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Alexandria City Council holds its third FY 2027 budget work session on Wednesday at 7 p.m. at Del Pepper Community Resource Center, focused on the Safe, Secure & Just functional area — the city's $221,093,167 portfolio of public safety and justice departments.
The session comes two days after roughly 10 speakers at Monday's budget public hearing called on council to cut Sheriff Sean Casey's budget over his office's continued transfers of inmates to ICE. It will be the first time the council formally reviews the sheriff's numbers since that testimony.
Ryan Belmore
The portfolio
The Safe, Secure & Just area covers 13 departments and agencies. The three largest by budget are:
- Police Department: $77,863,441
- Fire Department: $76,477,774
- Sheriff's Office: $36,116,994
Together those three account for $190.5 million — 86% of the functional area total. The remaining $30.6 million covers Emergency & Customer Communications ($10.4M), the Commonwealth's Attorney ($5.7M), other public safety and justice services including adult probation, the public defender and Sheltercare ($6.4M), Community Justice Services ($2.6M), the courts, Human Rights and other agencies.
What to watch
The sheriff's office is the political flashpoint. City Manager James Parajon proposed a 0.7% increase to $36,116,994 — not the $4 million cut advocates demanded Monday. Council sets the appropriation; how members respond to the proposed increase, and whether any signal support for a reduction, will be the most consequential moment of the session.
One detail worth noting: the sheriff's office is the only major department in the Safe, Secure & Just portfolio without performance indicators in the proposed budget. Every other significant department includes measurable outcome data. The police section tracks violent crimes per 100,000 residents (down from 252 in 2023 to 234 in 2024), Part 1 crime citywide (up 7.9% in 2024 after a 33.7% spike in 2023), and calls responded to by the ACORP mental health co-response program (down from 596 to 404). The fire section tracks response times, patient transports (up to 11,202 in 2025) and resident satisfaction (90% for fire services, 89% for EMS). The sheriff's section has no equivalent data — no transfer counts, no recidivism figures, no jail population trends, no accreditation outcomes. Whether council raises that omission on Wednesday will be worth watching.
The question of how to measure the sheriff's impact on community safety came up indirectly at Monday's hearing. Oliver Moreno of ICE Out of Alexandria referenced a performance indicator from a previous sheriff's budget — to "increase percentage of residents who have a positive overall feeling of safety in Alexandria" — and turned it back on council: "Do you think that we feel safe when Sheriff Casey works with ICE? Do you think that our immigrant community feels safe when he works with ICE?"
The Alexandria Brief has reached out to the city regarding performance indicators for the sheriff's office.
The police and fire budgets are larger but less politically contested. The Police Department is proposed at $77,863,441 — a 2.7% increase over FY 2026 — but the department would actually shrink by 15 FTEs, from 438.63 to 423.63, largely through a 30.5-position reduction in Field Operations and Investigations. Personnel costs rise 3.7% to $67.5 million despite the headcount reduction, driven by the first year of the police collective bargaining agreement. The Fire Department is proposed at $76,477,774 — a 1.8% increase — and adds 4.0 firefighters, all assigned to Fire, EMS & Special Operations Response, to support a reduction in firefighter work schedules. Total fire FTEs rise to 352.5.
Work sessions are staff presentations and council deliberation — they are not public hearings and do not include public comment periods. The second budget public hearing, where residents can speak, is on Saturday March 14 at 9:30 a.m., also at Del Pepper.
The session streams live at alexandriava.gov and on government channel 70. It begins at 7 p.m.
Ryan Belmore
Ryan Belmore
