Alexandria City Council unanimously approved an ordinance Saturday (May 17) banning gas-powered leaf blowers, making Alexandria the first jurisdiction in Virginia to enact such a prohibition.
The ban follows years of community advocacy and comes after an August 2024 opinion from Virginia’s Attorney General confirming the city’s authority to regulate these devices through its noise ordinance.
Metro Motor Towing is looking to open another towing office and storage lot in Alexandria.
The 14,250-square-foot property at 3106 Colvin Street in the city’s Taylor Run neighborhood is just off Duke Street and was previously home to Road Res-Q. Metro Motor Towing, which operates repair shops and tow lots at multiple locations in the city, D.C., and Maryland, is looking to operate at the property 24 hours a day with a parking capacity of 20 vehicles.
Among the movers serving Alexandria, VA, 495 Movers stands out for a simple reason: its local hourly rate includes packing materials, furniture disassembly and reassembly, and protection for floors, walls, and elevators. The company has been in business since 2009 and has completed more than 20,000 moves, a number that keeps climbing.
Anyone who has hired movers in the DC area knows the familiar pattern. A low hourly rate wins the call. Then the invoice arrives with a charge for boxes, a charge for taking the bed apart, a fee for the stairs, and another for the elevator. By the end, the number on the bill has little to do with the number in the ad. 495 Movers was built to avoid that.
495 Movers is a full-service moving company serving Alexandria and the rest of the DMV, founded in 2009 by people who had worked as movers for several other companies first. They wanted to do it differently.
“We wanted to take a different approach, offering a simple, honest, and transparent approach for the customer,” said Moti Kachlon, co-owner at 495 Movers. For local moves, that meant building the most common extras into the hourly rate. Seventeen years and more than 20,000 moves later, the company is still growing.
Alexandria is a hard place to move. A truck on an Old Town block gets watched by neighbors, property managers, and a family wondering whether the sofa will make the turn on a staircase built long before sofas got this big.
Old Town’s rowhouses have narrow staircases and tight turns, which is why large furniture often has to come apart to get out. Del Ray’s bungalows and rowhouses have basements that hold more than anyone remembers. And condo and apartment buildings in Carlyle, Potomac Yard, and the West End often require movers to carry a certificate of insurance and book the elevator, with building managers who care a great deal about scuffed hallways. The street adds its own complications, from cobblestones to limited curb space.
That’s the context for how 495 Movers prices its work.
For local moves, the rate covers four things that many movers bill separately:
Alexandria’s Department of Transportation and Environmental Services is kicking off a week of street repaving and maintenance across the city.
Crews will start working on several key areas, including Oronoco Street, Slaters Lane, and parts of East and West Oak Street, starting May 19.
A covered patio and plaza venue are planned for the proposed pump station at Alexandria’s Waterfront Park.
The city’s proposal to combat flooding in Old Town will close Waterfront Park and Point Lumley Park from the fall of 2026 until the fall of 2028 to rebuild segments of the sea wall and install a pump station to recirculate water in flood-prone areas back to the Potomac River. The pump station plans are heading to the Board of Architectural Review on June 5.
Event location
Woodson High School
9525 Main Street
Fairfax, Virginia 22031
Northern Virginia Fairfax Families for Safe Streets (NoVA FSS) cordially invites you to attend and support our upcoming World Day of Remembrance (WDoR) for Road Traffic Victims.
World Day of Remembrance is an annual event where we honor those whose lives were prematurely ended after being struck by a person driving. This year is particularly painful and sad as we think about the recent death of a 13-year-old Frost middle school student who was struck and killed by a person driving a truck on Pickett Road. We will also honor the nearly 30 other people (as of today’s date) who have been killed on Northern Virginia streets while, walking, biking, or rolling since last year’s day of remembrance.
Good Monday morning, Alexandria!
⛈️ Today’s weather: Sunny, with a high near 78 degrees. Northwest wind 7 to 13 mph, with gusts as high as 26 mph. Mostly clear tonight, with a low around 53 degrees. North wind 7 to 9 mph, with gusts as high as 18 mph.
King Street was packed with all sorts of traffic on Sunday, as thousands of car enthusiasts checked out classic cars at the sixth annual Old Town Festival of Speed and Style.
Today’s event featured more than 100 exotic sports cars and motorcycles, and was sponsored by Burke & Herbert Bank and several local businesses. This year’s theme was Ian Fleming’s James Bond spy novel Casino Royale, with elegant models beautifying a supercar catwalk at King and Fairfax Streets.
Alexandria is in recovery mode Saturday, working to restore electricity and clear debris after powerful thunderstorms hit the area Friday night.
At their peak, the storms knocked out power to over 16,000 Dominion Energy customers in Alexandria. As of 10:30 a.m. Saturday, 6,422 out of 70,258 Dominion Energy customers in the city were still without electricity.
Good Saturday morning, Alexandria!
⛈️ Today’s weather: Showers are likely, mainly before 8 a.m. Mostly cloudy through mid-morning, then gradual clearing, with a high near 87 degrees. Southwest wind 8 to 14 mph, with gusts as high as 23 mph. The chance of precipitation is 60%. New precipitation amounts of less than a tenth of an inch are possible.
As of 11 p.m. on Friday (May 16), more than 14,250 Dominion Energy customers in Alexandria are experiencing a power outage following severe thunderstorms that passed through the area earlier this evening.
Dominion Energy’s outage map does not have an estimated time of restoration for most of the outages with many stating that the outages are pending investigation and awaiting assignment. Dominion Energy serves more than 70,000 customers in Alexandria.
