This legislative subcommittee meeting, held on March 23, 2026, covered updates on the state budget impasse, city legislative priorities, and a detailed review of key bills headed to the governor's desk. Director Ginsberg led discussions on fiscal impacts, advocacy strategies, and next steps as the General Assembly session concludes.
Remind me. Okay, there we go. Recording has officially started. Wendy, remind me, do we have meeting minutes that we need to approve from the previous meeting? Okay. We do have last time, yeah. I I know we missed one, so I wasn't sure if we had got that already. Um, Councilman Chapman, can you please make a motion to approve the meeting minutes from the meeting two weeks ago? Can we lose on muted? Councilman Chapman, if you're speaking, you're still muted. No, I don't know why it wasn't letting me unmute. Thank you. Um Madam Mayor would like to make a motion to approve the minutes. I'll second it. So in a motion and a second. All those in favor say aye. Aye. Any opposed? All right. The ayes have it. Meeting minutes approved. With that, I will turn it over to Director Ginsberg to begin our updates. Happy Friday night, everybody. Thanks for the meeting. Thanks for handing it over, Mayor and Councilman. The first thing we're going to talk about today was just an overview of what's happening with the budget. I do want to give just stop and say we did adjourn the General Assembly did adjourn signe die on Friday or last Friday. At the end of the deliberations for the General Assembly session, the House and the Senate were still pretty far apart on what amount of money they believe they have. So it's not really clear what the universe of funding will be. So it's really difficult to budget anything if you can't agree on the amount of dollars you have to budget. So the House and Senate are still hashing out exactly how much funding they will have to use when they're uh picking their priorities and deciding where that funding should go. We talked a little bit about this at previous meetings. The Senate would like to eliminate the tax break for data centers to when they purchase uh different pieces of uh what they use inside of their data centers. They were going to remove that tax uh tax break for those data centers and use that funding that would be generated from those tax revenues toward uh what could be used by the state for funding different ideas and and concepts and programs and practices. Um the House did not have the that funding incorporated into its budget. So they are still deciding how much funding they have, and then they will use that to uh decide what they're going to invest in. The city is still very focused on advocating for several of its priorities, including WAMATA funding. We talked a lot about this over the last few weeks. Uh WAMATA funding and VRE funding, just transit writ large for Northern Virginia, which does underpin a lot of um a lot of Northern Virginia's economy and frankly, a lot of Virginia's economy overall. So we're especially focused on operating funding for WAMATA. We have a 153 million dollar funding gap. Um we estimate that the City of Alexandria's uh section of that funding is about 21 million dollars. So we are set uh certainly focused on making sure that that ends up in the budget. The good news um is that both both the House and Senate think WAMATA needs funding. It's just um how much funding and what that funding can be used for. The House was focused on operating funding, the Senate was focused on um more capital funding. So it's just making sure that we get that operating funding, which is uh more urgent of a need for our transit system, uh, and we're working toward that. The second thing that we are working on is continuing to advocate for funding for Freedom House Museum. We have a two uh we asked for two million dollars originally. There's a one million dollar ask that is in the Senate, uh, the Senate budget.