The Council Connection
your connection to City Council by Mayor Justin M. Wilson
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Digging for a Cleaner Potomac |
This combination results in this mixture ending up in the Potomac River and other waterways. This will now end.
The star of this show will be a 380-ton Tunnel Boring Machine (TBM). The TBM is 15 feet wide and can excavate enough soil to fill 3 dump-trucks in 15 minutes.
With remediation expected to require nearly a half billion dollars, the City requested funding from Commonwealth coffers to assist in this challenge. The City has now received over $140 million of commitments from the Commonwealth thanks to the support of Former Governor Northam, and our General Assembly delegation, specifically Senator Saslaw.
The budget signed by Governor Youngkin last month included a final $40 million state payment to support this project.
The challenge of this project is significant. We certainly did not plan to rectify this outfall on the timetable that the Commonwealth dictated. Even with the timetable, Alexandria remains ahead of many jurisdictions around the nation on this issue and we will be the first in Virginia to remediate our Combined Sewer System. Stormwater planning and work coordinated with redevelopment activity has left us better situated than most.
This is a significant investment in the cleanliness of our water ways. As a community, we will need to be patient with this significant construction work, but the legacy of cleaner water will benefit generations to come.
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Every other year, the City conducts a statistically valid survey of our residents. While not definitive, it is a useful tool in understanding the pulse of our community. In our 2020 survey, 86% of our residents rated the overall quality of life in our City "Excellent" or "Good."
Somewhat inexplicably, local governments have been reluctant to use the single most effective tool to increase the supply of affordable housing: build more housing. This has been the policy of the last three Presidential administrations, two Democrats and one Republican. It has been the approach of the Sierra Club and the National Association of Home Builders. It has been the approach of the Brookings Institute, the Hoover Institution and even the Cato Institute.
These targets, while voluntary, commit the City to the creation of additional units, with most of those units committed to be affordable for low to middle income households. To ensure that this housing creation does not exacerbate existing transportation challenges, most of this new housing must be located near job centers and high-capacity transportation infrastructure.
With the adoption of the new COG housing targets, the City has committed to an additional 11,500 housing units, with 4,250 as committed affordable or workforce housing.
While there is a broad agreement in our community about the problem and the need to focus on solutions to our affordability challenges, bringing together agreement on the correct solutions to pursue is a little more challenging.
While the City's Housing Master Plan contains a variety of tools in our housing "toolbox," the options the City has are generally limited to:
- Raising and Spending Tax Dollars: To develop and preserve housing as well as assist residents in obtaining housing.
- Using land-use policy (zoning) to create and preserve housing
This year has been very busy in putting those resources to work:
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A proposal for 94 units of affordable housing to be built by Community Housing Partners, a non-profit affordable-housing developer from Christiansburg, Virginia. This project is proposed for the site of the Land Rover Alexandria dealership.
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A proposal to partner with Community Lodgings, Inc. to redevelop existing housing in Arlandria to create 91 units of committed affordable housing.
Yet, the City cannot raise and spend enough money to make an appreciable impact on this problem. The City's power to determine how land is used, our land-use authority, provides a critical tool to spur the creation and preservation of both committed affordable housing as well as market-rate housing. Said another way: building additional housing supply, whether committed as affordable housing or market-rate housing, helps address our housing affordability challenges.
Over the 2 years, this includes study of:
This is a very modest proposal and is unlikely to be used often given the constraints of most sites in the City. Unfortunately, this proposal became the victim of hyperbolic misinformation that didn't advance a reasoned community conversation about its merits.
At the request of the Planning Commission, this proposal was deferred to allow our staff to collect more data and refine how the proposal is presented.
I am hopeful that this "pause" will allow us to craft a more comprehensive zoning reform proposal to ensure our neighborhoods, and the high quality of life we enjoy, remain accessible to those of moderate incomes.
The City will continue to seek creative partnerships, new land-use tools and innovative financing to preserve and create affordability in our City. I am pleased to see these efforts come to fruition.
