Council for approval later this month.

In September, the Council received an initial proposal for alternatives to improve civilian oversight. While I was comfortable bringing this proposal to the public for feedback, my colleagues wished to see further alternatives. You can watch the discussion of Council on this matter online.

Last month, the City Council received a revised proposal, reflecting more alternatives for consideration. By a vote of 4-3, the City Council voted to endorse a specific model of an investigatory review board and proceed with the community input process. This recommendation will return to the City Council in March for final adoption.

We have officers that participate in training designed to address implicit bias in policing. 

In the aftermath of the murder of George Floyd, our Police Department and our Sheriff's Department provided summaries of use of force guidelines, procedures and practices for public review and comment.

In November, our staff brought to the Council a study on the costs for implementing a body-worn camera program for the City's public safety agencies. This estimate will be a discussion for the upcoming budget process.

In 2017, the City released a first of its kind external study and analysis of five years of Alexandria Police traffic citation data. Conducted by the Center for Evidence-Based Crime Policy at George Mason University, this effort looked at over 91,000 citations issued from 2011 - 2015.

In February of 2018, the City Council adopted this procedure as policy to ensure that this type of accountability and analysis remains a practice in the future. 

Since that time, the analysis has been conducted annually, with the 2019 data released last year. With the adoption of new legislation during the most recent General Assembly session, our Police Department will work to modify data collection and reporting to comply with new mandates.

To ensure that the conversation does not end here, our Police Chief Michael Brown has appointed a Community Advisory Team to advise the Police Department on these issues. 

Tomorrow night, the Planning Commission will be considering the first development under the approved South Patrick Street Housing Affordability Strategy, the redevelopment of Heritage at Old Town. If the Planning Commission makes a recommendation, this project will come to City Council at our Public Hearing on Saturday February 20th.

You can sign-up to speak at the Planning Commission hearing tomorrow beginining at 7 PM online.

The initial phase of this project is the construction of three multi-family buildings on Blocks 1, 2 and 4 of the plan area .

Across the plan area, along Route 1, there are 319 affordable housing units that are for various reasons at risk. For 215 of the units, they are under Project Based Voucher agreements  that are on the verge of expiring or have expired. For the remaining 104 units, they are market-rate affordable units that currently accept  Housing Choice Vouchers and could be redeveloped at any time. For this phase of redevelopment 244 of those units will be redeveloped.

In approving the strategy for preservation of the affordable housing in this area, the City created a new zoning tool, entitled the "Residential Multi-Family" zone. This new zone allows for an increase of density up to a 3.0 FAR (Floor Area Ratio) , if a third of the new density is designated as committed affordable housing.

As privately-owned, affordable housing becomes threatened in the future, the City's approach to this particular project will provide a road-map for what works and what will not work in the future.