COVID Recovery, Housing, Compensation Among Alexandria City Council Priorities

ALEXANDRIA, VA — Alexandria City Council has identified six priorities for 2022, including COVID-19 recovery, housing, and a strategy on compensation for city government employees.

City Council's priorities were developed at the council retreat in late January and discussed at meetings over the next two months.

These priorities include:

• COVID-19 pandemic recovery: Identifying policies, practices and resources needed to ensure a resilient and equitable recovery for all residents and businesses.
• Diverse housing: Reconsider the city's zoning model and explore other tools to better provide a range of price points, styles of housing and services.
• Community engagement approach: Use new and traditional outreach methods to ensure efficient, effective and accessible engagement to all stakeholders, creating a clear relationship between community input and impacts on policy decisions, infrastructure needs and financial considerations.
• Support youth and families: Explore ways to expand academic, social and emotional services and physical support to all youth during after-school hours.
• Foster economic development: Seek out and consider budgetary, land use, regulatory and other economic development tools to foster sustainable and equitable development, diversify revenue and allow greater investment in infrastructure.
• Develop a compensation philosophy: Create a new compensation philosophy to ensure the city is a preferred workplace and that employees feel valued.

"Our new City Council will focus on these six community priority areas and accelerate our efforts," said Mayor Justin Wilson via a news release. "Coalescing around these priorities has been an important initial step to ensure that our work makes a real and noticeable difference in the lives of Alexandrians."

City Manager James Parajon has directed city staff to create an interdepartmental business plan for each City Council priority. The plan will have specific objectives, indicators and quarterly progress updates to City Council. A deeper update on the COVID-19 recovery and housing priorities is expected in May.

The next City Council meeting will be a public hearing at 9:30 a.m. on Saturday, which will include hearings on the real estate and personal property tax rates and stormwater utility fee. Final budget and tax rate adoption is scheduled for 7 p.m. on May 4.