City of Alexandria, Virginia
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MEMORANDUM
DATE: NOVEMBER 25, 2025
TO: THE HONORABLE MAYOR AND MEMBERS OF CITY COUNCIL
THROUGH: JAMES F. PARAJON, CITY MANAGER
FROM: EMILY A. BAKER, DEPUTY CITY MANAGER
DOCKET TITLE:
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Economic Summit Update - ALX Forward: A Strategic Framework for Economic Growth.
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ISSUE: Economic Summit Update - ALX Forward: A Strategic Framework for Economic Growth.
RECOMMENDATION: That City Council receive an update and discuss ALX Forward: A Strategic Framework for Economic Growth.
BACKGROUND: In November 2024, the City of Alexandria, the Alexandria Economic Development Partnership (AEDP), and TIP Strategies (TIP) launched their collaborative efforts to host an economic summit and develop a strategic framework “ALX Forward” to guide economic development. Ensuring Alexandria’s continued competitiveness was a driving factor in creating ALX Forward. In 2025, the Alexandria City Council adopted four priorities to provide the basis for budget and policy decisions: advance housing opportunities, reduce community disparities, drive economic strength, and attract and retain top talent. This strategic planning initiative falls under the economic strength umbrella. The most recent coordinated economic development planning effort was a City-sponsored Economic Sustainability Summit in 2007. The inaugural 2007 summit resulted in multiple recommendations for improvements to existing systems or new initiatives impacting tourism, real estate development, transit, business recruitment, and organizational functions within the City’s economic development network. These recommendations proved instrumental in catalyzing major developments across the City, including the reimagined waterfront, the former Landmark Mall, and Virginia Tech, and the City is poised to embark on a new chapter.
DISCUSSION: The draft ALX Forward strategic framework (Attachment 1) resulted from a collaborative planning process facilitated by TIP, an Austin-based economic development strategic planning firm, guided by the City and AEDP, and informed by robust stakeholder engagement, with over 890 community touchpoints, and quantitative analysis. This approach ensured a balance between professional expertise and community-driven input, resulting in a framework that is data backed and aligned with the shared aspirations of Alexandria's vibrant community. The community dialogue revealed several themes (equitable growth, real estate, business retention and attraction, small business support, entrepreneurship and commercialization, workforce development, creative placemaking, community engagement, resource alignment, and connectivity) that appeared consistently across different formats, suggesting strong consensus around business investment to grow and diversify the tax base, while remaining true to the City’s identity and values.
These themes were presented during the Economic Summit <https://www.alexandriava.gov/EconomicSummit> held on May 8, 2025, which marked a major milestone in the stakeholder engagement process. The City of Alexandria and AEDP hosted the summit at the Westin Alexandria, bringing together over 200 business leaders, policymakers, residents, and stakeholders to explore the City's economic future. The summit featured presentations, panel discussions, and interactive breakout sessions designed to facilitate open dialogue around Alexandria's economic trajectory while gathering community input on a proposed strategic framework to guide long-term development decision-making. Like the 2007 summit, the 2025 event successfully met its goals of engaging various stakeholder groups and collecting critical feedback for the next phase of the planning process. A summary of the event, the Economic Summit Report <https://www.alexandriava.gov/sites/default/files/2025-07/economic-summit-report-20250711.pdf>, was published separately. After the summit, the Alexandria community was invited to complete a post-summit survey that provided an additional opportunity to give feedback on the goals and broad strategies presented at the summit.
Running parallel to the community engagement process, TIP's research team conducted comprehensive quantitative research to better understand the City's competitive position and development potential. This analysis examined both current conditions and historical trends to identify themes that supplement community conversations. Integrating the quantitative analysis with community input revealed strong alignment between data findings and stakeholder perceptions. Not only does this alignment validate the research findings, but it also demonstrates that residents and leaders brought well-informed perspectives to the planning process. The comprehensive data analysis, an interactive visualization tool <https://public.tableau.com/app/profile/tipstrategies.1/viz/2025AlexandriaVACurrentConditions/Title>, makes the data easier to understand and more accessible. Residents can explore the quantitative findings in detail and understand the data underlying strategic recommendations. Key insights from this research are integrated throughout the strategic framework to support specific initiatives and implementation approaches. Finally, combining data trends with stakeholder themes shaped TIP’s analysis of the community’s strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats that guided strategic priority setting, ensured purposeful initiative development, and, ultimately, will foster community-supported implementation.
The strategic framework that emerged from the ALX Forward planning process creates a path forward for economic development investments by outlining a vision, guiding principles, goals, strategies, actions and tactics. The vision statement “Alexandria is a resilient, competitive, future-ready city where innovation thrives, opportunity is accessible to all, and economic growth enhances quality of life” is central to the framework in that it informs the guiding principles (equity, resilience, authenticity, accountability) and strategic recommendations across three goal areas of Place-Based Development, Business Retention and Recruitment, and Entrepreneurship and Innovation.
Within this framework, Alexandria’s competitive position can be recast most effectively by concentrating on short-term, high-impact initiatives outlined under the plan’s three goal areas. These catalytic initiatives are designed to transform Alexandria’s strengths into unique offerings that will attract business investment to grow and diversify the tax base, while remaining true to the City’s identity and values. The strategic framework also includes a revised “Economic Development Investment Decision Matrix” to identify when the City of Alexandria will invest in economic development opportunities. The draft ALX Forward strategic framework document is available at <https://www.alexandriava.gov/ALXForward> for community feedback via a comment form <https://www.research.net/r/AlexandriaVA-ALXForward> available on the webpage.
FISCAL IMPACT: None.
ATTACHMENTS:
Attachment 1: DRAFT ALX Forward: A Strategic Framework for Economic Growth
STAFF:
Elizabeth Bolton, Director of Communications, Alexandria Economic Development Partnership
Ebony Fleming, Director, Office of Communications and Community Engagement
Julian Gonsalves, Strategic Projects and P3 Director
Stephanie Landrum, President and CEO, Alexandria Economic Development Partnership
Marian Marquez, Senior Vice President, Alexandria Economic Development Partnership