On Saturday, March 14, 2026, the Alexandria City Council held a public hearing at the Del Pepper Community Resource Center, beginning at 9:30 AM and adjourning at 11:11 AM. The meeting covered a roll-call consent item, a public hearing on the City Manager’s proposed FY2027 operating budget and CIP, and informational reports on subdivision and site plan cases. Council heard extensive public testimony on housing affordability, ARHA tenant conditions, school funding, and other community concerns.
Oh sorry I mean sorry. Good morning, everyone. It's nine thirty-four. We're gonna go ahead and call um this public hearing to order. Madam Clerk, please call the roll. Councilman Geary. Councilman Chapman. Councilman El Newby. Here we go. Okay. Um we have quorum, so we will begin. I think we are expecting Councilman Chapman. Um unfortunately, due to unforeseen circumstances, we will not have Councilman Green joining us this morning. Our first order of business is to begin with the public hearing. As a reminder, the purpose of this meeting is for conducting uh the business of the council. We welcome public participation, so signs are welcomed, um, clapping, snapping, all those things are, but we ask that we as soon as you finish, um please sit down quietly so that we can transition to the next speaker. If we do have public outburst or disturbances that prevent the meeting from moving forward, I will issue one warning, then I'll issue a second, and then if the behavior continues at that point, we'll ask um a member of APD to escort you out. The other thing is we have to have the aisles and back clear at all times. So if more people come in and there's not a seat, we do have an overflow room available. Um I think that is everything I need to say. So with that, we will begin with our first speaker, and that is Martha Schnell. All right, hello, good morning. Martha Shawn's here. Glad to join you all today to provide this month's Environmental Policy Commission update to Council. First though, we need to start by wishing you all a very happy pie day. 3.14, very big day. Hope you're all celebrating later today. All right, let's get to it. Considering it's budget season. I'll start with a budget letter recap reminder. We shared EPC budget priorities back in November, focused on maintaining budget for all items related to Eco City Alexandria goals and targets in the EAP and the ECAP. We are keen to see the Office of Climate Action keep moving the kneel on the big scalable things like community choice aggregation, utility kind of arguments up in down in Richmond, things of that nature. And then also seeing other departments across Eco City focus on relevant activities as well, whether it's DGS and their equipment electrification efforts, whether it's Tesla's flood action efforts, RPCA's park and resilience improvements. You know, the list goes on. And so we want to see that stay study. Our February EPC meeting for a recap focused on PFAS and the Potumics uh Potomac sewer spills. Fairfax Water presented on PFAS levels in the Potomac and Aquaquan Reservoirs, which is the two areas where we get our water from. Potomac is fine. It's way below the levels of maximum contaminants. Aquan's kind of close because it's near AM. The airspace where there's like firefighting plastics of some sort, it's messing up the water. So Fairfax has until Fairfax Water has until 2029 to meet the EPA's PFAS requirements, and those are like many administrations of EPA requirements, so it's not political in that way. They're testing removal options, and they're also collaborating with regional research areas, but we're putting a pin in that. We're watching 2029. On the other end of things, Alex Renew, haha, other end, is also working on PFAS. Uh they're investing $355 million to upgrade their biosolids system, and they're gonna try drying it out with this like thermal drying facility, and they're doing RD to see if they can incinerate, like burn the biosolids that have been dried at Covanta or now called Reworld. Uh they do it in Hawaii, and so they're looking at it here. We're watching the um the carbon emissions impacts of that, and so we'll stay tuned there. On sewage with the Potomac Interceptor Collapse, we were really interested from the EPC side of things on the environmental impacts of this bill. The Alexandria Health Department came in very last minute, gave us an awesome human health update, which is great.