City's Waterfront Plan Sees Support but Activists Gain Traction

Alexandria’s City Council met Saturday morning to vet concerns, ask questions and brainstorm with the city staff charged with the grand task of redesigning the city’s waterfront.

Mayor Bill Euille thanked the audience sitting in the chambers and overflow room for citizen engagement, adding “some folks characterize this as the Euille waterfront plan. This is the citizens’ waterfront plan.”

His comment elicited boos from the audience and a reprimand for good behavior from their mayor.

“This council’s intent is not to offer something that citizens don’t want…This discussion is more than 20 years in the making,” Euille said. “If there’s misinformation, today’s the opportunity for any misinformation to be corrected.”

The audience was mild-mannered compared to similar meetings on the waterfront issue. Concerned citizens peaceably held up signs during the discussion and sported T-shirts emblazoned with “Don’t Rezone the Waterfront.” Prior meetings were riddled with cat calls, boos and red signs that read “Fire Hammer” (sic) referring to the head of the city’s Planning and Zoning Department Faroll Hamer.

Many of the protesters were fresh off a Saturday morning “hands across the waterfront” event held prior to the council meeting. Members of the event formed a human chain beginning at King and Union streets to make a statement opposing the city's waterfront proposal.

Group organizer Andrew Macdonald said a couple hundred people attended the morning’s protest event and the group had held a fundraiser the prior evening raising “several thousand dollars” to continue its efforts. Here is a YouTube video made by supporters of the event.

Many members of the audience were milling about outside the chambers trying to find out how they could purchase the anti waterfront plan T-shirts. The group is seeking no rezoning allowing hotels along the waterfront and more public space in the plan, among other things.

City Councilman Rob Krupicka sent an email to Hamer on Sunday morning characterizing staff work on the plan for Saturday’s meeting as “outstanding.”

The email listed 10 draft objectives to add to the plan. The first being “Maximize open space and public access along the waterfront.” Other points address history and cultural resources, parking, public arts, history, stewardship of natural resources as well as stewardship of tax dollars, flooding in Old Town and to “develop and manage new public, private and not for profit relationships to help support and maintain the community’s waterfront.”

What ever the new waterfront looks like, it won’t look like Portsmouth, Va., if the mayor has anything to do with it.

He commented during Saturday's meeting that in a recent visit to the area, which was built up shortly after Alexandria and boasts its own Olde Towne, he stayed in a 12-story hotel on the waterfront. Across the pier was a 25-story rental apartment building and next to the hotel was an eight-story condominium, he said.

“What do we want our waterfront to look like? I don’t want it to look like what I saw in Portsmouth,” he said.

Alexandria’s waterfront plan calls for a height limit of 50 feet for new buildings, although one building could go as high as 66 feet to match its current neighbor.

City Council is expected to decide at its June 14 meeting whether it will hold another public hearing on the issue.