City Council Work Session

Melissa Shinaberryclerkby voiceOkay. Our last item is a discussion. the city of fairfax 2026 legislative program when recognized melanie zip or acting city manager for the discussion good

Melanie Zippstaffevening mayor and council while melissa pulls up the presentation i will say that this is our first stab at the legislative program for 2026 i have a legislative liaison regional meeting on friday everybody is waiting until the results for tonight and a lot of sand will be shifting once all of that comes to light what what happened tonight so as we go through this I'm not going to go through the entire plan you'll see that there's a lot of strike throughs and additions when I bring it back to you for the public hearing it will be a much cleaner and will include the regional positions that I have received from my counterparts in the region so if we can go to the first slide sorry just to give everybody awareness you all obviously know this our citizenry may

not our delegation for the city of Fairfax is Senator Saddam Salim for the 37th district and our house delegate is David Bulova for the 11th district and the way that we build our plan is using the council goals the values that staff has created and then our strategic plan any regional projects and programs that are going forward and then obviously input from next slide all of our stakeholders partners owners um vml Virginia Municipal League their legislative program we usually incorporate that into ours Fairfax County we lean heavily on Fairfax County because we contract with Fairfax County for majority of our human services our library our jails and other programming our schools obviously so a lot of those sections of our plan come from fairfax county because we want

that they give to local police departments so it's not it's not equal and then of course all of the unfunded mandates that come from the state without funding and are we are required we or our partners are required to fulfill. So FY26 legislative program items for discussion. These are items that over the past several months, somebody on council has brought up as wanting it to be a legislative item or they're items that we have had previously and would like to, at a staff level, pushing forward the charter amendments will go in our legislative program they have not been forwarded to the state because the pre-filing doesn't open until November 17th once that opens then we will send our resolution down requesting that our charter changes to be added

for your first look i will have my regional meeting on friday november 18th we will hold the public hearing on the 26th legislative program hopefully hear some feedback from the citizens on priorities that they would like in the program december 1st is the moment when all draft legislation needs to be pre-filed with the Department of Legislative Services the only the only code language that we have currently is our charter amendments they will be pre-filed so that that that is is done if there are specific state code language changes that we would like I will need to know that probably by the November 18th meeting so that we can get that down ahead of time and get them to start working on that process it then comes back and we get to edit

December 7th December 2nd we'll have a work session on the proposed legislative program especially if you have a lot of input and changes you would like If there aren't a lot of changes after the public hearing, then we can cancel that work session if needed. And then December, I'm sorry, that's supposed to be December 9th, is when we will ask council to consider the legislative program for 2026 to be approved and sent down to the General Assembly. January 14th begins the 26th long session which is 60 days as most of you heard there will most likely be over the 3,000 pieces of legislation that they will go through it is a fast-paced process that they work through but that is when it starts any questions or additions