Green Lane
It's not easy being green, especially if you are a controversial bike lane that has created national headlines.
This week, drivers on King Street noticed something different about the city's grand entrance into Old Town. Part of it is green. After months of bitter debate and a contentious daylong public hearing in March, City Council members approved a plan to remove 27 parking spaces from West Cedar Street to Highland Place. Now city officials have created the new bike lane and painted it green.
"It really helps distinguish for drivers that this is a different lane," said Rich Baier, director of the Department of Transportation and Environmental Services. "It is not a car lane."
For the record, Baier said, it's not the first green bike lane in the city. That distinction belongs to the "bicycle box" on Commonwealth Avenue.
Incomplete Streets
Opponents of bike lanes may still be upset about losing parking spaces on King Street, but they can thank city officials for leaving Quaker Lane alone.
In the last year, Alexandria added 12 miles of bike lanes through its resurfacing program. In each case, those lanes were added after city officials resurfaced the asphalt, a trigger for opening the door to bike lanes. That's why city officials recently considered adding bike lanes to Quaker Avenue, which was recently resurfaced. Complete Streets Coordinator Hillary Poole says city officials conducted a traffic analysis and decided against installing bike lanes on Quaker.
"We would have had to remove a travel lane in order to do this," said Poole. "And the delays were so significant that we decided not to install the bike lane and instead look for alternate routes."
Union Destination
The stately low-slung brick building seems a little out of place in modern Alexandria, a building constructed at a time when masonry was valued and railroad travel was popular. Now Alexandria Mayor Bill Euille wants to make it a destination for weddings, meetings and receptions.
"It's an economic development opportunity waiting to happen," said Euille.
Union Station was constructed in 1905, replacing the old Alexandria Station at the northeast corner of Fayette and Cameron streets. The new station, known as Union Station because it was constructed by a conglomerate of railroad interests, was built on land that was west of the city limits at the time. The city annexed the land in 1915 and eventually took ownership of the station in 2001. Now the mayor wants to replicate the success of the Bristol Train Station, which offers space for conferences, banquets and special events.
"If they can do it in little Bristol," said the mayor, "we can do it in big, old Alexandria."
$1 Million Sequester
How much did the sequester cost Alexandria? The answer is still unclear, but city officials now say it's likely to be $1 million.
"The city has set aside $1 million in fund balance to compensate for potential short-term revenue reductions related to sequestration," said City Manager Rashad Young. "At this point in the year, we are likely to utilize the fund balance set aside."
Budget officials are weeks away from closing out the fiscal year 2014 budget, which will expire at the end of June. The problem for city officials is that they need to balance the books, but their revenue projections are off because of the automatic spending cuts triggered by a debate over the debt ceiling. For city officials, that meant that hotels were not booking transit occupancy taxes and restaurants were not forking over meals taxes — at least not as much as was expected.
"It's a testament to the difficulty with which we are ending this fiscal year," observed Councilman Justin Wilson.