A veritable who’s who in Alexandria will interview the final candidates looking to succeed retiring City Manager Mark Jinks.
On Tuesday night, City Council approved the formation of three advisory committees that will interview the final candidates selected after a five-month-long national search.
(Updated 4:45 p.m.) At the start of a City Council retreat this weekend, acting Human Resources Director Jen Jenkins laid out some numbers behind the ongoing discussion over a pay increase for city employees.
City employees — first responders in particular — have criticized city leadership’s handling of employee pay and lamented that the city is, in some respects, lowest in regional pay. The city has laid out plans for a 1.5% pay increase, which unions representing first responders called an insulting lowball.
After a few years of somewhat jubilant legislative sessions, the City Council is moving into preparation for a legislative package with a more grim outlook.
The legislative package is an annual list of asks and recommendations from the city to the state government. These sorts of legislative packages are particularly important in Virginia where, as a Dillon Rule state, the authority of the city is limited to only those areas explicitly granted by the state. With Republicans winning control of much of the state government in last week’s election, the all-Democrat City Council’s days of “playing with house money” could be coming to an end.
Electronic scooters could become a permanent part of the city ordinance this Saturday (Nov. 13) even as they head into their seasonal decline.
The approval comes after nearly two years of the program being in a pilot phase — even as scooter usage in Alexandria heads into its seasonal decline. Ridership typically falling to less than 10,000 trips city-wide between December and March. The chart also shows that scooter usage hasn’t come close to reaching its pre-pandemic highs in April and May 2019, though 2021 was still a stronger year for scooter usage than 2020 was. In spring 2020, scooter usage fell abysmally low, despite scooters being encouraged as a healthier alternative to riding the bus or carpooling.
After recent infrastructure work, Alexandria City Public Schools confirmed that it’s satisfied with the conditions at Alexandria’s middle schools — for the time being.
In what one school official described as a pleasantly “boring” meeting between the City Council and School Board after recent City Council-School Board turmoil, school staff said some recently completed work at George Washington Middle School and Francis C. Hammond Middle School should be the last big investments in those schools for the foreseeable future.
Alexandria’s City Council is scheduled to throw down the gauntlet on Comcast next week as the city works to break the company’s stranglehold on local internet access.
The city broke ground in August on a new municipal fiber-optic network that would boost internet speed at city facilities and public schools, but the part of bigger interest to the public was that a second underground system was being laid simultaneously to allow a private company to step in later and franchise it.
(Updated 4:15 p.m. on Nov. 3) With 31 of 33 precincts reporting, Alexandria Mayor Justin Wilson won a victory over Republican opponent Annetta Catchings on Tuesday.
The general election win came months after Wilson defeated his political rival, former Mayor Allison Silberberg, in the June primary.
(Updated 4:45 p.m.) After being denied a certificate of appropriateness from the Board of Architectural Review (BAR), Old Town PropCo LLC is taking the case for The Heritage project to the City Council.
The Heritage is a project that will replace four buildings in southeast Old Town ( 900 Wolfe Street, 450 and 510 S. Patrick Street, 901 Gibbon Street, and 431 S. Columbus Street) with three new apartment buildings. It’s attracted some criticism from neighbors close to the project, but was eventually unanimously approved by the City Council.
Counting both in-person and absentee ballots, a little under half of those registered to vote in Alexandria have shown up to the polls as of noon today (Nov. 2).
This year, Alexandria voters are voting for a slew of competitive state and local races, including:
The City of Alexandria is looking for locals to comprise the new Independent Community Policing Review Board, a body created by the City Council last year as part of an effort to provide greater police accountability in the wake of the George Floyd murder and the nationwide Black Lives Matter protests.
The new review board is an eight-member panel that will review complaints against the police department after an internal investigation by the police department. Ordinance adopted on April 17 earlier this year described the board as part of an effort to enhance policing legitimacy and to maintain trust between the police department, City Council, city manager and the public.
The Alexandria City Council wants more than answers from Dominion Energy for a recent power outage on the busiest day of the year in Del Ray — they want restitution.
After a 2020 hiatus, the weather was perfect for Art On The Avenue on October 2 along Mount Vernon Avenue. But a 16-hour power outage that morning ended up shuttering many businesses throughout the festival, which brought an estimated 50,000 visitors to Del Ray.
