Last month, I filed a petition with the Virginia State Corporation Commission as part of Dominion's Triennial Review. My petition requested that Dominion's allowed profit be reduced to account for the instability in Alexandria's electricity supply.

So far this year, our residents and businesses have experienced large-scale power outages on February 8^th, April 30^th, May 26^th, June 11^th, July 21^st, August 10^th, August 29^th, September 1^st, October 1^st, October 2^nd and again last weekend.

During 2020, 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.

I have now written twice to the CEO of Dominion Energy expressing concerns on behalf of Alexandria's residents and businesses. While Dominion has been responsive, we have not seen the necessary action to resolve this instability. In fact, the information Dominion has provided has validated our concerns, in that the data shows that outages are increasing and capital investment has remained flat.

Last month, Dominion again sent representatives to discuss these issues at our City Council meeting. While the dialogue continues, we will continue to work to achieve the type of increase in infrastructure investment in our City that will improve reliability.

Fully 67% of the City's General Fund (not including schools and debt service) expenditures are personnel costs. including both salary and benefits. In this year's budget, that is $231 million. 

For some of our employee groups, particularly in public safety, we are struggling to compete. With significant growth in hiring and in compensation among neighboring jurisdictions, the competition grows more acute each year. Given the substantial cost of training and the consistency of that training across the region, inability to retain these employees can be very costly for the taxpayers.  

In 2018, to begin the process of meeting the City's compensation philosophy, the City Manager set aside $1.5 million to address some of the pay inequities existing within the Police Department and Fire Department. The City Manager's plan was to allow this money to serve as seed money for a multi-year effort to address these issues. 

It became clear during the budget process that the $1.5 million was insufficient to address these issues. Ultimately the Council approved a package that I proposed to set aside a total of $3.6 million to address these public safety compensation challenges. 

In the City Manager's budget proposal in the spring of 2020, released just before the pandemic was upon us, he included a variety of pay adjustments intended to keep pace with regional competition. As the scope of the pandemic became clear, the Council ultimately, determined that the tax increases proposed to fund the budget proposals would not be tenable. Those pay adjustments were removed from the revised budget.

While most of these challenges must wait to be addressed during an upcoming budget process, the Council did vote last month to allocate surplus money from the previous fiscal year and a portion of our second tranche of American Rescue Plan funds to provide new funding to our employees.

Fifteen years ago, the City's Budget and Fiscal Affairs Advisory Committee made a series of recommendations to help mitigate these costs. Many of those are in place today including premium cost sharing, self-funding (or self-insurance), and plan design changes. These changes have saved the taxpayers millions of dollars each year, with minimal impact on employees. In fact, due to lower-than-expected health care spending from the City's self-insurance fund, the City was able to give City employees a "premium holiday" for three pay periods, thus increasing take-home pay.

In 2004, the Government Accounting Standards Board (GASB) required governments to account for their liability for the payment of healthcare benefits and retirement benefits (OPEB) during retirement. Previously, these costs were recognized and paid on a "pay as you go" basis. 

Alexandria became one of the first jurisdictions to comply with this new standard and we created a trust fund to save dollars for these future obligations. The City's unfunded liability for this obligation is now $50.7 million, a decrease of $14.7 million from the previous year. This prudence protects taxpayers in the future from large unexpected obligations. It also protects employees from sudden benefit reductions due to an economic downturn. We are on track to fully pre-fund these obligations in 2028.

Most City employees (excluding most public safety) participate in the Virginia Retirement System (VRS), a state administered defined benefit pension plan. The City implemented new cost-sharing for the VRS pension in 2012, with a five year implementation. This effectively shifted a portion of the funding of the pension program from the City to employees. 

In 2018, the City Manager proposed a change to the City's Supplemental Pension Plan. The City's Supplemental Pension Plan is an additional defined benefit pension plan that the City has had in place since 1970.

Tomorrow is Election Day!

All City polling places will be open from 6 AM until 7 PM.

Saturday was the last day of early voting. So far 7,078 voters have returned ballots by mail, 16,668 voters have voted in person, and an additional 3,765 voters have received ballots by mail but have not yet returned them.

Four years ago, we had 6,381 voters who voted early, so this is an enormous increase!

Mail ballots that have not been returned can be returned until 7 PM tomorrow evening using the drop-box that is at 132 N. Royal Street or dropped in one of the drop-boxes that will be located at every voting precinct tomorrow.

