A weekly look at Alexandria from the notebook of Ryan Belmore, founder and publisher of The Alexandria Brief — what I saw this week, what I'm watching, and what didn't fit into a story. Anything I couldn't confirm says so.
Here we go.
1. Buried in Thursday's walk zone discussion was an admission that the old rules were being applied loosely. Beaty asked whether staff had consulted the list of past safety exceptions — the ones that put buses in those neighborhoods for years. Jackson said most of the people who ran the 2018 redistricting are gone and the record-keeping "wasn't as strong as it needed to be," and that capacity reassignments and other changes over the years meant the policy "was not always applied as written." That's a different explanation than the one about maps and locators, and nobody on the dais followed up on it.
2. Two documents eight days apart give different answers on who decides what's dangerous. Simpson Baird asked Thursday why the city has a role in what she understood to be an ACPS decision. Peña said the city provides data like crash history, but "ultimately, we'll make the decisions, ACPS." The board committee's own post the week before says city staff "is responsible for designating hazardous intersections." Neither says who has final say on a specific crossing. Appeal decisions are due Sept. 30. The standard is still being written.
3. The count the School Board built its case on is gone. The board sued former executive director of support operations Ayanna Harrison last November for nearly $800,000, after the Times revealed she was working full time as an Atlanta charter school's COO while telling ACPS she needed to work remotely from Georgia to care for a father with dementia. She made $158,798 here. The Times reported the basis of the suit was the Virginia Fraud Against Taxpayers Act.
Harrison removed it to federal court in January. Judge Patricia Tolliver Giles cut it down twice — the taxpayer-fraud count in February, and again in May after the board amended, along with constructive fraud. What survives is breach of contract and actual fraud. The $300,000 in treble damages and $21,916 in civil penalties that rode on the taxpayer-fraud claim are off the table.
That's the case the board spent part of Thursday's closed session on, identified in the notice only by case number. Discovery closes Oct. 16. Harrison is on her second set of lawyers. The board is represented by Sands Anderson, a Richmond firm.
4. The retention question isn't the police department's to answer. The mayor said Tuesday she sees no role for Flock here. Elnoubi and Marks agreed. The chief is meeting other vendors with no timeline. Then APD told me Friday that City Council decides how long police keep the data — not the department. Four weeks to get that answer to a question I sent Aug. 14.
The transparency portal has the same shape of gap. It lists the agencies that can search Alexandria's data. It doesn't list what Alexandria can search. NoVA's police department runs four readers here and appears on the outbound list; whether APD can search theirs, the portal can't say. The Alexandria Sheriff's Office operates its own readers, doesn't appear on APD's list, and publishes no portal at all. Two agencies, one city, half a picture.
5. ACPS put a number on a slide this week that complicates its own good news. Early registrations up 15.5%, to 1,636 — that's the headline. Three slides earlier: registration webpage visits fell from 12,140 to 8,108. A third of the traffic, gone, the same year registrations rose. Both in the same deck. Neither said aloud, and nobody asked which outreach changed.
6. The two elementary schools that got state security grants this week are both polling places. Polk and Naomi L. Brooks share $16,376. The same night, the Electoral Board chair asked the same board to close schools June 15 because 10 schools open their doors to voters. Two conversations about the same buildings.
And closing June 15 means moving exams. I pulled the calendar: June 15 sits inside the four-day final exam window, June 14-17. Elementary and middle have a regular day; high schoolers have early dismissal for finals. That's a bigger ask than it sounded like from the podium.
7. An ordinance born from one dispute is getting its first appeal from the same dispute. Council adopted Section 5-2-94 unanimously in April after the trouble at 3600½ Russell Road. Five months later the first appeal to reach council under it is about 3600½ Russell Road, on a Saturday morning at the Del Pepper Center.
Much of the confusion is the city's own. The applicants' filing says Alexandria's GIS Parcel Viewer displayed 3600 for both lots as of May. Google Maps tags the half-numbered lot as both 3600 and 3602. USPS sent a package back in July marked "No Such Number." And in a case about whether the city can identify who lives where, city records carried the wrong names for the applicants — Darien Tillinghast wrote in June to correct his middle initial and his wife's name; the staff report going to council still has the old versions.
Staff's presentation reduces an eight-page appeal to three bullets, leaving out the sign next door listing five addresses, the alternatives the appellant proposed, and the neighbor dispute underneath it. Council members who read only the slides won't know those exist.
8. Alexandria borrowed Chesterfield's number and reversed who it trusts with it. Staff proposed a $500,000 ceiling on moving money between school budget categories without council approval, citing Chesterfield. In Chesterfield, per the advisory committees' July memo, that $500,000 authority sits with the school division — superintendent under $50,000, school board between $50,000 and $499,000. Alexandria's version gives the identical figure to the city manager. Same threshold, opposite answer on who decides.
