This Sunday, September 5th, the new route structure for Alexandria's DASH bus system goes into effect. Learn more about how your existing route will change and how you can get around our community in the future. This is the most significant rethinking of our DASH route structure since 1984.

Yet our four Metrorail stations (soon to be five) serve only a small portion of our 15.5 square miles. On an average weekday, almost 24,000 people board a bus, either DASH or Metrobus. 

The Alexandria Transit Vision Plan is the City's effort to rethink our buses. At the end of 2019,  DASH approved this significant "re-imagination" of its route structure. 

To coincide with the implementation of this new route structure, City Council unanimously approved my proposed for DASH to become the first transit system in the DC area to eliminate fares. Free transit will expand ridership by an estimated 23%, bring riders back to transit following the pandemic, help achieve the City's environmental goals and disproportionately benefit our lower-income residents. With ridership depressed due to the pandemic, the initial cost to implement this change is dramatically reduced.

Communities around our nation have done the difficult work of rethinking their bus route networks to improve frequency of service, reduce route duplication, and ultimately serve more riders.  Houston's overnight route network transformation helped spur growth in ridership at a time when transit ridership was dropping elsewhere. 

To provide a factual basis for this effort, a "Transit Choices Report" was developed. This report is a compendium of data on our existing transit network, designed to support this significant undertaking. 

During the early morning hours of August 15^th, Alexandria residents throughout our community again experienced devastating flooding. It is heartbreaking to watch residents of our City suffer enormous financial loss, damage, risks to their health and intense anxiety.

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.

Earlier this year, the City Council unanimously adopted an an ordinance to double our Stormwater Utility Fee. to significantly increase the resources available for investments in our storm sewer infrastructure. 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.

Recently enacted state legislation, sponsored by Senator Adam Ebbin at the City's request, gives the City the flexibility to use these resources to address all of the challenges facing our residents.

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 addition to these locally-funded infrastructure initiatives, the City Council voted in July to allocate $5.8 million of our American Rescue Plan funding to address maintenance and investment in our Storm Sewers.

On Monday the City launched our new "Flood Mitigation Pilot Grant Program." This new program will provide matching reimbursement grants to property owners making flood resiliency improvements. This is one of the components of our comprehensive approach to addressing the flooding that has impacted our community for decades.

The newly constituted Ad Hoc Stormwater Utility and Flood Mitigation Advisory Group met last month and you can review the meeting online. This new committee will help advise the Council and our staff as we work to implement our flood mitigation plans. 

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.

Alexandria spends a significant amount of money on infrastructure designed to manage water. In May, the City Council approved a $2.6 billion, ten-year Capital Improvement Program. Of that, over $320.5 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 a billion dollars 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 10% of this total, but addressing these challenges will require a sustained increase in that investment level of a long period of time.

The investments required in our Sanitary Sewer system are funded by maintenance fees paid by existing customers (on the Alexandria Renew Enterprises bills) and by connection fees paid by developers. Last month, our staff released a draft update to our Sanitary Sewer Master Plan designed to guide new investments in this portion of our basic infrastructure.

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 recently completed 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 it does not appear to have been done before, certainly not in recent memory.

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 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.

Two months ago, the City Council formally launched a national search for our next City Manager and we want your input in this process. There is an online survey posted seeking feedback. On Wednesday September 22^nd, at 7 PM the City Council will hold a public hearing at Patrick Henry Recreation Center (4653 Taney Avenue) to collect public input on the upcoming hire. We'd love for you to join us either in-person or virtually that evening.

If you know the right person to help lead our City government through the incredible opportunities and challenges that face our community, please encourage them to apply prior to the September 17th deadline.

To ensure that the City and its workforce lead by example, the City Manager and the Alexandria City Public Schools Superintendent announced new vaccine mandates for employees of both organizations.

It is my hope that private employers will follow suit and impose similar requirements to ensure that the resiliency within our community continues to strengthen.

Alexandria's population is 159,467. This is an increase of 13.9% from a decade ago. That is the headline of the release of the 2020 Census data for our City.

Beneath that top line number lies a treasure trove of data, as our City has changed dramatically over the past decade.

Our City has grown more diverse, with our white population falling below 50% for the first time ever. Our Hispanic or Latino population saw dramatic growth, rising over 30%.

The City's average household size grew slightly, to 2.11 persons per housing unit, while the number of housing units increased by 8,103.

While Alexandria's growth was nearly double the growth of the Commonwealth of Virginia, the growth around the region was much more varied. Loudoun County saw 34.8% growth over the decade, while Prince William saw 20% growth over the same time. Our neighbors in Arlington experienced nearly the same growth as Alexandria, with their population rising just about 15%.

Yet, Virginia's largest locality, Fairfax County, grew only 6.3% during this time.

The Census not only determines political representation, but also the distribution of billions of dollars of Federal and State funding. The City achieved an extremely high Census participation rate this year. Our 2020 Census Complete Count Committee was led by Councilman Canek Aguirre. His leadership, along with the hard work of the committee, community partners and staff, has led to this full enumeration.