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I have now been a part of adopting twelve City budgets as a member of the Council. Each year, I try to find new ways to engage residents in the process, and increase transparency and understanding of budget priorities and trade-offs.
Modeled after the Federal Taxpayer Receipt , this website will take the assessed value of your home and detail how much of your real estate tax is going to the various programs and services of City government.
We entered Fiscal Year 2023 this morning. Accordingly, we have updated the receipt to reflect the newly enacted budget. Give it a try and let me know how you like it!
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- Schools, City Parks and buildings (Up to $358.6 million)
- Transportation Improvements (Up to $87.5 million)
- Infrastructure (Up to $102.5 million)
- Fire Department Vehicles and Apparatus (Up to $3.1 million)
Ultimately, the City's actual bond issuance will be quite a bit lower, as we work to align the borrowing to the actual timing of when the resources will be needed on each project. Our staff will work to find the right timing, but the next bond issuance is expected to be this fall.
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.
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.
In issuing the City's rating, Moody's wrote: "Alexandria's financial position will remain stable given a trend of operating surpluses and improving cash and reserve levels, management's conservative budget assumptions, and future tax base growth."
Standard & Poor's similarly cited that "We view the City's management as very strong, with strong financial policies and practices..."
Alexandria is very conservative with our use of debt.
The median for other similarly rated and sized jurisdictions is 2.42%.
In fact, in the Standard & Poor's analysis, they noted that the City was rated higher than the "sovereign" (the US Federal Government) because "we believe the City can maintain better credit characteristics than the U. S. in a stress scenario."
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.
It is important for us to maintain the careful stewardship that will protect our taxpayers and our City's infrastructure long into the future.
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Power Plant Redevelopment |
Eventually, they got the support of the City government, and through years of work, led by my former colleagues Paul Smedberg and Del Pepper, the plant shut down for good almost over a decade ago.
With the closure of the station, this site became one of the higher priority sites for redevelopment in the City. As the City's focus on the waterfront has led to new public access, increased open space and new economic vitality, the power plant site is a critical missing piece as we work to ensure the connection of the northern end of the waterfront.
Fortunately, Hilco is welcomed to Alexandria with an adopted community vision to guide them. In 2017, City Council approved the Old Town North Small Area Plan. This planning document codified a redevelopment vision for the 20-acre power plant site and the area surrounding it.
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The first impact is one that we expected. In order to connect the newly-constructed Potomac Yard Metro Station, rail service south of the National Airport station will need to be shutdown for 6 weeks from September 10th until October 22nd.
The second impact was not anticipated. The rehabilitation of the Yellow Line bridge and the adjacent tunnels, will require a shutdown of the bridge for 8 months, also beginning on September 10th.
These closures will again cut Alexandria off from the rest of the system and significantly impact Alexandria transit riders at a time where the City and its regional partners will be working to bring our residents back to transit.
It was a challenging period for our City, its residents, our visitors, and our businesses and their employees.
With a year of planning and regional collaboration, we were able to throw nearly everything we had at the shutdown.
While riders settled into new, slower routines, there were still challenges that impacted our City. The shuttle buses had issues with capacity and traffic flow. Some Metro Bus and DASH routes had similar problems as well. Traffic impacts exacerbated existing congestion. Some businesses saw reductions in revenue.
Fortunately, we know what works. In 2019, the City worked closely with WMATA, DASH and other regional partners to ensure that the shutdown did not become a disaster for our residents and our businesses. We must again do the same.
The work to restore Metro back to the level required to support this region continues. In the short-term, additional sacrifice will be required. As a regular Metro rider myself, I know the service challenges first-hand. With new leadership and major infrastructure investment, I am optimistic that these efforts will result in a more reliable system for Alexandria and the entire region.