Nobody has reconciled the underlying numbers either. Routt counted about 29 transfers between classifications last year. The committees counted about 264. Both agree eight topped $100,000, which suggests they're counting different things.
9. Opening a spray park in September looks silly on paper. It wasn't. The Colasanto fountain came on Thursday with about five weeks before it shuts down in mid-October — after 14 years of planning and 11 months past the last date the city gave. The easy call was to hold it until May and cut a ribbon in good weather. RPCA turned it on instead. When I got there at 11:15 Thursday, staff were still checking chlorine and nobody had played in it. Every time I've been by since, there have been kids in it. Still outstanding: a final cost, and a date for the Nancy Dunning memorial garden the neighborhood started raising money for in 2018.
10. Dominion answered me Tuesday. It didn't answer the question. Aisha Khan, the utility's media and community relations manager for Northern Virginia, said crews were on site returning a circuit to its normal feed and expected everything restored within about an hour. She put the afternoon outage at 2,225 customers, starting at 3:47 p.m. What she didn't say was what caused any of it, or whether the afternoon round was connected to the morning's, which hit many of the same neighborhoods. Four days on, that's still the answer. Every one of Tuesday's outages carried the same cause on the map: pending investigation.
The hour didn't hold either. After Khan's estimate, the map still showed one outage of 88 customers near Del Ray and Northeast Alexandria with restoration between 11 p.m. and 2 a.m., crews awaiting assignment. That story was the most-read thing I published this week by a wide margin, which means several thousand people went looking for an explanation that doesn't exist.
11. The line everyone repeated Friday came from the fire department. Deputy Fire Chief Garrett Dyer walked the morning minute by minute and closed with it: "We must continue to honor our promise to never forget." Never forget the lives lost, the families left behind, the responders who answered, and the responsibility carried forward. Gaskins borrowed it to close the ceremony a short time later. I'm old enough to remember that day. Nearly a third of Americans aren't — Gaskins said so from the podium — and a promise to never forget only works if the people who do remember keep saying the names.
Which is the other thing I noticed. There is no settled list of Alexandrians who died on that day. McGuire read 12 names and asked the crowd for grace if he'd missed anyone, saying the list came from his own research. Other local lists name five more men who died at the Pentagon: Craig Amundson, William Donovan, Wallace Cole Hogan Jr., Stephen Long and Dean Mattson. Published lists differ partly because some victims had Alexandria mailing addresses outside city limits. Twenty-five years on, a police chief had to assemble the city's roll himself.
Quick hits
- What Dominion didn't say is worth holding next to the SCC ordering three in-person hearings in the NextEra merger case. Outage communication is the sort of thing ratepayers raise at hearings like that.
- VRE's noise permit runs "Monday through Friday, September 14 through September 21." Sept. 21 is a Monday. The same email calls it a one-week period. Evening work runs three hours past the city's 6 p.m. limit, approved one week at a time so the city can judge the impact — which makes next week a rare permit where what neighbors do matters.
- The mayor wasn't at Thursday's chamber reception. My August advance listed her; the Sept. 1 list didn't. She was in New York with the city manager for the bond rating presentation, which is also where she saw the Tribute in Light.
- Transurban presented the chamber reception, holds a seat on the committee that wrote the legislative agenda, and the agenda backs finishing the express lanes network. Two of the committee's seats belong to the Apartment and Office Building Association; the agenda asks the General Assembly to oppose letting localities regulate rents and to oppose lengthening the eviction process. Disclosure: the Brief is a chamber member.
- Newport Village II broke ground: 383 units, 12 affordable.
- Mobius Records opened in Del Ray. Royal Nepal sent $6,150 to flood relief after raising about $7,400 on Labor Day.
- The symphony's music director search lost its artistic adviser before announcing a result. George Hanson left June 30; the release announcing his departure says he advised the committee through candidate selection. This season has four guest conductors, one concert each. The ASO hasn't said they're finalists.
- Matthew Quick at the Lyceum and the ASO opener are the same night, Sept. 26.
- Something to watch this season: Police Chief Tarrick McGuire's son Isaiah is a defensive end for the Browns — No. 57, Missouri, fourth round in 2023. The chief confirmed it.
Last thing. The state of things, since a few of you have asked. I hit publish 45 times this week. The Brief goes to 6,433 subscribers, 297 of whom pay for it, and 48,636 unique visitors came to the site this week. All of it is one person, with reporting from the Virginia Mercury and The Associated Press filling in around the edges. No ads, no sponsors, no paywall — the 297 are the reason the rest of it is free.
Got something for the notebook? ryan@alexandriabrief.com. The Brief is free every weekday and runs on reader support — you can chip in here.
