The City of Alexandria Department of Planning & Zoning held its fifth bi-monthly community meeting on January 9, 2026, to update residents on long-range planning initiatives, development applications, and zoning code updates. The meeting included presentations on the Duke Street Land Use Plan, the Housing 2040 Master Plan, stormwater management review processes, and upcoming development cases. Staff also summarized outcomes from the January 8 Planning Commission meeting and addressed questions from attendees.
All right, well, let's go ahead and get started. Welcome everybody. My name is Paul Stoddard. I'm the director with the Department of Planning Zoning here in the City of Alexandria. And I want to start by saying thank you to investing in evening with us to learn more about what's going on across the City of Alexandria and also inform us through the questions that you ask as we talk about all these different projects and initiatives. And if we go to the next slide. So this is the fifth installment of our bi-monthly community meeting series. And this meeting has a couple different objectives that we're hoping to that we hope it's achieving. One of the biggest ones is we just want to make sure that people are being made aware of what's going on, not just within their neighborhood, but across the city, and really have the opportunity to learn about a range of projects, whether they are development projects or master plan updates or proposed updates to the to the city zoning regulations. We want to be making sure we're we're getting the word out broadly about those proposals as they're under consideration. And then also we want to have the opportunity, of course, for people to learn more. So you'll see throughout the presentation that we've provided uh web links where people can find more information. Uh and of course, we'll have a QA session at the end so that people can just ask their questions tonight. And then before we hop off on this slide, I'll just uh mention one more thing. Uh if we can go back one in the lower left corner, uh you'll see a web address for Alexandria BA.gov slash planning. That is the home page for the planning and zoning department. Uh, and of course, you can find a lot of information uh if you go there. Uh and one of the things you can find is the web page for this meeting series. Uh, we do make available on that page the presentation slides that we use of each of these meetings. We we post the video uh that we record as part of the meeting. Uh, and then we also type out the QA and post that on that web page as well. So you'll be able to find that for tonight's meeting as well as the other four meetings we've run prior to this. Uh, and just in terms of uh timing, we are trying to run these uh approximately every other month. Uh sometimes holiday timing throws that off a little bit, but we are trying to run these every other month so that people can be uh sort of made aware of what's coming up with uh each series uh planning commission and city council members. Um the agenda for tonight's presentation. Uh we got some of the preliminaries uh uh in the first couple slides there. Long range planning. We have three different topics that uh we want to touch on tonight. First is providing an update on the Duke Street uh land use plan, the small area planning process for the Duke Street corridor. Uh, we also have some colleagues with us uh uh tonight from the Office of Housing. Uh, we're gonna get an update on the uh uh what's going on with the Housing 2040 plan, which is our master plan for the city. We're updating that. Uh and then also from the Department of Transportation and Environmental Services that we know that stormwater is something that people are often worried about when they see construction activity. And so our colleagues from TAS uh Transportation Environmental Services are going to talk through and provide a summary of what are the things that we look at on every development application and how are we making sure that stormwater is controlled and managed properly. Uh, from there, we're gonna jump over and talk about development applications that are being considered now. Uh that includes some of the larger development applications in the city as well as some of the smaller infill projects. Uh, and we'll also talk about proposed updates to our zoning coordinates. And as I mentioned on the last slide, we'll close the meeting with QA. Uh, so as we go, you should be able to see a QA icon, a question mark icon in the bottom center of your screen. As we go, please do uh type in your questions, uh, and then we'll answer answer all those questions at the end of the meeting. And anything that we can't get to tonight or need to provide additional information on, we'll do that in that typed QA that we provide on the web page. Slide. So this is one uh that I often find helpful to keep in mind because as we go through tonight's presentation, you're gonna hear from a number of different speakers on a number of different projects. Uh, and this graphic can serve as a reminder of how all the different things that we're talking about tonight are linked and really pointed toward the same goal of delivering uh on the Alexandria vision for the future. So the vision uh is where this whole graphic starts on the far left of the screen. Uh vision, objectives, recommendations, and SAP is an acronym uh for small area plan. This is where uh community members, city council, city staff, uh, advisory boards and commissions work together to come up with a common vision of what they want the future of their neighborhood, what they want the future of uh the city of Alexandria to be. And that formally gets adopted by Planning Commission as well as city council through a public hearing process. Once that vision is set, that provides direction to staff to develop to write down the development regulations, which also have to get approved by the city council through a hearing process. And then those regulations set the rules under which development applications are reviewed.