Alexandria, VA – Through the gleaming glass walls of AlexRenew’s sixth-floor conference center in Carlyle, the morning rush on the Capital Beltway served as a fitting backdrop for the Eisenhower Partnership’s City Manager’s Breakfast on March 18. Inside, a crowd of about 150 business and civic leaders mingled over coffee and breakfast potatoes—a robust gathering of the minds held against a sweeping view of the city they plan to navigate through an increasingly complex economic landscape.
Outside, I-495 was a blur of high-speed commuter energy, but the conversation inside centered on a different kind of momentum: a $977.3 million budget proposal defined by its deliberate lack of movement. Alexandria City Manager James F. Parajon presented a fiscal plan that manages to steady the ship without a tax rate increase, opting for a “flat” approach in a season of high-speed change.
Alexandria Mayor Alyia Gaskins opened the morning by acknowledging the bizarre gauntlet the city has run since January. “It is only March. It’s literally only three months into the year,” Gaskins told the crowd. “Yet our city has had a number of unprecedented and unexpected events. Everything from the snowstorm, which introduced a new term into our vocabulary—snowcrete—to measles to rabid raccoons to the Potomac Interceptor collapse.”
Beyond the “crisis of the day” is a sobering economic reality. Gaskins revealed that consumers are worried about spending—eating out less, cutting back on hotels and travel — while a recent Brookings Institution presentation pinpointed that Alexandria has the highest unemployment rate in Northern Virginia due to a steep loss of private-sector jobs…