Alexandria City Council Approves New Hires, Budget Amendment

At the Alexandria City Council meeting last night, the council voted to authorize the 2022 – 23 major budget amendment as well as approve new hires.  ABC 31 News’ Joel Massey has more.

City Council President Lee Rubin said, “I was very happy to be elected president at our last meeting looking forward to working with all the council members and the administration.  I had several conversations with not only the mayor but all the members of the administration and members of the council.  I’m looking forward to a very productive year.”

Alexandria Councilman-at-Large Lee Rubin is the new city council president.  He talks about the biggest problem he feels is facing the city.

“The crime situation which is a nationwide problem, but we’ve got to worry about Alexandria and we’ve got to take care of it and so that’s number one.

The newest council member is District 2 Councilman Gary Johnson.  He says community policing is a solution to help combat crime in the city.

Johnson said, “We still have crime.  That’s still an issue we had some shootings last few weeks.  So working with the administration to get community policing that’s our biggest issue now.”

Rubin says the city’s utility department has finally returned to 30-day billing cycles following the security breach that wreaked havoc to the system.

“We’ve gone back to 30-day billing.  So that problem is being worked on.  Next week you’ll see the mayor and administration will start putting out specific information on that plan.”

The council approved several of the mayor’s appointees to fill various city positions.

“We made a motion to approve them.  It went through committee.  The final approval will come at the next meeting, so it was introduced and put into committee tonight and I think there’s a tremendous group of qualified individuals to fill the different jobs that are needed to be done.”

The council also authorized the 2022-23 major budget amendment.

“We’re six months into the year, we basically go through the budget we try to move funds around where we have excess funds in some areas, and we have shortages in other areas we’ll take those funds and move from one spot to the other in order to maintain our balanced budget.”