Arlington County's Draft Guiding Principles

Guiding Principle statement: Ensure Arlington fosters economic resilience and community prosperity by promoting innovative and market-responsive growth, supporting diverse businesses, and offering equitable access to essential services and amenities.  

Supporting Statements:

• Value‑Aligned and Fiscally Responsible Growth: Guide public and private investments that reflect adopted plans and policies and advance community values and priorities, while maintaining quality and responsible stewardship of public resources.

• Economic Diversification and Investment: Foster long‑term economic strength and diversification that supports business investment, retention, and expansion, and promotes thriving mixed-use places, anchored by arts, culture, tourism, and community‑serving institutions.
  

• Inclusive Entrepreneurship and Business Ecosystem: Enable inclusive entrepreneurship and small‑business success by reducing barriers to entry and growth and by offering access to new networks and opportunities so small businesses can thrive.

• Flexibility and Commercial Resilience: Enable flexibility in changing market conditions through dynamic, market‑responsive land use policies and regulations that support adaptive reuse and strengthen the vitality and resilience of commercial corridors.

• Workforce Opportunity and Economic Mobility: Advance economic mobility and strengthen talent pipelines through access to life-long education and training opportunities that match jobs and skills in evolving industries and technologies.

• Household Stability and Wealth‑Building: Promote planning, policies, and accessible supportive services that strengthen household stability, enable wealth‑building, enhance homeownership pathways, and reduce barriers to workforce participation.

• Social Infrastructure and Preparedness: Protect livelihoods and wellbeing and prevent long term economic loss and service disruption through strong social infrastructure, climate resilience, emergency preparedness, and reliable essential services.

Guiding Principle Statement: Ensure Arlington supports a healthy lifestyle and strengthens protections for everyone through equitable access to healthy food, essential services, recreation, trusted public safety and emergency response teams, safe transportation options, and reliable infrastructure and information resources.

Supporting Statements:

• Healthy Living: Remove barriers to healthy living by reducing food insecurity, closing service gaps for the most vulnerable groups, and ensuring access to healthy food choices, stable housing, healthcare facilities, and supportive services such as aging and childcare services for all community members.

• Community Wellbeing: Support wellbeing and behavioral health for all by providing public spaces, parks, and programs that promote active lifestyles, strengthen social connection, and reduce isolation. 

• Safe and Convenient Transportation: Create safe, comfortable, people-centered streets that accommodate all ages and abilities while eliminating transportation related deaths and serious injuries.

• Healthy and Accessible Built Environment: Provide accessible, affordable, and adaptive housing that supports community integration for people with disabilities and enables aging in place through universal design, multigenerational living, supportive care systems, and assisted living arrangements.

• Public Safety and Emergency Response: Provide quality public safety facilities, fire protection, community policing, and trusted emergency response to meet crisis situation needs, with a focus on protecting vulnerable individuals and communities.

• Safe, Reliable, and Resilient Critical Infrastructure: Maintain resilient critical infrastructure that provides safe and reliable drinking water, fire flow, stormwater, wastewater, energy and transportation systems. 

•  Health Data and Continuous Improvement: Foster a community committed to health and wellbeing through education and reporting on health metrics to guide equitable planning and investments and close service gaps.

Guiding Principle Statement: Ensure Arlington is a diverse, accessible, and welcoming community for all, free from all forms of discrimination, while integrating equity across all County work.

Supporting Statements:

•  Inclusive Culture, Identity, and Heritage: Strengthen and celebrate diverse communities and values by recognizing, preserving, and uplifting cultural resources and local heritage assets.

• Economic Opportunity and Mobility: Support workforce diversity and an inclusive economy that enables small business success, promotes education, job training, employment, and career advancement, and empowers long‑term generational wealth‑building and homeownership opportunities.

• Equitable and Accountable Distribution of Resources: Document historic and current harms and disparities to ensure equitable distribution of resources, and train staff on integrating the Equitable Development Principles into their work.

• Accessible Housing, Services, and Basic Needs: Provide equitable access to housing and other basic needs and services, including multimodal transportation options, education, healthcare, childcare, food and nutrition resources, aging and disability support, recreation, and other social services that meet diverse community needs.

• Diverse and Meaningful Engagement: Ensure planning, budgeting, and other decision‑making processes follow public engagement best practices for equitable, inclusive, and accessible participation where residents, including historically marginalized groups, collaborate and share a sense of ownership and purpose in community life.

• Avoiding Displacement of Vulnerable Communities: Prioritize stabilizing residents and small businesses most vulnerable to market pressures, historic inequities, and environmental risks, so they can remain and thrive in the community as development and change occurs.

Guiding Principle Statement: Ensure Arlington supports the community’s current and emerging needs through future-ready infrastructure and public facilities, technological innovation, and accountable stewardship of public resources.

Supporting Statements:

•  Emergency and Essential Services Readiness: Align public facilities and emergency response services with anticipated growth, and modernize aging systems, while investing in clean and renewable energy, backup systems, climate resilient and future-ready infrastructure and technology.

