The Arlington City Council convened in a special meeting on September 2, 2025, at 2:15 PM in the Council Briefing Room. The meeting began with a closed executive session (2:15–3:54 PM) to discuss incentives, real property, and economic development negotiations. After a short break, the open session reconvened at 4:01 PM and adjourned at 5:13 PM. Key topics included preparations for the 2026 FIFA World Cup, a comprehensive street maintenance report, a legislative update, and the Fiscal Year 2026 budget.
2026 World Cup Update
Street Maintenance Discussion
Legislative Update
City Council External Committee and Training Reports
Fiscal Year 2026 Budget
Evening Agenda Items
Future Agenda Items
And we will now go into an executive closed session pursuant to be TCA Government Code Chapter 55. Okay, we're gonna go ahead and call the afternoon session back to order. We're gonna move on down to discuss the work session items. Uh starting with 3.1 with Deputy City Manager Jennifer Wick. Thank you, Marin Council. Jennifer Wickman, deputy city manager. I'm here to bring you an update on where we are with our preparations for the World Cup. So you can see this is a lot of the information that you've seen before. So match schedule, the venue, base camps, and all of that. One thing I did want to point out is under the um the fan activation locations, it says TBD. Um on the map, FIFA's been circulating. There are a couple of fan activation spaces that are on the map now. One is at Sundance Square and one is in our entertainment district. We're not sure what that uh means yet, but we're certainly going to keep an eye on it. So that might be an additional element that would be coming to Arlington. This is information that our folks at the CVB and also Carrie Parker Berry, who's at our eSports um uh stadium are very familiar with. These are sort of stats on how long people stay, where they're coming from, the demographics in general. Um the probably one of the most important things in that chart is the 9.7 days on average of international, you know, sort of visitors are staying, because so many of our folks will be internationally international visitors traveling uh to Arlington for this, they will tend to stay longer. We're working to see how that compares to a typical stay, but I can tell you on the general, um, generally looking at it sort of hits the higher end of the length of time that people will stay. So this is very this is very encouraging. We're excited we want to retain as many of those folks in Arlington as we can. So some important dates, some of that have already passed. Uh this last month, the volunteer registration has opened. Um should be a really exciting opportunity. I'll have a little bit more on that later. Uh September 10th, you may be seeing um information about tickets go on sale at that point. What happens at that point is there's sort of a nine-day period where people affiliated with the visa credit card can sign up for a pre-sale draw and that will give them the opportunity to buy the tickets. So things that are for sale now are hospitality um deals that you may see out there. So this will be a long and phased approach to purchasing tickets for the world cup. So there may not be there's not really gonna be a single date we'll probably be able to point to that says here's where they went on sale. But one of the most important dates that we have on there is December 5th, and this is where there's going to be a big event in Washington, DC at the Kennedy Center, and they're gonna draw for which teams are playing in which matches for all the group the group phases, the group uh team stages. So this is when if I'm a fan of Iceland, I will know where my team is playing during the whole uh event. At that point, that really kicks off a cascade of decisions. Uh base camps will be selected. Ticket sales will be will be um tickets will be uh purchased by fans of of these teams. And additionally, they'll start making travel plans, lodging reservations, all of that. So a lot of things are gonna come from that December 5th deadline or date, and we'll know a lot more. Things will really start picking up speed as if they you know there are they're pretty going pretty quickly, but they'll go even faster then. So I want to give a brief tour, and Matt's gonna be my um my mouse on this one. But Arlington Welcomes the World is the website that Cynthia Lemus from our office communication has set up. We showed this to you recently, or we talked about the concept and you were asking many things about will this be included, will that be included? You can see it's a it's a great looking website. Um it has really three categories. If you scroll all the way to the bottom there, uh Matt, it has all of our all of the news that happens, um, videos that have been loaded, all of that. Uh Cynthia tells me that the our World Cup articles when they are published are consistently the week's highest rated article, most clicked on. It's this is a high um high interest area uh for a lot of folks. So you can see uh the they have a uh page for residents, you can click there, just talks about city services, um safety information, scroll down if you want to volunteer, what to do with short-term rentals, the schedule, all of that. Um and then if you go back, Matt, and then we've got um visitors information. This is great because it not only talks about cat um schedules and matches, but how to get around, what to do, like how to explore Arlington. This is really keying in on how we want folks to connect with and be a part of Arlington when they're here, spend their dollars here.