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In a little less than two months, my kids will head off for 9th grade and 12th grade in the Alexandria City Public Schools (ACPS), with my oldest in his 13th and final year in our school system. With 12 years as ACPS parents under our belts, my wife (an ACPS graduate herself) and I often get asked for advice from parents of young children ready to begin in our schools.
My advice is generally simple: Ignore everything that happens outside the classroom. If you have good educators in the classroom and a supportive environment at home, children will thrive.
Alexandria continues to have good schools, filled with dedicated, creative, and hard-working educators that inspire our children everyday.
But there is no denying that this has been a tumultuous time for public education nationally, and an unsettling period in Alexandria's schools.
With this context, the City Council and Alexandria School Board gathered for a joint worksession last month to discuss our capacity challenges, youth safety and resiliency initiatives and more. You can watch this full worksession online.
While we continue to educate and prepare highly qualified students for higher education, trade schools, the military and more, we cannot be satisfied with the fact that we have children who are not achieving in our schools.
It should not be ignored that the four jurisdictions with the highest pass rates, Falls Church City, and Arlington, Loudoun and Fairfax Counties, are also the four jurisdictions with the lowest rate of Free and Reduced lunch recipients in the region. The very same variation exists within our City, with the highest test scores in our City being posted by schools with the lowest rates of Free and Reduced lunch recipients.
Yet there are school systems around the country that have excelled in educating children challenged by poor backgrounds or limited English proficiency.
The variation in test scores within our city show that there are schools in Alexandria that have even excelled in educating these children.
As a member of the City Council, it can be easy to make the case that this is an issue for our School Board. There is no question that the Board, which was elected to lead our schools, has an enormous responsibility for ensuring our students' success.
That being said, our children are in school for 32.5 hours a week. What they experience in the other 135.5 hours of each week (as well as the five to six years before they enter our schools) has a dramatic impact on their achievement.
We cannot ignore the significant role that the City government plays in the success of our children.
Many of our children receive pre-school, day care, after-school and summer camp from City government. They may access programs from our Health Department, our Recreation Department, our Court Services Unit, or some of the many non-profit organizations that receive City funding.
Throughout the past several years, the Council and School Board have been working collaboratively to improve coordination and delivery of early childhood services and after-school services. These two areas are currently provided in partnership with existing public and private providers and present us with a great opportunity to improve the success of our children. In the budget recently approved by the City Council, we included new investments in both of these areas, working to expand quality and capacity to serve our children.
The wealth of a student's family should not dictate academic achievement or safety. We have more work to do in order to make that aspiration, reality.
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That our community got safer during this challenging time for staffing in the Alexandria Police Department, speaks volumes about the professionalism, commitment and dedication of those who serve our City.
The "fix" to our Police staffing challenges will not be quick. Hiring, training and releasing a new police officer to the streets is a time-consuming process. While we have made adjustments to pay and compensation, more remains to be done to ensure competitiveness in a hyper-competitive market for new police officers, particularly at a time where many jurisdictions are struggling to attract people to policing.
In the most recently approved budget, the City Council added 13 additional FTE to the Police Department's budget, including the creation of a new Weapons Violation Task Force and expansion of our Co-Response program.
Alexandrians are fortunate to be served by a professional and dedicated Police Department. Equipping them with the resources they need to keep our community safe must continue to be a high priority.
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One of the perpetual challenges of Alexandria local government is the balance of parking policies between those who reside in our City and those who wish to visit our City, as well as to ensure that no one user monopolizes space on our streets. The City has had the most experience working through these issues in Old Town.
While this would still allow some non-residents to park (albeit now with a fee), it would make it more likely that most parking in that given block-face would be reserved for residents of the parking district.
The City's Traffic & Parking Board did endorse these concepts and last month City Council approved the expansion of the Residential Pay-By-Phone program.
I am pleased that this program has been successful, and is popular with residents. We will continue our work to protect resident quality of life while ensuring vibrant commerce in Old Town.
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Paid for by Wilson For Mayor | www.justin.net |
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