A weekly look at Alexandria from the notebook of Ryan Belmore, founder and publisher of The Alexandria Brief — what I saw this week, what I’m watching, and what didn’t fit into a story. Anything I couldn’t confirm says so.
Here we go.
1. Buried in Thursday’s walk zone discussion was an admission that the old rules were being applied loosely. Beaty asked whether staff had consulted the list of past safety exceptions — the ones that put buses in those neighborhoods for years. Jackson said most of the people who ran the 2018 redistricting are gone and the record-keeping “wasn’t as strong as it needed to be,” and that capacity reassignments and other changes over the years meant the policy “was not always applied as written.” That’s a different explanation than the one about maps and locators, and nobody on the dais followed up on it…