The Alexandria City Council voted Tuesday to push back to September any further discussion of the hotly contested waterfront plan.
It would be more productive to have a public hearing after the council’s summer break rather than trying to cram it into the city’s tight end-of-June schedule, council members said.
“I felt after Saturday[‘s work session], we were really at a stalemate,” councilwoman Redella Pepper said.
The current plan has been widely protested by residents hoping for more park space rather than hotels on the waterfront.
Mayor Bill Euille said the city would hold the public hearing in September and would hope to vote “sometime before the next decade,” eliciting laughter from his audience. The city has spent several years working on the $50 million plan.
Pepper said she would like to see “floating zones,” a new idea for designing the zoning rules associated with the plan, discussed over the summer.
Citizens for an Alternative Waterfront Plan wrote to the mayor Tuesday decrying “floating zones,” which it said would allow the city to circumvent an open planning process. The group asked to extend planning into the fall to allow for more review and discussion.
