Belmore's Notebook: Three different counts of Alexandria's cameras, and a question the mayor couldn't get answered either

Labor Day is Monday, which in Alexandria now arrives two weeks into the school year and the day before council's first meeting back after a somewhat summer break. 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. A one-word change was the whole story. The Friday night before last, after the ACHS football game, a large crowd assembled at Bradlee Shopping Center, and police dispersed it. Saturday morning, APD told me no injuries were reported, and no arrests were made. I published that. Saturday afternoon, the statement was revised: no student injuries. I asked what the change meant. Monday morning, the department confirmed an officer had been assaulted, didn't seek medical treatment, and didn't want to pursue charges. Nothing I was told was untrue — the first answer was just narrower than it looked. Meanwhile, an aggregator account had posted crowd numbers, fights at the school, and a mutual-aid request Friday night, none of which I published and none of which the department or the school division has confirmed. I don't report from scanner traffic, and repeating an unverified claim in order to doubt it still puts it in front of people who hadn't seen it. If you read that story on Saturday, the version up now is different. That isn't a correction. It's what a story looks like when someone keeps working it.
2. Braddock West holds a community meeting Wednesday at the Charles Houston Recreation Center, the same room where Metro's April hearing on closing the Braddock Road Kiss & Ride turned into a hearing about flooding. Two developments facing each other across N. West Street, same drainage. What didn't make the story: when CRC pitched this project to the Braddock Implementation Advisory Group in September 2020, the presentation ran about thirty slides — walk scores, transit scores, plaza renderings, a "catalytic gateway" into Old Town — and never mentioned stormwater. Five years and two deferrals later, flooding is the issue that keeps sending this project back to staff. The city's position is that the water at Braddock, West, and Wythe comes from 65 acres of runoff unrelated to this building, and the engineering supports that. We'll see Wednesday whether it settles it.
3. Two things I couldn't tell readers Friday morning. At 7:03 a.m. the city's eNews listed eight intersections without working traffic signals. At 7:09, an APD notification listed seven, the same list minus Seminary Road at Beauregard. Nobody did anything wrong — a signal may have come back on in those six minutes — but I was writing from both, and I couldn't say how many intersections were dark without picking one city source over another. So I wrote "at least seven." The other gap was Dominion's. For most of the morning the largest West End outage carried three lines on the map: cause pending investigation, restoration time pending investigation, crews awaiting assignment. It stayed that way while the count fell from 9,127 to 2,206, which tells you crews were working the whole time. It also means the only thing you learned by refreshing at 6 a.m. was that nobody had told the map anything.
4. There are now three counts of the same cameras. The city's transparency page says 61. The Alexandria Times investigation Tuesday put it at at least 81 license plate readers in the city or on its immediate border — 77 Flock cameras the paper located and verified, plus four Axon cameras APD reported to state police that the Times could not find. It also found the cameras concentrated in lower-income census tracts and more than 50 instances of officers improperly labeling why they searched the database. And in the documents Virginia Mercury and VCIJ obtained, Mayor Alyia Gaskins wrote to City Manager James Parajon in June 2025 asking how many cameras the city had, who could pull the data, and whether federal partners had access. Her own email put it at 67. She also wrote that colleagues had asked and not gotten answers.

That's the part I keep returning to. The mayor couldn't get basic answers about this program in June 2025. I submitted my own questions to APD on Aug. 14 and have twice been told answers are coming. Parajon presents the Flock report Tuesday with nothing posted in advance. The number of cameras is not a hard question, and it now has three answers depending on who you ask.

5. The bonuses aren't on Tuesday's docket. The School Board approved a budget revision Aug. 27 to pay about $2.5 million in bonuses to all full-time employees, drawing on two state allocations and $900,000 in vacancy savings. CFO Dominic Turner said then that City Council still has to appropriate the money. I read Tuesday's final docket line by line and it isn't there. What is there is an oral update on the City/ACPS budget category process, with nothing posted. That may be exactly where it gets discussed, and a September appropriation could land on the Sept. 22 docket instead. But if you're an ACPS employee who heard about a bonus nine days ago, the answer to when it arrives is still nowhere in writing.
6. The tax item is better timed than it looks. The city mailed 2026 personal property bills Aug. 30, due Oct. 5. Tuesday council takes up an ordinance implementing HB 915, which would let the city push that date for federal employees furloughed in a shutdown, with final passage Sept. 19. The bill is already on your counter; the relief, if it's needed, lands about two weeks before the deadline. One wrinkle in Finance Director Kevin Greenlief's memo: one paragraph calls the extension automatic, the next says state code requires employees to apply. Staff say they'd use the same electronic application as in past shutdowns, so plan on filing something.
7. The walk-zone map was wrong, and that's now on the record. Three members of the School Board's Strategy and Accountability Committee published an account of their Aug. 31 meeting that says the walk-zone distances never changed in policy, but an error in the walk zone locator confused families about where the one-mile K-8 line and the 1.5-mile high school line actually fell. Parents told the board two weeks ago that the real problem was who the division decided no longer needs a bus. Part of the answer, it turns out, is that the tool telling them so was wrong.

