The Council Connection
your connection to City Council by Mayor Justin M. Wilson
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City Manager Selection Tonight |
I am excited that the City Council has selected the right leader to move our City government forward as we tackle the important challenges and opportunities that await us. Our new City Manager will formally take on their responsibilities next month.
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Landmark Property Transfer |
After two decades of discussion about how to redevelop Landmark Mall, the City of Alexandria is finally redeveloping 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.
This will not only revitalize a site that many had given up on, but will also provide a catalyst for redevelopment and enhancement throughout the West End of our City.
Despite over two decades of decline, it is not a mystery why we had been unable to spur redevelopment on this site in the past, It is a complicated site, with a complicated ownership structure requiring significant infrastructure investment.
The City will finance some of the infrastructure improvements required on the site and we will purchase the future hospital site to lease back to Inova. Inova's proceeds from selling their existing site on Seminary Road is financing their expenses related to the move.
There is no clearer demonstration of the City's financial challenges than the predicament that has faced Landmark Mall.
At the City's tax rate in 2000, these three sites alone generated $1.25 million in real estate tax.
Today, the three properties are assessed at $25.2 million, $14 million, and $12.6 million, respectively. They generate about $500,000 in real estate tax today, less than half of what it used to be.
To make the situation even more severe, real estate tax is only a portion of the picture. The reduction in revenues from sales tax, dining tax, and other business taxes has also been dramatic at this site.
We have finally assembled a partnership, financing and a plan to revitalize this site. Landmark Mall redevelopment has been complicated from the beginning, but this exciting partnership is making things happen on this site for the first time in decades.
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At the end of October, I joined our City Manager, our Finance Director and other members of our senior leadership team to make our annual presentation to the bond rating agencies.
A municipal bond refunding is essentially the municipal version of a mortgage refinancing, where the City is taking advantage of lower interest rates and replacing portions of our municipal debt with new debt at lower rates.
The City will issue these bonds shortly using a competitive bidding process.
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 cited Alexandria's "healthy financial position given strong operating trends and conservative budgeting practices and that the sizeable tax base will continue to grow and diversify."
Standard & Poor's similarly cited Alexandria's "Robust economic growth and management team that proactively manages the city's economy, finances, and environmental, social, and governance (ESG) risks."
This is the first year that the rating agencies have focused on the ESG risks. The agencies cited the City's work managing these risks as a considerable positive, noting the City's work on climate change, flooding and equity.
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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It has taken far too long, but the City is finally moving ahead on an effort to bring new broadband capacity to our community.
Over 7 years ago, the City issued a Request for Information (RFI). This RFI solicited concepts from the private sector for partnership with the City in expanding broadband options, availability, and capabilities. We received 10 responses from potential private partners and those responses shaped the approach the City is now taking.
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.
This is an issue that impacts not only residents but also our businesses and the ability of our community to attract new investment.
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.
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.
This is an exciting project and one that gives the City the best chance to leverage its assets to bring new broadband services to our residents and businesses.
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Public Housing Redevelopment |
The Alexandria Redevelopment and Housing Authority (ARHA) directly manages and controls 1,079 units of affordable housing in our City. In addition, ARHA manages the City's Section 8 Housing Choice Voucher program, which utilizes Federal funding to provide assistance for another 1,906 low-income families to reside in privately-owned housing units. Together, this is approximately 4% of the City's overall housing stock.
ARHA is an independent entity, with a City Council-appointed Board, but separate from the City, that utilizes Federal funding from the US Department of Housing & Urban Development (HUD) to provide housing to low-income residents of Alexandria.
With an aging housing stock and decades of underinvestment in public housing at the Federal level, ARHA has worked to advance redevelopment efforts to refresh and preserve homes for low-income residents in our City.
Almost exactly 40 years ago, the City Council adopted Resolution 830, which committed the City to "one for one" replacement of any public housing unit that was destroyed by redevelopment.
Making the commitment stated in Resolution 830 is rather easy. Actually achieving that replacement in an environment of rapidly-appreciating property values, is extraordinarily difficult.
Last month, ARHA made two successive announcements that will define this important next phase:
Pursuing these redevelopments will help reshape, refresh and expand a significant portion of ARHA's housing stock.
At the federal level, we have seen dramatic changes in how public housing is managed and developed. In the past, the Federal Government had been a proactive participant in bringing about the redevelopment of public housing. This was demonstrated in Alexandria when the City used HOPE VI funding to redevelop 100 units of Public Housing into Chatham Square. This mixed-income development incorporated both market-rate and public housing.
Now as we conclude 2021, the Federal Government is forcing changes in public housing with its inaction. Today, HUD funds a shrinking portion of the dollars required to operate Alexandria Public Housing units. The balance of revenue that ARHA collects as rent is not sufficient for sustainable management of their properties, and this is likely to get worse. While there is some potential for large new investments given legislation being considered, it will remain to be seen.