Tomorrow, Alexandria voters will elect a Governor, Lieutenant Governor, Attorney General, members of the Virginia House of Delegates, Alexandria Mayor, Alexandria Sheriff, Alexandria Commonwealth's Attorney, all six members of the Alexandria City Council and all 9 members of the Alexandria City School Board.

Sample ballots are available for your review online.

Our Potomac River waterfront is the reason Alexandria exists as a community. The history of our waterfront is the history of Alexandria. It is what has brought people and commerce to our community for generations. 

Only a few years ago, the future of our waterfront was the source of disagreement and vigorous debate. Today, it is the source of vitality, excitement and a place for all of those in our community to gather. Yet, we are just getting started.

On Friday afternoon and overnight Saturday morning, we were reminded of some of the unfinished work that remains, as tidal waters closed several streets and businesses.

Almost eight years ago, the City Council approved Phase One of the Waterfront Landscape and Flood Mitigation Design. This exciting design married the vision of the Olin Group and the input of hundreds of residents who participated in the planning efforts. It also received input from the Art and History Report to ensure our history is a key component of the future of our waterfront.

The City Council's approved Capital Improvement Program includes over $100 million to accelerate the implementation of the infrastructure elements of the plan, specifically the flood mitigation. Yet, as this project has been planned, it has become obvious that the cost of what was originally envisioned will be quite a bit more than we have budgeted.

Following extensive re-assessment, our City Staff has returned with new concepts that would address waterfront flooding. These alternatives will require weighing various trade-offs with costs, temporary impacts on existing parks, and planned park enhancements.

Please let me know your thoughts on these concepts as we work to achieve the vision of a more vibrant and accessible waterfront for our City.

In late August, our community was excited to see Alexandria's students return to school, full-time, 5-days a week. The experience of the past two school years has been heartbreaking, disruptive and tumultuous for our students.

Yet, if you talk to any educator, administrator or support staff in any school in our country, they are full of anxiety about how this return is faring.

In Alexandria, we invest in numerous supports of our students, from counseling, mental health services, mentoring, healthcare, and beyond. For a year and a half, our students were largely separated from those services.

Nearly two-thirds of Alexandria's public school students come from poverty and a third are learning English as their second language. We have a unique student population that requires a unique level of supports to ameliorate the impacts of poverty and ease language acclimation. Despite the best efforts of our educators, many of those services cannot be delivered effectively in a virtual format.

As students returned to classrooms, we have seen the impact of some of those gaps. Students were unaccustomed to the school environment and their skills to address the inevitable conflicts that arise, had atrophied.

Unfortunately, this significant transition coincided with another change, the removal of Alexandria Police Department School Resource Officers (SRO) from our middle schools and our high school. Since the mid-1990s, Alexandria has been fortunate to have dedicated SROs that work in our schools to build community relationships and provide a support for our students, the faculty and support staff.

Our community has been engaged in debate about the appropriateness of the SRO program for a few years. There is a national movement working to remove police from school environments.

Ultimately, our School Board took up this issue last year, and they voted 6-3 to retain the SRO program, but with substantial revisions to the Memorandum of Understanding that governs the program.

During City Council's budget process earlier this year, a majority of the City Council voted 4-3 to remove the funding for the SROs, thus ending the program. I did not support this removal.

Last month, the City Council voted 4-3 to return SROs to our schools for the remainder of the school year while we considered potential alternatives and other changes to the program in the future.

This entire discussion has been a dismaying one for our community. If we have learned anything from the national conversation over the last few years, it is that there are radically different perceptions about police and policing among our residents. That has been painfully evident in Alexandria's SRO discussion.

There have been concerns voiced about criminalization of youth misbehavior and premature involvement of youth in the criminal justice system, particularly among youth of color. There is national data to support those concerns. These concerns cannot be dismissed.

Yet, we also must hear the voices of parents and educators who are concerned about the safety of our schools. During this school year, we have had at least two students involved in shootings and a student attempt to bring a loaded firearm into our high school. These concerns cannot be easily dismissed either.

I believe that City Council's decision earlier this year, made by the Council without collaboration with our schools, served not to provide closure on a divisive issue, but unfortunately made the issue more volatile.

We CAN devise an Alexandria approach to keeping our students, educators and support staff safe, while also ensuring that our students can learn free of perceived intimidation. I am hopeful that we will use this moment to step back, have a collaborative process involving students, educators, support staff, parents, and law enforcement, to determine an Alexandria approach to this issue.