The same post says ACPS has 18 unfilled bus-driver positions and is covering routes by doubling them up, one route after another for the same driver, with new drivers expected to be onboarded by the end of September. It puts about 97% of eligible students on assigned routes and notes, fairly, that this doesn't mean every route ran on time. Chief Operating Officer Anthony Peña had been in the job 16 days when he briefed the committee. The fuller redistricting and transportation update goes to the full board Sept. 10, with an after-action review to follow.

8. In a search where nobody gets named, the board named someone. The one candidate fact ACPS has volunteered about its superintendent search is a negative: Chair Christopher Harris wrote to families Tuesday that Acting Superintendent Grace Taylor did not apply for the permanent job. Nobody had asked publicly. The board won't say who is in the pool, citing confidentiality, but went out of its way to say who isn't. Read it as heading off a question every family was going to ask, or as clearing the air for whoever gets hired, or both. It's still the only name in a process built to avoid them, and I'd have expected it in October with the appointment, not in a September update. This is also the same division that ran its ACHS principal search in the open this spring — leadership profile, community meet-and-greets, finalist to a public vote. Finalist interviews are supposed to happen this month.
9. The goats cost $9,500, and they start the same day council does. Between 35 and 40 goats and sheep go behind an electric fence on the kudzu slope at James Marx All Veterans Park on Tuesday, in a pilot RPCA will judge on two questions: fewer invasives afterward, and whether grazing does something crews and mowers can't. The operator is Mary T. Bowen of Browsing Green Goats, through Prosperity Acres LLC. What stays with me is where that number sits. Clearing invasives at that park was the first of six things the Parks and Recreation Commission recommended in 2014. The other five — the trail connection, moving the James Marx memorial, the bridge to the Beatley library, and the stormwater site.
10. Two seats and a pending finding. Council fills two Independent Community Policing Review Board seats Tuesday, one created by a resignation. The board met Wednesday. Auditor Ameratu Kamara told council in July she aimed to return supplemental findings in the Tucker case within 30 days, targeting September.

Quick hits

• The Kent Place vacations beside 2702 and 2800 Russell Road return Tuesday as implementation ordinances. Final plats grew the total by exactly one square foot, to 7,621 — one neighbor gains 21, the other loses 20. Five months after a contested hearing, what's left is a surveyor's rounding.
• Twosome Place's release puts its 404 King St. café at about 2,604 square feet; the permits I worked from in August said 2,689. I've asked. It also promises two more U.S. locations without naming them, though the company registered Twosome Ballston LLC here this spring.
• Parajon's other three reports Tuesday — the economy, City/ACPS budget categories, City Hall construction impacts — also have no attachments posted. Oral reports don't require them.
• Deconstruction of City Hall's 1960s infill section starts this month, the first phase Old Town will see and hear. Still unanswered: whether the asbestos delay means a change order against Grunley's contract.
• Parking permits were mailed by Friday after the vendor delay. If yours hasn't shown up next week, that's a story.
• Kiwi Kuisine reopens on Eisenhower with a ribbon-cutting and a pie-eating contest.
• From Head to Tail's pet pantry is open seven days a week to anyone who needs it, no questions.
• ALIVE! needs volunteer truck drivers. No commercial license required.
• Legacy Month has a free public event Sept. 10.
• The Alexandria Choral Society's 57th season is pay what you can, all four concerts.
• The city holds its historic district zoning meeting Sept. 9, the same Wednesday night as Braddock West.

Last thing. The storm story drew about 2,200 readers Friday, seven times a normal day. I started it at 5 a.m. off a Dominion screenshot and a police Instagram post, updated it eight times, and cut most of it back out Saturday once the numbers stopped mattering. What people needed was never the count. It was which intersections were dark and when the lights were coming back, and both came from the city and from Dominion, not from me. What I added was being awake and putting it in one place.

Got something for the notebook? ryan@alexandriabrief.com. The Brief is free every weekday and runs on reader support — you can chip in here.