Letter to the Editor: Mirant Closing + Rejected City Commercial Waterfront Plan = Green Historical Reset

With the announced closing of the polluting Mirant power station on Alexandria’s environmentally abused waterfront, all calculations have changed. But once again, Alexandria’s Developer-Mayor Bill Euille is paying more attention to his personal portfolio as an extension of “Euille Way,” a designated Alexandria street, than to his constituents.  

The Mayor misrepresents majority opinion by trying to claim, erroneously on both counts, first that the recently announced October 2012 closing of the Mirant power plant does not completely alter the Old Town waterfront redevelopment debate, and second that the Alexandria community in any way shape or form wants the deal he has already negotiated behind our backs.

On the contrary, the additional 25-acre plot of hazardous materials the Mirant plant has housed for 62 years now can be cleaned up in unison with the decades of hazardous materials under Robinson Terminals North and South. Such an outcome could ensure that those of us who live near the waterfront together with visiting tourists and park-enjoying local citizens finally can breathe free and clear of contaminants and the City can rest easy knowing it will have dodged the multiple legal bullets coming its way.  

Instead and unfortunately for stakeholder-residents who actually live in Old Town, it’s all about the money for the Mayor and his shareholders who would like to own, sell, lease, and run Alexandria’s public waterfront as they see fit.

To date, both the Mayor and the Washington Post Company, supported in full by Alexandria’s feckless City Planning Commission and its National Harbor-inspired staff, have tried to fog-over and cover-up the waterfront’s environmental degradation through their backroom and backdoor deal-making (a recent FOIA request documents those discussions) to build on what is still overly polluted through rezoning trickery.

Brownfield applications of likely PCB and mercury contamination must be remediated as a first step at both the Mirant and two Robinson Terminal sites. Other attractive steps could include removing all the contaminated land and the rail line which is no longer needed, and build an inlet with an open public access dock, small boat loading ramp, and boathouse as an eventual Alexandria Boat Club alternative, but this time with the Club’s blessing before losing in court as City Government did at an unnecessary cost to taxpayers who funded both sides of this case.

Clearly with the announced Mirant plant closing, the waterfront redevelopment goal posts have moved. Now, all stakeholders and would-be shareholders should have at least another full year to answer the most pressing economic development question of our local times: why do tourists come to Alexandria as opposed to National Harbor? 

The answer is understood intuitively and viscerally by Old Town residents and merchants who receive these visitors on a daily basis…it’s the history that creates the economy, stupid! Old Town is authentic; people have the best of both worlds between modern commercial sprawl and colonial America just by crossing a recently enlarged and improved Wilson bridge.

Creative, and civic-minded economic development mandates enlarging the differences between National Harbor and Old Town, not shrinking them, something Alexandria’s current Mayor, City Council, City Planning Commission, and Washington Post Company find very difficult to understand. Perhaps it’s because so many of these players are commercial developers during their day jobs and turning Alexandria’s Old Town into “National Harbor, The Series” represents that “one bridge too far” cat-nip that’s just too hard to resist even though deep down inside they understand that this is not what their citizens want, that if they put this option up for a public referendum vote they would lose and lose big.

Make no mistake, this is all about developers versus citizens, profiteers and carpet baggers versus residents.  Robinson Terminals North & South and the Mirant site are one and the same, the kind of polluting commercial development favored by Mayor Euille, the Washington Post Company, and the Mayor’s “amen corner” on the City Planning Commission and City Council.

Instead of taking every short cut to put lipstick on pigs that won’t fly, hunt, or clean-up, why don’t we swing for the fences with an approach that puts people first, environment second, historical legacy third, open and free public access fourth, and then earn commercial profits from the sustaining historical outreach we have integrated into the city’s waterfront fabric? 

The Mirant plant constitutes a far larger parcel than the eight block area threatened by the Mayor’s conflict-generating city waterfront plan that has divided Alexandria’s residents against its elected politicians for the last two years. City government’s press release affirms that the Mirant site will not be considered in the current Washington Post-Euille waterfront plan because the process is already underway.

This means more patronage to favored developers who advocate for pre-cooked deals where citizen input will be barely tolerated and visibly not respected until those in power are thrown out. State Senator-hopeful Adam Ebbin’s recent August primary victory is prologue to what is coming and must occur to protect our future and Alexandria’s legacy.      

When Mirant, which was a well run plant, tried to introduce new technology that would have reduced the overall environmental impact on Alexandria including stack consolidation and trona injection, the City government said no way, nada.  Now, the same City government is trying to use a distorted “privatization” argument to justify boutique hotels for the affluent that it wants to put adjacent to Alexandria’s waterfront parks that will keep out all of its citizens except those wealthy enough to afford the tab.

The moral of this story is that hypocritical, vision-free, city government leadership like the one we need to overhaul in Alexandria can only generate power where poor people live and can only build boutique hotels on historical public waterfront land because that’s how great fortunes are made… through crimes against the people.