For most of its history since the early 1800s, the City of Alexandria had neighborhood-based representation on its city council.
Now, a bipartisan coalition of residents is calling for a return to that type of government, arguing that ward representation would foster better service and accountability to residents.
The group, called For Wards, is asking current city council and mayoral members and candidates to sign a statement declaring their support returning Alexandria to ward representation.
“Neighborhoods deserve to have a voice. This is not rocket science,” said longtime Old Town resident Michael Maibach, who is helping lead the charge with the bipartisan group. The group’s unofficial slogan is “No taxation without Neighborhood representation.”
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‘When Everyone’s Responsible, Nobody’s Responsible’
Right now, Alexandria’s city council elections are at-large and city council candidates can live anywhere in the city. While some residents argue that this allows them to choose from the best and brightest candidates across the city, others say at-large representation is a disservice to residents in certain neighborhoods.
A large part of the reason Alexandria moved to an at-large system in 1950 was to intentionally limit minority voices. The move, after nearly 150 years of ward representation, was part of widespread resistance to school desegregation to ensure fewer voices from minority neighborhoods.
The change back to wards would make campaigns more personal, the group argues. Further, they say, a ward system could create more transparency and better accountability at the ballot box.
With six wards, each council member would represent just 28,333 people instead of each council member trying to represent 170,000 — the entire population of the city, including children.
Maibach recalled a time when he first moved to Old Town about 24 years ago. There was an issue with his garbage collection, so he called City Hall to find out how to contact his neighborhood’s city council representative. The person on the other end of the phone gave him all six council members and the mayor.
He ended up calling the city’s trash department.
“When everybody’s responsible, nobody’s responsible,” he said.
A Set Precedent
Many other cities have ward systems, including Richmond, Newport News, Virginia Beach and Norfolk. Even the Alexandria City Public Schools board is ward-based.
In addition, history is on the side of a ward-based system here in Alexandria. From 1804 to 1950 — except for a 10-year period from 1921 to 1931 — Alexandria had four to six wards.
Alexandria’s first city government was bicameral, with a city council and a board of aldermen, both were elected at-large with voting in February.
Alexandria’s first ward system started in 1804 and lasted through 1952, with 16 elected officials from four wards (map below).
City of Alexandria
Alexandria's Ward map from 1804, with wards labeled by For Wards.
Alexandria returned to a bicameral system from 1852 to 1921 but retained its four wards. The City returned to at-large elections for 10 years following World War I, and then went back to a ward system (with six wards in the growing city) from 1932 to 1950.
Becoming a One-Party City
The For Wards pledge only advocates for returning to a ward-based system, but Maibach said ultimately he would love to see Alexandria return its city elections to the spring.
“There are so many voters that vote in November because of the governor or U.S. Senate or Congress or president, and they just vote straight-party tickets. But they don’t know these people, they just vote for them,” Maibach lamented.
Since local offices are partisan and most city residents are Democrats, this effectively discourages most Republicans and Independents from running for local office in Alexandria, he said.
“I don’t care what party you’re in, it’s not healthy to have one choice,” Maibach said.
However, moving the election back to May is impossible now, as the Virginia General Assembly recently passed a law that moves all remaining local spring elections to November.
If it was possible, moving elections back to the spring would make it likely that far fewer residents would vote in city elections.
That’s exactly what was happening Alexandria until 2012, when Alexandria city elections were held in the spring.
Keeping local elections separate on the calendar from state or presidential elections was affirmed in 2007, when Alexandria’s then-Mayor Bill Euille stood up an Alexandria Election Process Review Committee of nine bipartisan members. (The committee is often referred to as the Euille Commission.) The nine members decided that the city council elections should not be moved to November, particularly if they coincided with presidential elections. The reason was in part to ensure those who cast ballots in local elections were truly interested in the issues at hand.
But participation in local elections had reached an all-time low. By 2008, Euille and Justin Wilson, who was a council member at the time, were advocating to move elections to November to increase participation.
“The basic premise was that between 1976 and 2009, the turnout for the City's municipal elections dropped from 41 percent to 15 percent,” said now-Mayor Justin Wilson. “Of those that did turn out, they were primarily homeowners, primarily white and primarily from the East End of the City, which left out wide swaths of our population from participating in the selection of our government.”
In 2009, a close election resulted in then-council members Wilson and Tim Lovain being voted off of city council — beaten by Independent Alicia Hughes and Republican Frank Fannon.
Shortly after that May 2009 election, Wilson and Lovain filed a resolution to move city elections from May to November for the first time in the city’s history, arguing that more people would participate. The city council took up the matter and voted 5 – 2 to move elections to November.
The first November elections were in 2012, and Wilson and Lovain regained their city council seats. Hughes and Fannon were not reelected.
Since then, few Republicans and Independents have gotten elected to city council, but participation in elections has rebounded. In the 2018 city council and mayor election, which coincided with mid-term elections for Congress, more than half of Alexandria’s eligible voters cast ballots.