Early voting for our November election will begin this month.

On November 2^nd, 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.

On Tuesday November 2^nd, all City polling places will be open from 6 AM until 7 PM for the General Election.

Sample ballots are now available for your review online.

Last year, Virginia introduced "no-excuse" early voting, so voters have three choices to vote this November:

Last week, City Council gathered on Eisenhower Avenue to have a formal groundbreaking for the build of our municipal fiber network.

Almost 8 years ago, I proposed that the City develop a broadband plan to help bring true competition to Alexandria's broadband market.

In December, the City issued a revised solicitation to select a vendor to construct a municipal fiber network to serve City and School facilities around our community. A few months ago, a contract was awarded to Jones Utilities Construction, Inc to perform this work.

For years, Alexandria has sought new private investment in broadband infrastructure. For most of our residents, we have one company providing Internet connectivity and television. With new Verizon FIOS deployment plans shelved around the country and Google Fiber largely dead, the investment in broadband infrastructure must fall to local governments. Regardless of the performance of incumbent providers, technological innovation and reliability thrives on competition.   

Concurrent with the FY 2017 budget process, the City completed the initial financial estimates for the first phase of the infrastructure build-out .The plan is designed to replace the City's existing connectivity agreement for City facilities with a City-owned fiber network. 

By leveraging E-Rate funding from the FCC, achieving operating savings from the costs of the existing agreement, and the potential for private leases of our infrastructure, the effort may be able to pay for itself.     

In the fall of 2016, the Council unanimously took the next step in this important process, as we requested that the City Manager formally solicit for new providers to partner with the City. 

One of the core components of the original proposal I made was that the City adopt a "Dig Once" policy.  Essentially that's a policy that makes the City more efficient by leveraging existing underground infrastructure work to add conduit and other infrastructure at the same time. With hundreds of millions of dollars of sewer and transportation work scheduled over the next decade, we should sequence and combine that work to be the most efficient. 

For a quarter of a century, the City has been working to bring an inline Metro Rail station to Potomac Yard. Just before the end of 2019, we broke ground and formally began construction of that station.

The station had been scheduled to open in April of next year. Unfortunately, WMATA announced an error that they believe will lead to a 5 month delay in the opening. WMATA's contractors are now working to correct the specifications for the Automatic Train Control capabilities in our new station. During this time, our staff is working closely to ensure that every opportunity to accelerate this process is pursued.

You can review an update of construction activities, including photos on the City's website.

Given the history of this project, it seemed somewhat unsurprising that we would experience one final hurdle. On the front page of the Final Environmental Impact Statement for the Potomac Yard Metro Station are the seals of four entities: Federal Transit Administration, Department of the Interior, WMATA and the 

One of the trade-offs associated with this project was the impacts of the construction efforts on wetlands adjacent to the construction site. In May we learned that due to careful management of the construction project, the permitted wetland impacts have been able to be significantly reduced. While the permit that the City sought allows temporary impacts of just over 2 acres of property, the City now believes that the temporary impact will only affect just over 1 acre. This is a significant accomplishment that further reduces the environmental impact of this important project.

The Potomac Yard Metro project will facilitate the creation of up to 26,000 new jobs and will bring up to $2 billion of new tax revenue to the City (over 30 years). It removes thousands of vehicles from one of the most crowded corridors in our City. It promotes the creation of the kind of walkable community our City has long desired in Potomac Yard. 

In 2008, along with then-Councilman Rob Krupicka, I proposed a new start to efforts to bring Metro to Potomac Yard.  We included language in the City's Transportation Master Plan explicitly calling for a new station at Potomac Yard. We also tied the construction and funding of Metro to the development occurring in the Yard.   

The result is a funding plan for Potomac Yard Metro that not only leverages the development activity in Potomac Yard, but also does so without requiring the contributions of General Fund taxpayers.     

The largest environmental, economic development, and transportation initiative in our City's history is being accomplished using one of the most innovative funding mechanisms used anywhere in the country.     

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. 

A little over two 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.

As we near the moment when the pandemic will be behind us, the City is working to determine the future of these adaptations. Many of these changes have become very popular, with little of the negative impacts that were feared.

Many of these changes not only supported the commercial activity of our central business district, but also provided new vitality. Please share your opinion so the City Council can make an informed decision about the future of these changes

During the 2020 Virginia General Assembly session, Senator Adam Ebbin sponsored legislation that gave local governments to authority to enact a 5 cent tax on plastic bags.

This legislation provided that local governments who imposed this form of taxation would be required to use the proceeds to fund environmental clean-up as well as the provision of reusable bags to lower-income residents.

Later this month, our staff will bring to the City Council a formal proposal to impose this new fee tax as a manner to both reduce the amount of plastic bags that are littered in our City as well as provide new revenue for environmental clean-up efforts.

As proposed, the tax would only apply to grocery stores, convenience stores and drug stores.

Next Wednesday, September 8th, our staff will be hosting an information session to provide more information and receive feedback in advance of Council consideration.

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.