Candidate Question #2
What is the number one thing you would like to improve in city government?
Kirk McPike There are many issues that I would like to tackle as a member of the City Council. If elected, I will be a tireless advocate for our city's schools, to ensure they have the funding and space they need to succeed. I plan to take on long term challenges including housing affordability, flooding, climate change, and equity. I want to improve transparency and communication between the city and its residents, because I believe that being open, accessible, and communicative is essential to democratic governance.
However, the issue that is likely to dominate the first few months of the next City Council's term will be the lingering impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on our city, our businesses, and our residents. Even when the virus itself is behind us, the process of rebuilding will lay before us. If elected to the City Council, I will work hard to help support the families that have lost income or education opportunities who will need the city to fully fund our schools and our safety net to help make them whole. I will work to support the businesses that made it through this long, hard economic downturn, and to replace the businesses we lost by making Alexandria the easiest place in Northern Virginia to start a business.
As a member of the city's Budget and Fiscal Affairs Advisory Committee, I've seen what it took to help Alexandria recover from the Great Recession, and I will enter office ready to help us move past this pandemic.
Sarah Bagley So many projects undertaken in our city take years and in some situations, decades to implement from proposal to completion. Our government can always improve its outreach and education for residents about how decisions are made when they are made, and what the costs and benefits are of a particular decision. We should strive to explain budget and development decisions in a holistic way that ties a particular line item decision, transportation choice, or project approval to the larger vision for Alexandria. Increased engagement and coalition building at the earliest stages of a project are likely to only improve on the outcome through shared ownership and creative contributions to the process.
Amy Jackson The number one thing I would like to see improve in city government is its overall communication techniques – internally and externally (person to person, as well as improving presence on the City website, social media, other forms of mass communication). Improving upon communication surrounding community outreach, docket items, budget decisions, project plans and project implementations would most likely also lead back to creating improvements in the process of how Council policy decisions are communicated and then implemented. When listening to our community members, civic organizations, businesses, etc, it seems that the City’s communication
tactics tend to play a role in their concerns. If the city focuses
upon how the distribution of information was heard to be inadequate, or it would be appreciated by neighbors to hear about road work or construction noise ahead of time to make needed changes to their own plans instead of frustrated with the process, then I would think that improved communication measures concerning city operations and project implementations would benefit the overall morale of our citizens with their concerns of city government’s communication and transparency issues.
James Lewis My foremost priority is engaging more Alexandrians, earlier and throughout the process, to ensure the best ideas – informed by the lived experience of residents – move forward to improve our community, City and region.
Alyia Gaskins As a public health professional and urban planner, I understand that authentic community engagement can strengthen our abilities to identify key issues and strategies to address them. In my conversations with many Alexandrians, I’ve listened to individuals, businesses, those who are already thriving and those who need a hand up, and even those with whom I might disagree. As a candidate, I’ve focused on listening because despite our City Council’s best efforts, many in our community feel like they do not have the ability to shape decisions that impact their lives, especially our low-income neighbors, communities of color, and seniors.
I believe that the people who are affected by a problem are most likely to know what’s needed to fix it. As a Council Member, I will work with the City Manager, Department Heads, staff and residents to create ways to make it easier for community members to share their diverse views, and to be a part of creating solutions to our most pressing problems. This includes expanding opportunities for participation and co-decision making, including virtual engagements and methods that bring meetings to neighborhoods and to the people. It also includes creating a transparent process with feedback loops that allows community members to see how their feedback was incorporated.
Patrick Moran We have a huge opportunity before us to incorporate Smart City Technology to improve transparency, speed of service, communication, quality control, and proactive engagement with Alexandria City residents. These technologies can proactively address and extend the life of our roads, sewer, and stormwater infrastructure that we are demanding more of with infill development.
William Campbell Our city and different communities seem to often get sideways, sidetracked, distracted, and dismayed by hyperbole and rhetoric. I think that the primary way that you minimize this is by overcommunicating the facts. In addition to overcommunicating, council members must continue to be as disclosive as possible in terms of sharing all of the elements that are taken into consideration prior to voting. Our citizens absolutely want council, the City Manager, and staff to pursue federal, state, and private grants. But we need to also overcommunicate what requirements and stipulations are tied to those awards. We need to be disclosive about schedules and contracts, to the extent possible, without jeopardizing the City’s bargaining position. We need to ensure that our citizenry is well informed as to any federal or state mandates that drive, hinder, or help us.
An additional goal of mine, as it relates to improving our government, is to work towards improving how we quantify and disclose the various benefits to our citizens when City Council approves an item. Each of our citizens ought to be able to quickly recite the quantifiable benefits and opportunities that these developments will bring. We need to be able to guarantee certain housing options, guarantee certain park amenities, and know that work will be done to facilitate movement - both pedestrian, and vehicle powered. We must overcommunicate!
Kevin Harris Alexandria needs to be a more equitable city. Inequities caused by systemic racism, sexism and classism are present throughout all levels of our community, and can only be dismantled if we prioritize taking the hard steps, having the hard conversations, around how we can dismantle these inequalities.
For example, according to the Department of Planning and Zoning, people of color make up approximately 25% of the population of Old Town North. However, very few people of color are represented in any of the community or business associations found in this part of the city. This leads to systemic underrepresentation for people of color when issues and concerns are addressed by our elected officials.
Other examples of this lack of representation include a lack of public housing residents in Alexandria Civic Association, and the lack of minority owned businesses in our business associations.
These microlevel inequities are not just found in North Old Town, they are found throughout the city, and when stacked together, create a wall of inequity that prevents large swaths of our city from achieving their full potential. Dismantling this wall starts with outreach to all communities, representation for all communities, and creating the necessary space to have frank discussions.
I look forward to working with organizations throughout the city on how we can work together to create a more inclusive environment for all.
John Taylor Chapman I believe we as a City Council have a unique opportunity to reconfigure and improve Alexandria government’s relationship with community members. With the diversity of technology that is available, there are many more effective tools to engage people with their local governments beyond traditional public hearings. While important, public hearings reach a limited audience. I will push to find new ways to meaningfully engage Alexandrians in decisions that affect them. If elected back to City Council, I want to expand citizen input beyond the standard board and commission model – our current set-up is viable but can be better. We need to employ innovative, inclusive, and creative methods of engagement to meet community members where they are, such as expanding the use of participatory budgeting. By cultivating proactive citizen engagement, we as a city government can garner greater community trust, transparency, and buy-in on a variety of public projects and engagements.
Bill Rossello The most important improvement is one that is central to everything city government does – embodied in three words: Integrity, Transparency, and Accountability. The culture at City Hall has not been to make residents their central focus. As a result, residents and neighborhoods are often saddled with things they don’t want, and frequently don’t get the things they do want. Witness, no bike lanes in neighborhoods that want them, but bike lanes installed in neighborhoods that don’t want them. And residents are often the last to know what the City is contemplating – witness, the slaughterhouse, the grant funding for redesigning important roadways, and the destructive stream restoration projects. When residents raise a controversial issue, City Hall often literally attacks them for challenging their wisdom. Rather than being transparent, they regularly force us to employ the Freedom of Information Act to get the truth and then redact with all the fervor of a federal intel agency. When City Hall loses the trust of the residents it exists to serve, It’s Time For a Change!