For the past 15 years, Kerry J. Donley has been a constant on Alexandria’s political landscape. On July 1, his service as a local, elected official came to an end.
"It’s been a little strange,” Donley said. “I feel like I’m at my own funeral, listening to the eulogies. I’m not going anywhere and I plan to run for office at some time in the future. I just want to spend more time with my family and see what opportunities present themselves in the future.”
That family includes a wife and five daughters. “I don’t want to wake up when I am 60 and realize that I have missed the girls growing up,” Donley said. “You can’t get that back.”
He was first elected to Council in 1988 and became mayor in 1995 when Patricia S. “Patsy” Ticer was elected to the Virginia senate. “It wasn’t really a hard decision not to run again,” Donley said. “As a matter of fact, I decided fairly early on in this term. I discussed it with my wife and we made the decision together. Working 14 and 16 hour days has begun to take its toll, especially in the past year. I guess I’m not as young as I used to be.”
The city has changed significantly over the past 15 years. Donley reflected on his accomplishments during that time.
“The thing that I am proudest of is the city’s added emphasis on young people,” he said. “We have developed new programs and made new investments in our young people. Whether it is through the Youth Policy Commission or the Alexandria Campaign on Adolescent Pregnancy or in the funding that we have provided for our schools, we have really provided an emphasis on our young people. I’d like to some day be remembered as the guy who really put kids first.”
HE IS ALSO PROUD of the investment that has been made in the city’s infrastructure. “By the time we finish T. C. Williams, we will have expanded or modernized every single school building in the city,” he said. “I think that’s a tremendous accomplishment. That was a policy objective that I had when I was elected mayor because we had just finished a period where we had aggressively paid down a large amount of indebtedness and the city was in good financial shape and I felt that it was time to make the investment in our infrastructure, particularly the infrastructure of public education.
“This investment didn’t stop with the schools,” Donley continued. “We have new parks, new recreation centers, a new library. All of these things have positively impacted the quality of life in Alexandria. These buildings are something tangible that people can see and touch and can tangibly understand what kind of bang they are getting for their buck, so to speak.”
Finally, Donley is proud that he saw many projects through to fruition. “When I was elected, I set some goals for the city, some things that had been languishing, and I have been able to see them to closure,” he said. “Potomac Yard, which had been a 10-year saga, was finally resolved. And the Woodrow Wilson Bridge. We’ve had an interesting path to get there that included the Woodrow Wilson Bridge Coordinating Committee, the lawsuit and finally, a resolution, which brought the city a tremendous amount of benefit. Finally, we are going to get what we wanted from the beginning. We advocated strongly for a 10-lane bridge and when it’s constructed, that’s what we’re going to get.
"The HOV lanes are never going to come to the bridge. In some renderings, they have even been taken out. Ultimately, transit will come to the lanes that have been reserved for the eleventh and twelfth lanes. It’s going to be a 10-lane bridge – that’s what we wanted and that’s what we’re going to get, but we are going to accrue a tremendous number of benefits to the city including parks, fields, and the preservation of Freedmen’s Cemetery."
WHEN IT COMES to growth, Donley pointed to PTO.
“Bringing the PTO [Patent and Trademark Office] to Alexandria had long been a policy objective. It is a tremendous example of smart growth. Bringing this large office complex into an area of the city that is between two Metro stations is smart for transit and also smart because of the availability of transportation. It made sense to put it at Carlyle. That vision for the Eisenhower Valley was developed 25 or 30 years ago and, during my time as mayor, it became a reality,” he said.
The Berg is another example of bringing things to closure. “We have been working on this project for even more years than I have been on Council,” Donley said. “Finally, we have a project that everyone can be proud of and that is going to bring excellent housing to people who have needed it for too many years.”
“We have been able to make some very difficult decisions and advance some very important projects and that what local government is all about,” he said.
While he accomplished all of the goals that he set, he was reflective on what Councils might have done differently over the past 15 years. “We are in a constant push-pull situation between different perspectives,” he said. “How we use our park land…how we use our open space, for instance. Whether it’s active recreation v. passive recreation or playing fields v. dog parks. For a long time, we worked to preserve open space at Cameron Station and then there was a request to build something there. That’s sort of the schizophrenia of Alexandria — you preserve open space and then you want to build something on it. It just doesn’t work that way. Ultimately, I think we will expand Chinquapin and have senior programs there and, it would be my hope that more active recreation would be preserved at Cameron Station for children and adults alike.
“It’s Council’s job to strike a balance and sometimes that process can get a little bit unnerving and a little too controversial. I think that some of our citizens need to put aside some of their parochial concerns and look at the bigger picture as we approach some of these issues,” Donley said.
OVER THE NEXT few years, Council is going to have to confront many of the same issues that Donley has been confronting for the past 15 years. “Transportation is always going to be an issue,” he said. “How we wrestle with this issue will always put us at the crux of transportation issues because of our geographic proximity to do many different jurisdictions,” he said. “We are between Washington and a lot of residential areas as well as being a center of activity in our own right so people are going to come and go. A lot of people are going to come through the city and we are going to have to accommodate that commuter traffic. More transit options is going to be one of the challenges.
“The other challenge for the next Council is to maintain the right kind of priorities. When you consider the various levels of government, local government is involved in public safety, public works and public education. Those are our top priorities. We need to make sure that we keep those priorities and that we fund them in terms of our ability. We need to make the right decisions in terms of programs and strategies to employ. We have made the right decisions in terms of our police department and our fire department over the past few years. We saw how they responded on Sept. 11. The next Council needs to maintain that focus.”
What will he run for next?
“The General Assembly has always held some interest because there are different issues to deliberate,” he said. “I just want to take a little time off and see.”