<b>No New Trash Cans</b>
When city leaders scheduled an afternoon walk through the Inner City last year, one of the biggest complaints residents expressed to City Council members was the excessive amount of trash littering the streets. Elected leaders spent most of the afternoon stooped over, picking up litter and depositing it in the nearest trash can. During the walk, Councilman Ludwig Gaines said that the city should invest in more trash cans for the area.
"An effort to bring in new trash cans was stalled by the city’s recent spending reductions," Gaines said during the April 2006 Inner City walk. "But we are gong to find a way to put that initiative back in the budget."
The effort must have failed, because city officials in the Department of Transpiration and Environmental Services have confirmed that Alexandria has installed no new "ornamental" trash cans in the last year. Although hundreds of old trash cans have been replaced with new wrought-iron models, none of the streets in the Inner City have received a new can in a location that did not previously have one.
"Sometimes when you add a new trash can, you create more litter," said Alton Weaver, chief of the city’s solid-waste division. "The point is to strategically locate them and make sure that they are emptied at intervals that are appropriate to the location."
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<b>Voices from the Past</b>
With the area east of the Braddock Metro station in the midst of dramatic change, the city government is in the final stages of accepting input from residents and developers on their competing visions for the Parker Gray and Inner City neighborhoods. Upcoming meetings include an April 12 community meeting at Jefferson-Houston Elementary School and a May 1 public hearing of the Planning Commission. The process will culminate in a May 12 public hearing in which City Council members will finalize the small-area plan that will shape the future of the historically black neighborhood.
If the past is any prologue, the debate will be contentious.
The archive of the Alexandria Port Packet, one of the two newspapers that merged in 1986 to form the Alexandria Gazette Packet, shows that the process creating the Parker Gray Old and Historic District was one fraught with competing visions of the future and lingering resentments about how city leaders had marginalized the black community for generations.
"I resent a group of new people coming in here and being planners for the area, looking at us as if we’re back in the woods," said Eudora Lyles, founder of the Inner City Civic Association, who opposed the creation of the district, after a 1984 Planning Commission public hearing. "We’ve done a lot here."
U.S. Rep. Jim Moran, who was then vice mayor, said that although he understood Lyles’s concerns, he would be voting for creating the district because he had received many more letters of support than opposition. The vice mayor eventually forged a compromise that would allow some residents to opt out of the historic district, an architecturally protected zone that many blacks felt would be a financial burden to homeowners who had lived there for generations.
"If I’d grown up in this city as a black person and watched Old Town become entirely white except for public housing, I would resent words like ‘Old and Historic District’ and ‘Old Town’ because I would know it was something that would push me out of the city," Moran said during an April 1984 public hearing on the matter. "But as representatives of democracy, we are here to represent majority opinion."
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<b>Grocery Store Politics</b>
During a recent event honoring former Del. Marian Van Landingham for her years of service to the city’s senior citizens, Virginia Sen. Patsy Ticer recalled how Van Landingham persuaded her to run for the Senate instead of continuing as mayor. Ticer, who served as mayor from 1991 to 1996, said that Van Landingham made a persuasive case by telling her that it would take up less of her time.
"It’s true that people no longer stop me in the grocery store to ask me about zoning issues," said Ticer, who is running for reelection to the Senate this year. "Now they stop me to ask about transportation funding."