• Technology and Innovation: Ensure that technology infrastructure is accessible, reliable, secure, scalable, equitably distributed, and supports innovation to improve efficiency and respond to changing community and market needs.

• Educational Facilities: Plan for schools, educational spaces, and alternative learning environments to meet projected student enrollment and learning needs.  

• Workforce Readiness and Access: Plan for and provide accessible, technology‑enabled spaces and public facilities that support learning, innovation, entrepreneurship, and future‑ready workforce and industries, while fostering career opportunities in green and technology‑driven sectors.

• Accountable Stewardship of Public Facilities and Infrastructure: Coordinate long-range planning, siting, and co-location of public facilities and infrastructure to maximize community outcomes, reduce costs, ensure lifecycle stewardship, and align investments with land use decisions and community growth.

Guiding Principle Statement: Ensure everyone can thrive in high-quality, accessible, and affordable live-work-learn-play spaces that support wellbeing and integrate Arlington’s urban and natural environments through thoughtful planning and design, coordinated infrastructure, and public services and programs.

Supporting Statements:

• World Class Placemaking and Urban Design: Create high‑quality spaces through visually appealing architecture, biophilic design, and culturally responsive public art that value and reflect the unique needs of Arlington’s diverse communities and neighborhoods.

• Housing that Meets Community Needs: Grow Arlington’s overall housing supply, including more affordable and accessible options throughout the County, while reducing systemic barriers to housing access.

• Walkable, Accessible, and Well-Connected Spaces: Create human scaled, well-connected public spaces that meet accessibility standards, support mixed uses, and offer walkability to daily needs, access to nature, and multimodal transportation options across the County.

• Quality Public Amenities, Services, and Infrastructure: Provide and maintain reliable, resilient, accessible, and equitably located public facilities and infrastructure to meet current and future community needs.

• Rich Cultural Heritage & Identity: Strengthen Arlington’s identity by protecting historic resources, highlighting cultural heritage and locally inspired architecture, urban design, and art to shape a public realm that reflects the County’s diverse community stories and character.

Guiding Principle Statement: Ensure Arlington collaborates with regional, state, and federal partners on matters affecting the County to achieve mutual benefit without compromising local autonomy.

Supporting Statements:

• Partnerships and Data Sharing: Build and sustain regional partnerships that support coordinated data systems, secure information sharing, and best‑practice learning to strengthen cross‑jurisdictional policies, meet regional commitments, improve public services, and advance equitable development goals.

• Transportation Planning and Services: Promote comfortable and consistent travel experiences by coordinating transportation planning, enhancing regional transit systems, and partnering on transportation demand management efforts.

• Environmental Coordination: Coordinate environmental resilience planning and climate action efforts, including protecting natural resources, advancing green infrastructure and flood resilience, and expanding renewable and clean energy resources.

• Economic and Workforce Collaboration: Coordinate with government, industry, and higher education to strengthen regional competitiveness, attract value‑aligned industries, and expand education‑to‑employment career pathways.

• Public Safety and Emergency Management: Formalize and strengthen interjurisdictional public safety partnerships and mutual aid structures and implement unified emergency planning and readiness frameworks.

• Cooperative Growth and Land Use Planning: Coordinate regional land use planning and cross‑border collaboration in the Metropolitan Washington region to advance goals, such as housing targets aligned with economic and employment forecasts, while supporting value-aligned development and best practices.

Guiding Principle Statement: Ensure a sustainable and environmentally just community with equitable access to clean air, water, and healthy places so nature and people can thrive together, now and for generations to come.

Supporting Statements:

• Environmental Justice and Stewardship: Remediate cumulative environmental burdens, especially in higher‑vulnerability areas, and promote environmental stewardship across planning, policies, education, operations, and budgets to meet adopted climate action targets and environmental commitments.

• Protecting and Restoring Natural Ecosystems: Safeguard, restore, and enhance Arlington’s natural ecosystems to support clean air and water, promote biodiversity and long-term environmental health. 

• Access to Clean Air and Water, Nature and Shade: Ensure equitable access to clean air and water, parks, natural spaces, and shaded areas to support public health and wellbeing. 

• Tree Canopy and Biodiversity: Reach and sustain countywide tree canopy goals, support biodiversity and ecological resilience, and prioritize diverse native landscapes tailored to local conditions and ecological contexts. 

• Biophilic and Green Infrastructure: Advance and equitably distribute nature-based design and green infrastructure across public and private spaces to enhance access to nature, improve health outcomes, reduce environmental impacts, and strengthen ecosystems.

• Climate Resilience and Adaptation: Prioritize climate action efforts, including flood resilience and addressing urban heat island effect, through targeted investment, planning, and environmental protection efforts especially in communities vulnerable to environmental risks.

• Clean and Renewable Energy: Expand clean, efficient, and renewable energy resources by advancing on‑site solutions, and where that is not possible, supporting access to off‑site solutions.