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ALEXANDRIA, Va. — HRP Group used its 20th community meeting Tuesday night to explain how the former Potomac River Generating Station coal plant will come down even as the first new buildings go up, why the project's southern entry block is on hold, and how a proposed public financing package fits into an approval calendar that reaches the City Council in June.
The hour-long session, held one week before the Planning Commission is scheduled to take up the project on June 2, focused on four topics HRP said neighbors had raised after its May 4 meeting: master-plan phasing, arts and cultural uses, environmental remediation, and abatement and deconstruction. A City Council vote on the development approvals and a tax increment financing proposal is expected on June 13.
"We're now five years into this review process," said Ken Wire, a land use attorney with Wire & Gill representing HRP, who served as the evening's host. He described the meeting as "cresting" a 14-year arc that began when the plant closed in 2012 and that HRP describes as the product of more than 50 public meetings over its five years of ownership.
A 2.5 million-square-foot plan, delivered in phases
The overall project remains as previously described: up to 2.5 million square feet of mixed residential and commercial uses across six blocks, with a projected capitalization of about $2 billion. HRP has split it into two phases, with the roughly 1.15 million-square-foot first phase covering Blocks A, B, and C.
Melissa Schrock, who leads HRP's mixed-use development team, said the company is amending the site's Coordinated Development District — the 2022 master zoning approval — to shift from the CDD's original three-phase structure to a block-by-block delivery schedule. "It became clear that we needed to refine the phasing plan to be on a block-by-block basis," she said, calling such refinements "quite typical when a city has a multi-step approval process like Alexandria's." HRP is now seeking four Development Special Use Permits — for Block B, Block C, and two open-space areas, the waterfront and the rail corridor.
Block A redesigned, on hold for a tenant
HRP also detailed plans for Block A, the parcel at the southern end of the site that serves as the entry from Old Town and an anchor for the planned extension of the city's arts and culture corridor. HRP submitted three design concepts for the block in 2024 and 2025, but has paused the process while it searches for a tenant.
Schrock said the company concluded the block — approved in the CDD as a 65,000-square-foot, five-story building — "would be most successful as a smaller single-story building of about 15,000 square feet, tailored for an active user." HRP is working with the Alexandria Economic Development Partnership to identify that user, who may or may not be subsidized.
Because Blocks B and C are not expected to open until 2030, Schrock said HRP believes it has time to find a tenant and still open Block A around the same time. If not, the company says it will deliver interim improvements and activate the site with temporary uses such as seasonal outdoor performances, rotating public art and pop-up spaces for local artists and small businesses.
Tearing down while building up
A recurring community question — how the plant can be demolished while construction proceeds on the same site — drew detailed answers. Because the plant sits on the north end of the property and Blocks B and C are to the south, HRP says the two can happen concurrently, shortening the overall timeline and delivering public benefits and city revenue sooner. The plant will be down before Blocks B and C are occupied, Schrock said.
Nick Pullara of HRP's deconstruction team said crews will first remove regulated materials — including asbestos, which will be contained and abated by licensed contractors and cleared by third-party inspectors before any structure comes down — then dismantle the buildings mechanically, "piece by piece," rather than by implosion. He said HRP's team has abated and deconstructed more than 300 acres of coal-fired power plants, a 1,300-acre oil refinery in Philadelphia and about 20 acres of commercial buildings in Boston, the latter while protecting adjacent historic structures.
John Newhall, who presented the sequencing plan developed with general contractor Balfour Beatty, said deconstruction will proceed in four overlapping sequences running roughly 6-9, 14, 16 and 20 months, moving generally south to north. The first sequence must be completed before vertical construction breaks ground at Block B; the remaining sequences continue alongside construction. Block B is expected to take about 27 months to reach occupancy, by which point, Newhall said, deconstruction will be "very much substantially complete." Plans call for the Road A connection to Slaters Lane to be installed by the first building's occupancy.
Mitigation measures described included rodent and noise control, perimeter vibration monitoring, and extensive dust control using water inside and outside the buildings, with third-party perimeter dust monitoring. HRP says that it is also committed to a deconstruction-and-construction website featuring a 24/7 hotline, weekly work updates, three-week look-ahead schedules, and monthly dust-monitoring reports posted publicly.
Two cleanup programs, contamination 'spread out' across the site
Julianna Connolly, who leads HRP's environmental remediation, said the property is enrolled in two Virginia Department of Environmental Quality programs: the Voluntary Remediation Program, which HRP entered in 2021 after acquiring the site in late 2020, and the Petroleum Program, which the site entered in 2013 — before HRP's ownership — after a release was identified from two underground fuel-oil storage tanks near the plant.
Site sampling found localized petroleum contamination near those tanks and more "diffuse" contamination — lower concentrations of metals, intermittent petroleum compounds and some volatile and semi-volatile organic compounds — spread across the rest of the site. Polychlorinated biphenyls, or PCBs, were tested for but not detected, Connolly said. A human health risk assessment found no unacceptable risk for current or construction-phase uses, but determined that metals in soil must be remediated before residential redevelopment.
The cleanup is deliberately timed to the demolition. The localized petroleum soil — close to the building, intertwined with old tunnels and overlapping a planned underground garage — cannot be safely excavated until the plant comes down; it will then be dug up and hauled off-site. The diffuse contamination will largely be removed as soil is exported to build the subsurface garages, with whatever remains capped beneath roads, sidewalks, building slabs and landscaping. HRP's environmental reports are posted at hrpalx.com.
The financing question
Asked what has changed since HRP bought the plant, Schrock pointed to economics rather than regulation: construction costs and interest rates have risen sharply, and "after COVID the office market has not recovered in the way that people had initially thought." Those pressures, she said, underpin the company's tax increment financing proposal — which, per the city's framework presented April 28, would commit up to $135 million over roughly 30 years toward public costs such as open space and infrastructure, not private buildings.
Wire and Schrock described the city's vetting as a "but-for" analysis — essentially whether, but for the public financing, the project would not advance — supported by a third-party study of costs and revenues and the city's own financial and legal advisors. If approved on June 13, the package would also create a new Community Development Authority and clear Phase I development.
Ryan Belmore
Public benefits: affordable housing, arts, and transportation
On affordable housing, Schrock outlined a "three-pronged" commitment: more than 58,000 square feet of affordable units distributed across the market-rate buildings and phases at 60% of area median income; a voluntary contribution of $8 million to $11 million (in 2022 dollars) to the city's Housing Trust Fund; and 100,000 square feet of bonus density set aside for a public-private partnership to build a dedicated affordable building of roughly 100 units in a future phase. All told, she said, the site would yield about 160 affordable units. The Alexandria Housing Affordability Advisory Committee endorsed the Block B and C unit distribution earlier this month.
The project also pledges 30,000 square feet of arts, cultural, and innovation space — half of it subsidized below market — positioned as the northern terminus of an arts corridor anchored at the other end by the Torpedo Factory, plus a public art plan that would reuse industrial artifacts such as old rail in landscaping and sculpture.
On transportation, Gorove Slade engineer Sasha Ksanznak-Redmon said the redevelopment will build an entirely new street network connecting to the existing neighborhood at Slaters Lane and North Royal and North Fairfax streets, with on-street bike facilities and new bike lanes on Slaters Lane. She noted the CDD commits HRP to updating its transportation analysis again halfway through vertical construction. The Mount Vernon Trail, briefly closed earlier for emergency shoreline work by a National Park Service subcontractor, is currently open.
HRP said a recording, the slides, and written responses to all questions submitted on Tuesday will be posted at hrpalx.com. The city maintains its own project page at alexandriava.gov/PRGS.
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