Testimony at work sessions.

And we will not take any formal actions at tonight's work session.

Members of the public are welcome to listen to the discussion.

To comment on the draft plan or tonight's work session discussion, please email plancom at Alexandria VA.gov.

That's P-L-A-N-C-O-M-M, one word, at Alexandria VA.gov.

There has been extensive outreach tonight on the plan to date with more to come.

So please stay tuned for those future opportunities through eNews and the city's website.

Please note that immediately following the work session, the planning commission will hold its regular monthly public hearing beginning at 7 p.m.

or soon thereafter.

Information on public hearing items is available on the table outside of chambers.

The restrooms are located in the corridor left of the security desk in the lobby.

For the planning commission, we can access the restrooms through this door right over here.

Staff may now begin the presentation.

Thank you, and happy new year.

Good evening, Madam Chair and members of the commission.

We are excited to be here.

We are at an important milestone in the in the planning process, and as we do with all of our small area plans, we have check-ins with the planning commission to make sure we're headed in the right direction.

And so tonight is really a compilation of what we've heard from the community, what we've compiled internally, hopefully get directions from the commission.

This is very much hopefully a conversation.

So if you have questions along the way, please feel free to weigh in and uh hopefully get some some guidance from you tonight.

So tonight we are going to talk a little bit.

One of the questions we had early on from the community is uh why do we need a plan on the corridor and why now?

Uh we had this a little bit with the commission as part of the incorporate that um and uh talk a little bit about context.

Most of our small area plans are much smaller.

This is uh much larger.

I'm gonna throw out some numbers in an upcoming slide to talk about scale.

This is a big big plan for our city, um, both in terms of scale and importance, and then uh the really the big thing that we want to talk to you tonight is some of the plan principles and some of the organizing themes that wrap around those.

And again, did we get it right?

Are there things we missed?

And um, are there other things the commission wants us to consider?

Because this is really a foundational element for us to build on the upcoming plan.

So um please share your thoughts and comments along the way.

So next slide is um uh this is something we shared with the community, and uh the question was why plan, why now?

And we think there are two elements at each end of Duke Street that are going to shape and influence uh what happens along the corridor in the coming years.

One is we have the catalytic project of the former landmark mall, now called the West End.

Of course, we have Old Town, and both of those are putting economic and development pressure on Duke Street.

And uh I think our opinion is rather than responding on a case-by-case basis, uh, the city and community should have a vision of what we want to have happen for this corridor.

This is incredibly important for us.

Um just to throw out some comparisons in terms of scale.

Um, so it's a three and a half mile long corridor.

Um to put that in some comparison, that is three times longer than the entire length of Potomac Yard, one of our biggest planned redevelopment areas.

So this is a very large important corridor for the city.

Um just we're gonna talk about this later, but just to some order of magnitude.

So Potomac Yard is roughly about 225 acres on this corridor.

There's 400 acres of impervious surface.

Just to sort of put scale and magnitude in as we think about this corridor.

Um again, big corridor, lots of importance for the city.

Um, all of the rental housing adjacent to the corridor is market rate affordable.

And so that also has challenges and opportunities as we think about this plan.

So next slide is um again context.

Uh, one of the things we heard from the community along the way, uh, and also city council as part of uh preparation of this process was the importance of small businesses.

There are a lot on this corridor, and one of the things we heard, Carrie's gonna talk to you about some of the things we heard, but one of the things we heard from many of the businesses is um if our rents go up substantially, we don't know if we can stay in the corridor.

Uh the other thing we heard from some of the businesses is this is sort of a gateway entrance into the city.

So we started a food truck, now we go to brick and mortar, and now we sort of open this is because of affordability in portions of the business areas.

This is sort of a gateway location for many of those to enter the city.

Other sort of important elements are up here.

I'm not going to touch on all of these.

Hopefully, we can come back.

So let's go ahead and jump to the next slide.

And with that, I'll turn over to Carrie.