With aging properties sitting on valuable land, ARHA must look at the highest and best use of its land to preserve housing for low-income residents in our City.
In 2008, the City Council adopted the Braddock East Master Plan, which called for redevelopment of several aging public housing properties. By allowing additional density near existing transit, it was designed to encourage private partnership in the redevelopment of this housing.
Aligned with this Plan, James Bland Homes have become Old Town Commons. This redevelopment activity has proven successful in providing a sustainable model for mixed-income housing in our City.
As they continued through the process, ARHA narrowed the number of properties down to five: Andrew Adkins, Samuel Madden, Hopkins Tancil, the ARHA Headquarters building, and Cameron Valley.
The story of public housing redevelopment has been one of ups and downs. This is a significant undertaking, but we will now have a historic opportunity to partner with the private sector and provide new housing for a variety of income levels near existing transit in our City. This effort will also provide financial stability for ARHA in the face of continued change at the Federal level.
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We also see a clear divide emerging in the new post-pandemic enrollment trends, as enrollment in our high school (grades 9 - 12) continues to increase, while enrollment for elementary and middle school students dropped. While both the increase and the decreases were modest, they are potential trends to be watched in the future.
This 10-year Capital Program includes rebuilds or builds of:
- Cora Kelly Elementary School
- George Mason Elementary School
- Minnie Howard Campus of our High School
- A new school to be determined
All together, this is the largest period of new school facility construction in our City's history!
With the resources now in place, we must work collaboratively to ensure that these new facilities come to reality.
In June, feasibility studies were released by ACPS to inform planning for the new school buildings for George Mason and for Cora Kelly. Both reports examined the question as to whether "swing space" will be required during the construction process.
Over eight years ago, the City convened the Joint Long Range Educational Facilities Work Group. The group was given the essential charge to understand our recent increase in student enrollment, better project enrollment growth in the future, and to decide what to do about it.
The School Board Chair and Vice Chair at the time, the Mayor at the time, and I joined a group of community members and staff to steer the effort.
We have also worked to understand where the enrollment is coming from. The type and age of housing is a significant determinant of the student generation rates. Today, 88% of ACPS students live in housing that is over 30 years old.
We learned that low-rise apartments generate nearly three times the students as high-rise or mid-rise apartments do. We learned that single family homes generate nearly double the students as townhouses. We know that public housing and other income-restricted units far outpace any other property type for student generation.
These data points remind us of the need to address this enrollment growth head-on.
In June of 2015, the City Council and the School Board adopted the Joint Long Range Educational Facilities Plan. The Plan is the culmination of the group's work in conjunction with the efforts of both ACPS and City staff. The Plan looks at each elementary school building in the City, assesses the facility's educational adequacy, and provides a roadmap for increasing capacity and addressing deficiencies.
While capacity will remain the focus of the investments we must make in our school facilities, we have seen far too many examples of the dangers of systemic under-investment in our school facilities. Returning our school facilities to a state of good repair while sustaining a preventative maintenance cycle must be a priority of our collective investment. There can be no excuse for poorly maintained learning environments for our children.
While the pandemic has paused a decade and a half of enrollment growth, it can be assumed that the trend will return as our schools continue their return to "normal." These long-term investments become critical to support the success of our students in the generations to come.
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Safer Streets/Vision Zero |
Each of these tragic incidents change the lives of the victims and their families in dramatic ways. But for each tragedy, there are also countless close calls and near misses that don't get reported.
In Alexandria, we are fortunate to have pedestrian scale, walkable neighborhoods with urban amenities throughout our City. Yet if residents do not feel they can safely traverse the streets of our City, then all the urban amenities are for naught.
Yet there are still areas of our City where sidewalks are non-existent or unusable, intersections are unsafe and unsafe driving is rampant. We must improve the safety of our streets for all users. Doing so requires changing the behavior of all users of our roads.
My view is that in order to significantly improve pedestrian safety in our City, we will have to be willing to make trade-offs in the pursuit of safety. The data show that the changes that will most significantly improve safety are also the most controversial in our community.
We have also explored the creation of additional "pedestrian scrambles" to create an "all pedestrian" phase at problematic intersections.
I do believe there is more we can do.
The ideal condition on our roads is to separate users by mode, particularly when there can be large disparities in speed. That means building new sidewalks and new lanes for bikes.
Alexandrians should be able to use our streets safely. We will have to take ourselves out of our comfort zone to make that happen. Ultimately, these efforts will not only provide mobility options for our residents, help achieve climate initiatives, but also save lives.
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The most important decision the City Council makes each year is the adoption of the annual operating budget and capital improvement program. The operating budget generally funds the on-going costs of government (primarily personnel), while the capital budget funds one-time expenditures that provide the community with an asset (new schools, new roads, new playing fields, transit buses, etc).