Given the time, I believe we can arrive at the correct approach for our community.

Between 1828 and 1861, over 100,000 enslaved African-Americans passed through 1315 Duke Street in the City of Alexandria. This building was the headquarters for one of the largest domestic slave trading operations in our nation. 

As of March of 2020, the City of Alexandria owns the building, having purchased it from the Northern Virginia Urban League to ensure the preservation of this important historic resource. While the purchase was locally funded, the Commonwealth's approved budget in 2020 included $2.4 million of state funding to support the rehabilitation and development of the historic resources on the site.

In furtherance of this effort, the City commissioned a comprehensive Historic Structures Report (HSR) to formally document the history, plan future interpretation and prioritize rehabilitation. Last month, the firm commissioned to perform the study formally presented their findings and the final report.

Additionally, fundraising efforts have begun immediately to support private interest in this important resource. Please join me in donating to support this effort. 

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. 

We are now seeking applications for the Independent Community Policing Review Board that was created by City Council. You may apply online and applications must be submitted by Friday November 12th.

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.

In February, the City Council unanimously approved the creation of the Alexandria Crisis Intervention Co-Responding Pilot Program. This new program will pair a dedicated behavioral health clinician with a trained behavioral health police officer to respond to calls for service regarding residents in need of behavioral health crisis intervention. This new program will provide residents in crisis with more specialized services to ensure safety of the individual in crisis and the community. At the end of September, Council received an update on the implementation of this new program.

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. The proposed budget included a comprehensive proposal for such a program, but it is not funded at this time. Earlier this year, Congressman Don Beyer secured initial Federal funding for the City to set up a pilot camera program.

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.

The Torpedo Factory Arts Center is an iconic presence on the City's waterfront. Bringing a half million visitors into working artists galleries, the Factory is a economic development engine and unique arts resource for our community.  

In February of this year, the City Council endorsed an action plan for the future of the Torpedo Factory. In June, the City Council received an update on the status of the engagement on that action plan.

As a result, our staff is now bringing a few proposals for the future of the Torpedo Factory to stakeholders for input, in preparation for a return to the City Council. You can review those proposals online.

In 2009, the City commissioned a study to review the Factory and the opportunities of the site. The result of the study was a series of organizational changes to the Factory. Those led to the creation of a non-profit Board to run the operations and leverage private resources to support the Factory. 

With the lease nearing conclusion a several years ago, the Torpedo Factory Arts Center Board commissioned another study to look at the strategic options available to the City and the Factory.

It has now been five years since the City took steps to provide stability by assuming caretaker leadership for the Factory. Since that time, the City provided leases to the existing artist tenants, and has been providing day to day management. It is now time to make a decision and create a sustainable structure for the governance of the Factory so that it can flourish in the future.

Alexandria's annual leaf collection begins today! Check online to learn your collection date.

In June we learned that our City Manager, Mark Jinks, will be retiring at the end of the year. We will have the opportunity later this year to properly recognize Mark's dedicated and impactful service to our City, but at the moment this leaves a significant task before the City Council. We must make the most important personnel decision in City government: selecting our Chief Executive Officer.

Three months ago, the City Council formally launched a national search for our next City Manager.

We conducted a resident survey and presented the findings to the public. Additionally, the City Council held a town hall meeting to get feedback from residents on the hiring process. You can watch the meeting online.

Last month, I provided a comprehensive update on the City Council's work to accelerate efforts to address chronic flooding issues, due to more frequent and more intense rain events.

In an attempt to bring better "ground truth" to the discussion, the City has now worked to install 6 new rain gauges and 2 new streamflow gauges. These gauges will now provide real-time data for members of the public to see what is actually occurring in our City.

Fifteen years ago, the City spent a summer experimenting with a closure of King Street to vehicles on weekends. By giving the road space over to pedestrians, the City attempted to replicate numerous cities around the world who have created new vitality from asphalt. 

Last month, the City Council voted unanimously to make this closure permanent.

Two and a half years ago, Councilman John Chapman and I proposed that the City prepare a new recommendation for a pedestrian zone in the unit, 100-block and potentially 200-block of King Street in Old Town. We suggested that with a newly expanded Waterfront Park, new public art, active programming and adjacent businesses, it was the ideal time to bring back this idea.