Mary Kadera says she’s had a change of heart about the Arlington’s Democratic party’s School Board endorsement caucus, which helped her to land a School Board seat.
Kadera, who said she initially voted to keep the process after careful study, wrote in a blog post on Monday that it’s time to listen to dissenting voices and try something else.
(Updated at 1:55 p.m.) Gov. Glenn Youngkin’s first veto could mean Arlington’s police oversight board cannot be led by an independent policing auditor.
Today (Tuesday), the Republican governor vetoed his first bill: HB 670, put forward by Arlington’s Del. Patrick Hope (D). It would have granted the Arlington County Board permission to appoint an independent auditor who would oversee the Community Oversight Board (COB), which is tasked with handling civilian complaints of misconduct by Arlington police officers.
(Updated 6:15 p.m. on 02/16/22) For the next 18 months, bus fare will be free or reduced-price for thousands of income-eligible residents and students.
The fare reductions began this month as part of the Low-Income Fare Assistance and the APS Student Fare-Less pilot programs, which are intended to target residents most impacted by the pandemic.
The County Board and the community have a small mountain of applications to Arlington’s new police oversight board to sift through.
Between October and December of last year, more than 100 people applied to sit on the county’s Community Oversight Board, according to Board Vice-Chair Christian Dorsey.
New cameras enforcing speeding could be coming to Arlington school and work zones by the end of this year.
The County Board voted on Saturday to have speed cameras installed throughout the county near schools and on public roads where construction work is ongoing.
Sponsored by Monday Properties and written by ARLnow, Startup Monday is a weekly column that profiles Arlington-based startups, founders, and other local technology news. Monday Properties is proudly featuring 1515 Wilson Blvd in Rosslyn.
A locally owned co-working space is partnering with a nonprofit to help Black girls from the D.C. area reach their fullest potential.
Arlington County could start cracking down on speeding near schools and highway work zones with newly-allowed speed cameras.
This weekend, the Arlington County Board is scheduled to set a public hearing for its Jan. 22 meeting on the question of whether to install speed cameras.
Arlington County could use federal American Rescue Plan Act funding to take a swing at making the “Arlington Way” work for more residents.
From what a development project should look like to where protected bike lanes could go, Arlington often invites residents to have a say in policy-making, a local community engagement philosophy known as the “Arlington Way.”
(Updated at 4:30 p.m.) Arlington has long prided itself on the pathways available to residents to have a say in local policy-making, also known as the “Arlington Way.”
But a growing number of county officials, local leaders and civic groups think the tradition, while noble in aim, doesn’t work for everyone. They say it leans too much on affluent retirees and sabotages the county’s equity efforts.
Arlington County's transportation division is kicking off its ambitious plan to eliminate traffic deaths with a series of relatively quick safety projects.
For now, most of those projects appear to be in North Arlington.
Four months ago, the Arlington County Board adopted a five-year action plan that aims to eliminate traffic fatalities and severe injuries, known as "Vision Zero." The plan lays out a systematic approach to safety improvements, addressing the most urgent needs through data analysis, equity and community engagement.
These improvements vary in scope: "quick-build projects" address immediate needs quickly using low-cost materials, while larger-scale projects require funding from the county's Capital Improvement Program or grants. Others include pilot projects and regular maintenance work.
"We're focusing initially on small-scale operational improvements... a small but important part of program," said Dennis Leach, the director of transportation for the Department of Environmental Services.
Residents will see upgrades such as curb and median extensions, improved bus stops, curb-and-gutter repairs, new ramps and new high visibility crosswalks. DES has already completed eight "quick-build" projects and 11 are underway, according to its website.
Staff identify projects by analyzing crash data and considering reports by police, Arlington Public Schools and community members. They are constructed on a rolling basis.
For example, this month, staff completed a new mid-block crosswalk across N. Ohio Street that will improve access to Cardinal Elementary School and Swanson Middle School School. Staff are now installing a crosswalk with accessible curb ramps over Sycamore Street for better access to Tuckahoe Park and Tuckahoe Elementary School.
Of the 19 completed and under-construction projects, only three appear to be in South Arlington. One Twitter user mapped out the geographic spread of these projects, raising questions about how these projects are chosen and when DES will make its way south, given that equity is a core tenant of Vision Zero.
https://twitter.com/CarFreeHQ2/status/1442889831034597379
Leach said that could be because there are a number of older community and school requests being worked through.
"I think there's an issue of a pipeline of small projects that may have gotten their start in early years," Leach said. "What you see in the pipeline of quick-build projects has been built up over years... These projects may have gotten their start before Vision Zero was adopted."
Transportation and Operations Bureau Chief Hui Wang said these projects are "a very small, skewed piece of the transportation program" because they don't show large-scale investments, such as those on Columbia Pike.
"When we're talking about balance, equity, we have to make sure that we're not looking at it through a shaded lens," she said.
Leach agrees.
"[Columbia Pike] is our single largest focus areas, as it has some of our oldest infrastructure," he said. "In other parts of the county, like the Rosslyn-Ballston corridor, private development builds a lot of the infrastructure. In Columbia Pike, until recently, there's been little private development -- there's more now -- but it's been left to county to actually make those investments in advance of redevelopment."
When asked if certain communities generate more traffic reports than others, Wang said DES doesn't map out community reports because it's hard to categorize them and her team doesn't have the resources for that.
"My team is focused on the engineering part -- our goal is trying to get things done," she said.
The data-based approach helps weed out what is a perceived safety risk versus actual safety risks, Wang noted.
"We use crash data to identify real problems," she said. "We're using data as a guiding force, focusing on high-injury networks."
Chris Slatt, who is president of transportation advocacy group Sustainable Mobility for Arlington County, said it's not surprising that initial projects will skew toward North Arlington.
"Complaint-driven processes are well-known to reflect the biases of whom within the community is best equipped to spend precious time and energy complaining, so we would fully expect that method of identifying projects to skew toward the more affluent areas of Arlington unless staff works intentionally to correct that bias," he said.
Leaders of a local civic organization admit their membership does not reflect the diversity of Arlington County, but they’re looking to change that.
One of Arlington’s largest community organizations, the Arlington County Civic Federation (CivFed) gives representatives from 85 local groups — including neighborhood civic associations and local advocacy organizations — a non-partisan forum to discuss community topics and provide input on county government and Arlington Public Schools activity.