In Virginia, the structure of municipal finance is heavily reliant on real estate taxes. Consequentially, in Alexandria the real estate market, both residential and commercial, dictates our budgetary fate.
Real estate tax revenues are currently projected to grow by 3.8%, which is a healthy rate of growth, not unlike growth in recent years. Much higher than expected vehicle prices are driving vehicle personal property tax revenues. Our consumption-based taxes, including sales and dining, are staging strong recoveries.
Yet on the expenditure side of the ledger, we are seeing increases in costs across our balance sheet, driven by new costs for cash capital and debt service to support City and School capital investments.
With these revenue estimates and expenditure estimates, this brings us to a projected revenue shortfall of $8.4 million, not including employee compensation changes that will likely be necessary to address competitive pressures.
Given that our local budget must be balanced, that shortfall must be resolved with either spending reductions, tax increases or some combination of the two.
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.
This will be a challenging environment to adopt a budget within. With our residential taxpayers already paying more this year due to the appreciation in our residential tax base, I believe we should again work to avoid a rate increase while protecting the core services our residents depend on.
The City Manager's budget presentation is on February 15th.
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For the past two years, the City has been engaged in an extensive planning process to help manage change and preserve and expand affordability in the Arlandria section of our City.
The Council worked to accelerate and prioritize the planning efforts for this area of our City to deploy tools that would serve to counteract some of these impacts.
This plan will now be before our Planning Commission on Wednesday December 8th and will come to City Council for consideration on Saturday December 18th. Public input is welcome at both venues.
Let me know your thoughts!
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Next month the Virginia General Assembly returns to Richmond for the so-called "long-session." The General Assembly alternates between a 45 day session in odd number years and a 60 day session in even number years.
Two years ago, we were prepping for a switch of party control for the first time in 22 years in the House of Delegates and 8 years in the State Senate. The regular session of 2020 was extraordinary with significant legislation enacted, and it was just a prelude to an extended special session, which addressed legislation and budget decisions related to COVID and numerous reforms to Virginia's criminal justice system.
For the past two years we enjoyed an unprecedented level of influence for our City. Our delegation boasts BOTH Majority Leaders (Senator Saslaw leading the State Senate and Delegate Herring leading the House of Delegates) and a few committee chairs.
With the recent election results, things will change dramatically. With a new Governor and a flip in partisan control of the House of Delegates, the only legislation likely to make it to the Governor's desk for signature, will be changes that enjoy bipartisan support.
Every year, the City Council adopts a Legislative Package for the upcoming General Assembly session. While the state government is certainly a significant financial supporter of the City's budget, Richmond also sets a legal environment that affects how we provide services to our residents.
Along with Vice Mayor Elizabeth Bennett-Parker, I serve on the City's Legislative Committee, which recommends the Legislative Package each year to our colleagues.
Yet we do have specific asks within the legislative priorities, including:
- Funding and Authority For Infrastructure Investments
- Protecting and Expansion of Local Authority and Funding
- Projecting our most vulnerable residents
- Promoting Access, Equity and Equality
- Combating climate change and promoting clean energy
We have included a specific list of legislative asks to support our efforts to address inland flooding, including efforts to regulate the stormwater impacts of smaller infill development and ensure new state resources to support the necessary infrastructure investments. We have included requests for increased regulation of Dominion Virginia Power, funding for abandoned cemeteries, broadband investments and efforts to support building safety.
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Last month, the City Council finalized the recent update of our Alexandria Mobility Plan. During the outreach phase of that update, one of the most consistent areas of input we received were concerns about the impacts of congestion on quality of life.
As traffic volumes have returned in the wake of the pandemic, it is clear that more is necessary.
The first pilot would be for the first quarter of 2022 and would change light timings on Quaker and Duke, as well as on side streets, to focus traffic volumes on the arterial roads.
The second pilot would occur beginning in August and would also limit access from West Taylor Run Parkway to Telegraph Road.
The plan is to assess the impact, collect data and engage with the community to ensure these changes achieve the results they are designed to create.
Let me know your thoughts!
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Last year our nation conducted the Constitutionally-required decennial Census. While the process has been delayed due to a variety of factors, the City did finally receive our population data at the end of the summer.
We learned that our City grew by nearly 14% over the previous decade and that our community grew more diverse.
While the process of reflecting these population changes in the districts drawn for the General Assembly and the United States Congress was entrusted to the newly-created Virginia Redistricting Commission, that process has now collapsed, meaning the Virginia Supreme Court will draw the districts.
Based on the population changes in the recent Census, District A has a population of 56,160, District B has a population of 49,507 and District C has a population of 53,800. To maintain equal representation, the districts will have to change before the next election.
This question will come to the City Council sometime in the new year. Let me know your thoughts!
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Paid for by Wilson For Mayor | www.justin.net |
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