Heather Curtis
WMAL.com
WASHINGTON (WMAL) – Amazon’s HQ2 is prompting a new partnership between Arlington and Alexandria. Tuesday the Arlington County Board of Supervisors and Alexandria City Council will hold a joint work session to talk about ways they can work together to figure out how to manage challenges that come along with Amazon building its HQ2 in Crystal City.
Arlington County Board of Supervisor chair Christian Dorsey said Amazon’s HQ2, coupled with the Commonwealth’s significant new investments in transportation and affordable housing represent unprecedented opportunities and challenges for both counties.
“It requires unprecedented cooperation between our two communities to ensure that the benefits do not accrue only to a few, while the many cope with the challenges,” Dorsey said.
Alexandria Mayor Justin Wilson hopes they will come out of the meeting with a structure about how they can collaborate on housing, workforce development, education, contracting activities for small businesses and transportation.
“We’re not gonna solve all of these problems tomorrow night, but we definitely envision this as a kickoff of a much broader cooperation between the two jurisdictions for a long time to come,” Wilson said.
He is optimistic given the success of some significant partnerships that he said led to successful attraction of Amazon to Arlington.
Affordable housing has long been a big issue in both counties. Wilson wants to look into how to preserve affordable housing, especially in Arlandria, an affordable neighborhood that straddles the border of the two counties. Alexandria is already starting a re-planning effort to preserve affordability there, according to Wilson, and he said they want to see how they can work together on that, including figuring out if there are land use tools they can put in place to preserve affordable housing.
Tuesday’s meeting starts at 7:30 p.m. at Gunston Community Center in Arlington. The meeting is open to the public, but no public comment will be taken.
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