As Metro stares down potentially devastating cuts, City Council member Sarah Bagley said the Virginia Railway Express (VRE) is grappling with similar funding struggles as it tries to redefine itself.
Bagley, who serves on the VRE Operations Board, said the rail service’s new plans to add weekend service represent an effort to broaden the ridership beyond commuter traffic.
The Alexandria School Board’s preferred options to restructure itself are “dead” as-is, mostly due to a lack of engagement with the Alexandria City Council, City Council Member John Taylor Chapman told members of the School Board on Monday night.
“I think you’re losing Council by not really engaging with them right now,” Chapman told the City Council/School Board Subcommittee meeting Monday night. “Given the response I’ve seen from my colleagues, I think you have even more of an uphill battle than you had before, and that’s not a good thing if this is supposed to be a process that’s collaborative.”
A discussion of one of the city’s larger stormwater infrastructure projects spurred a question from city leaders: can the city do more to make these projects happen faster?
Adriana Castañeda said at a City Council meeting last night that the city is a little over halfway through the design process for the Commonwealth, Ashby, Glebe Flood Mitigation Project, one of the largest stormwater infrastructure projects in the city — outside of the immense AlexRenew project.
The Alexandria City Council at its town hall meeting on Saturday shot back at criticism over its plan to rename streets named after Confederate leaders.
Council answered public questions for two hours Saturday morning at Charles Houston Recreation Center, and the meeting took a decisive turn when Mayor Justin Wilson read the following question:
City leaders broke ground on Housing Alexandria‘s 474-unit affordable apartment complex in Arlandria on Wednesday, capping off the largest project of its kind in Alexandria history.
It will be 2026 by the time residents start moving into the two-building, 36,000 square-foot complex, Housing Alexandria said in a release. The buildings, named Sansé and Naja, will be located near the corner of W. Glebe Road and Mount Vernon Avenue. The property will include a large underground parking garage and 34,000 square feet of commercial space, which will include childcare and health care services, according to Housing Alexandria.
With the reopening of the Dash Transit Center at the future WestEnd development years away, Alexandria is looking to ask Richmond to help pay for $800,000 in temporary bus bays, benches and real-time signage.
Concerned about crime, flooding or taxes in Alexandria? There’s a public meeting this Saturday that could answer some of your most burning questions.
The Alexandria City Council will answer public questions in a town hall meeting on Saturday morning at Charles Houston Recreation Center (901 Wythe Street). The meeting is the second of its kind, after kicking off in September.
Nearly 500 signatures have been collected in an effort to name the new and yet-to-be-built athletic fields at Alexandria City High School’s Minnie Howard campus after former Mayor Kerry Donley.
A steering committee of civic leaders, colleagues and friends submitted the petition with 486 signatures yesterday to the Alexandria School Board. In their letter, the steering committee wrote that the name is fitting, as Donley’s contributions were through public governance, education and community service.
After more than a dozen complaints of outdoor grills sending smoke into neighboring Del Ray homes, City Council on Saturday unanimously approved a modified plan to allow Hi/Fi Tex-Mex BBQ to operate behind Evening Star Cafe.
The approval expands the concept’s hours of operation from 7 a.m. to 11 p.m. (previously 8 a.m. to 10 p.m.), more outdoor seating (from 50 seats to 124 seats), live outdoor music Wednesday to Saturday, as well as permission to cook food from two outdoor smoker grills and selling the food from a temporary food trailer.
Del Ray’s BBQ scene could be getting a little bigger soon.
A plan to boost the size of outdoor smokehouse Hi/Fi Tex-Mex BBQ (2000 Mount Vernon Avenue) in Del Ray, in the backyard of Evening Star Cafe, is heading to the City Council at a meeting on Saturday, Oct. 14.
The City of Alexandria spent $1.8 million on its Taylor Run and Strawberry Run restoration projects and, at a meeting earlier this week, Mayor Justin Wilson said the city has virtually nothing to show for it.
That $1.8 million went into the project before shovels ever hit the dirt. The plan was to combat erosion and improve the flow of the waterway, but the city’s design attracted considerable pushback from some local environmental activists and city watchdogs who said the plans could do more harm than good to the stream. Critics also noted that pollution levels in the stream were being calculated based on modeling rather than testing in the actual waterways.
