The Council Connection
your connection to City Council by Mayor Justin M. Wilson
Initiatives and Updates
Digging for a Cleaner Potomac
Nine months ago, we celebrated the groundbreaking of the largest infrastructure project in Alexandria's history. For decades, the combination of stormwater and sanitary sewage has overwhelmed portions of the Combined Sewer System that serves a 540-acre area in Old Town.

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.

The TBM was built in Germany and it left Schwanau, Germany by boat. Once across the ocean, it travelled up the Chesapeake Bay and Potomac River and it will arrive in 3 parts by truck overnight starting Tuesday July 5th.


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.
Housing, Height & More
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."


In September of 2019, the Board of Directors of the Metropolitan Washington Council of Governments (COG) unanimously adopted new regional housing creation targets. This was the first-ever regional commitment to accelerate the development of housing supply as a means to address our affordability crisis. 

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. 


In 2013, while adopting our Housing Master Plan, City Council had set an ambitious goal to create or preserve 2,000 affordable units by 2025. We are on track to meet this goal.  

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.

Over the last three years, the City has achieved the preservation or creation of just about 1,000 units of committed affordable housing.

The housing non-profit HAND has begun an annual report to measure the work that each jurisdiction in the region is doing to achieve our commitments. The HAND "Housing Indication Tool" report shows that Alexandria has made significant progress, with more work to do.

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:

  1. Raising and Spending Tax Dollars: To develop and preserve housing as well as assist residents in obtaining housing.
  2. Using land-use policy (zoning) to create and preserve housing

In the budget the City Council approved in May, we expanded the tax dollars we have committed annually to affordable housing. One cent from the real estate tax rate now goes to affordable housing, which generates $4.6 million annually. One percent of Alexandria's dining tax rate also goes to affordable housing, yielding another $4.9 million annually. Together this generates $9.5 million of annual revenue that is used to fund the creation and preservation of committed affordable housing, with an aggressive project pipeline planned years in advance.

This year has been very busy in putting those resources to work:



  • 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.
  • 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.

Our Interdepartmental Work Program to include a comprehensive review of zoning tools available to advance affordability. The so-called "Zoning For Housing" effort is now moving forward with findings scheduled to come to Council and the Planning Commission over the next few years. 

Over the 2 years, this includes study of:

One of those proposals came to the Planning Commission last month, a proposal to expand the applicability of "Bonus Height." As structured today, this program allows a landowner to request additional height, up to 25 feet if a third of that additional housing is committed as affordable housing. This is similar to the City's "Bonus Density" program, which provides additional density in exchange for a third of affordable housing. Bonus height is today only allowed in a zone where the height limit is 50 feet. This proposal would apply the Bonus Height program where the height limit is 45 feet or higher.

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.
Taxpayer Receipt
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. 

A few years ago, I worked with the staff in our City's Office of Management and Budget to create a Real Estate Tax Receipt Calculator

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! 
Debt Issuance

  • 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. 

In May, the Council adopted our 10 year Capital Improvement Program, covering fiscal years 2023- 2032.   Over the 10 year period, the program calls for $2.73 billion in capital investment throughout the City. Over 31% of this funding goes to City and School municipal facilities. Another 27% goes to transportation initiatives, including Metro.

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..."

Over the past few years, I have pushed for new policies to make the City's balance sheet even stronger. Nearly eight years ago, the Council unanimously adopted a new "cash capital" policy, which served to reduce debt levels and the risk of our borrowing

Three years ago, the Council approved amendments to our "Spendable Fund Balance," essentially expanding the amount of reserves we have available. This new policy was recommended by the City's Budget and Fiscal Affairs Advisory Committee, and it was specifically cited by the rating agencies in support of our ratings. 

Alexandria is very conservative with our use of debt.  

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 2.5%, and this budget year we achieved 1.8%. 

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. 
Power Plant Redevelopment
On Tuesday evening, the City Council will hold a public hearing to receive testimony and take action on an application for redevelopment of the the coal-fired Potomac River Generating Station, which began operation on Alexandria's waterfront in 1949.


Two decades ago, persistent resident activists, led by Elizabeth Chimento and Poul Hertel, began questioning the health impacts of the coal-fired Potomac River Generating Station, which began operation on Alexandria's waterfront in 1949.

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.

Hilco Redevelopment Partners, a national entity specializing in the redevelopment of aged industrial sites, took control of the property with plans to see redevelopment to fruition.

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.

With the progress of this planning, I am excited to see an ideal partner for the City to turn this former industrial polluter into the sustainable uses of the City's future!
Another Metro Shutdown

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.

In May, representatives from WMATA attended our City Council meeting to discuss the ongoing planning for the upcoming shutdown. You can watch the discussion online or view the slides from the presentation.

After last May's meeting, I wrote to WMATA Interim General Manager Andrew Off detailing the City's requests for mitigation, as well as reiterating the City's position that this major infrastructure work cannot occur unless WMATA has completed their work to bring the 7000 series cars back into service. Recent lapses by WMATA have only affirmed this position.

Almost three years ago, Alexandria's Metro Rail stations reopened after a difficult summer of platform improvement work cut the City off from the rest of the system. We spent part of a September 2019 City Council meeting looking back at the mitigations that we had put in place and how they had fared.

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. 
Alexandria's Schools
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.   

The children may live in public housing units owned and operated by the Alexandria Redevelopment and Housing Authority or in affordable housing units created or supported by the City. 

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.

Last month, I joined with my colleague Councilwoman Alyia Gaskins to present a proposal designed to use the violence we have seen as a galvanizing point to make change to ensure our youth are more resilient, better equipped for success and ultimately safer. We hope to engage youth, parents, educators and members of our community in a dialogue designed to build the systems and supports required to promote youth safety and success.

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. 
Police Staffing
During 2020, the City experienced some of the largest increases in Part 1 crime in recent years. Part 1 crime is the most serious incidents and are used around the nation as a reference for the safety of a community.

While Alexandria's increase in crime was not as steep as was seen around the nation, it was certainly a cause for concern, as the pandemic fueled increases, particularly in violent crimes.


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.
Old Town Parking
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. 

In 2015, the City reconvened the Old Town Area Parking Study (OTAPS) group to make policy recommendations on various parking challenges in the Old Town area. As with similar groups before it, the 2015 iteration of OTAPS grappled with proposals to create "resident-only" parking in areas of Old Town.

While the 2015 OTAPS recommendations did not recommend full "resident-only" parking, they did recommend a more modest approach. The group recommended paid parking in the residential permit restricted zones. These zones restrict parking to residents, but also allow other users to park for free for a short period of time. The OTAPS proposal would allow non-residents to pay instead, using the City's "pay-by-phone" platform, now ParkMobile.

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. 

In a surprisingly divided vote of 4-3, the Council approved this program as a pilot effort in November of 2016. In approving the pilot, Council chose to limit the area eligible to participate to a subset of Old Town streets. Since the creation of the program, 18 blocks have petitioned and been approved for signage. Most of these blocks are south of King Street.

We have seen a rapid recovery for Old Town visitation in the aftermath of the pandemic. As a result, on-street parking has grown increasingly tight, particularly in the evenings. In March, I published a memo detailing several concepts that I believe will provide more on-street parking for residents, drive visitors to available off-street parking (garages, etc), and support the visitation that drives our economy.

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.