Miss your chance to bring up a burning issue at a recent town hall meeting with the Alexandria City Council?
City Council Member R. Kirk McPike is asking City Manager Jim Parajon to formalize a schedule so that Council can hold quarterly town hall meetings. The city will start the effort after Council approves the FY2026 budget and it goes into effect on July 1.
“We know that the current environment is going to be very difficult for many residents of our city,” McPike told ALXnow. “Not only are the values that Alexandria embraces under attack at the federal level, but 13,000 of our residents work for the federal government, and they’re afraid that they may not have a job in three months, or that the job that they have is going to be executing policies that they cannot spend 40 hours a week executing.”
The meetings can get contentious. After a series of town halls at around this time last year, the Alexandria backed out of negotiations to build an entertainment district with a basketball and hockey arena in Potomac Yard.
While the plan to move the Washington Wizards and Capitals from D.C. to Potomac Yard ultimately failed due to an impasse between Republican Gov. Glenn Youngkin and Democratic legislators in the General Assembly, steady messaging from Alexandria residents at the town hall meetings didn’t help the effort.
“The feedback we had from the town hall about the arena, and the questions we got from the public really did inform the conversations we were having with legislators in Richmond,” McPike said. “The ball was in their court regarding what was going to come into the city for consideration, so hearing from the public helped us better inform our legislative delegation.”
The next town hall is on Saturday, March 29, from 1 to 3 p.m. at the Redella (Del) Pepper Community Resource Center in the West End. Residents are encouraged to attend in-person or virtually to get updates from Council and city staff on a host of issues.
“If these town halls and the other ways we have people to reach out to and contact the council help us to better support these residents in this town, then these town halls are helping us do our jobs better for the residents we want to serve,” McPike said.
City Council has been conducting more town halls in recent years, but without a set schedule. The effort started in early 2023 when McPike asked City Manager Jim Parajon to look into the city funding more of the events.
Parajon added $40,000 to his base Fiscal Year 2024 budget (and all subsequent budgets), setting aside $10,000 per meeting to cover translators, sound equipment and other costs.
“I believe we should formalize the schedule throughout the year so that we can plan when these town halls will be happening months in advance, instead of weeks in advance, and my colleagues supported that,” McPike said.
The city says that meeting support costs are outsourced and range from $4,000 to $10,000.
According to the city, these costs could include but are not limited to:
- Hiring a vendor to deliver services for microphones, audio/visual, and conferencing capabilities
- Cameras for recording or recording using Zoom
- Language translation services which vary on languages provided
- Typically cost for Spanish translation ranges from $150-$200 for 2 hours, while for Arabic, Amharic, Farsi, etc., the cost can run $500-$1,000 because those interpreters are difficult to find
- This service will likely include additional cost for the use of equipment such as: headphones and microphones for translation which ranges between $550-$600
- Broadcast capabilities to Channel 70 are limited to City Council chambers and require vendor support
- Other possible uses include food services typically handled by City Manager’s Office staff
