Last night, Georgetown administrators and neighbors gathered before the D.C. Zoning Commission to discuss the 2010 campus plan for the final time as the University, ANC 2E, and neighborhood groups submitted a revised version of the original campus plan that they hammered out last month. The commission voted 3-0 with one abstaining to accept the proposal in its entirety.

After the Zoning Commission voted last February to postpone any decision on the campus plan until the parties reached an agreement, neighbors and administrators restarted negotiations. The commissioners were highly pleased with the result. “We don’t always get the results we would like to see, and, in this case, I feel like we got everything and more,” Commissioner Peter May said. “And so I really am very, very happy with this result.” The other commissioners agreed: “I think that what’s happened in this case is no less than exceptional,” commissioner Michael Turnbull said. “To see Georgetown and the neighborhood come together like this is just wonderful.

The room erupted in cheers after the commission voted without opposition to approve the agreement, and Georgetown administrators joined in the sentiment. “What this process has made clear is that there is great strategic advantage for the University to align ourselves with the city,” University spokeswoman Stacy Kerr said. “I think you’re going to see from this a lot of opportunities for us to find new ways to engage deeper with the city and engage beyond just Northwest D.C. and beyond that historical 37th and O street. And, really over the long term, we see that as… [an opportunity] to strengthen the residential undergraduate experience at 37th and O street.”

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At 6 p.m. on Monday evening, GUSA held the first-ever conference-call town hall, providing students with the opportunity to voice their concerns and ask questions on the recent campus plan agreement. In an effort to make up for the lack of student representation in campus plan negotiations, GUSA President Clara Gustafson (SFS ’13) and Vice President Vail Kohnert-Yount (SFS ’13) organized the discussion as a formal way to provide information to students about the effects of the plan on student life. Gustafson began by introducing President John J. DeGioia, followed by remarks by Vice-President of Student Affairs Todd Olson. After a brief presentation, students were asked for their questions. Here are the highlights.

DeGioia: The undergraduate program will stay on the main campus. We learned of the long-term plans for Georgetown to build a satellite campus from the agreement last week. According to the documents, the University will locate at least 1,000 students in the School of Continuing Studies at one or more satellite locations “not within the zip code 20007” by the start of 2014. It was unclear,  however, whether undergraduates would eventually be housed or take classes at another location. DeGioia explained that, for Georgetown to grow, it would need to expand past the main campus, but he emphasized that the main campus would be the locus for undergraduate life at Georgetown. “We believe that our undergraduate experience best can take place on this historic campus,” he said. “Our vision prioritizes development of an enhanced living-and-learning campus focused on undergraduates on the main campus, on this plot of ground.”

Olson: New noise rule not a radical departure. According to the campus plan agreement, the University will adopt a policy for off-campus conduct by fall 2013, which adheres to the standard that if noise can be heard across the property line, it’s too loud. Olson, however, said that he regards the new policy more as a change in specificity more than in substance, saying that both the new policy and the current one are based on principles of being respectable neighbors. He noted that George Washington University has the same standard.

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On Wednesday, at the Citizens Association of Georgetown’s meeting, Mayor Vincent Gray hinted that an agreement has been reached between neighbors and the University over the campus plan. At the meeting, the mayor said, “We’re 95% to getting this solved,” according to the Georgetown Dish.

But, as we all know, it ain’t over till it’s over.

On April 2, the University and neighborhood groups announced that negotiations for the 2010-2020 GU Campus Plan would restart. ANC2E chair Ron Lewis said that no reports would be issued from the meetings to allow them to be “conducted as candidly as possible.” So far, the meetings have been carrying on behind closed doors.

University spokesperson Stacy Kerr expressed a positive sentiment about the negotiations that took place during the past few weeks. Vox is still waiting for an official response.

The meetings remain private; an agreement at this point is speculation. “It is my understanding, though, that Mayor Gray is right to say that the talks are moving in the right direction. I am certainly looking forward to a resolution of the campus plan controversy and continue to hope that whatever agreement is reached will be one that advances the interests of undergraduate students,” ANC Commissioner Jake Sticka (COL ’13) said in an email to Vox.

Check back for updates after the ANC 2E’s meeting on Monday.

Tonight, Georgetown University, Advisory Neighborhood Commission 2E, Citizens Association of Georgetown, and the Burleith Citizens Association announced they would restart negotiations about the 2010-2020 Georgetown University campus plan. They also requested that the Zoning Commission postpone its filing deadlines and an upcoming hearing to allow the negotiations to unfold.

The parties announced their decision at tonight’s public meeting of ANC2E, where Chair Ron Lewis said, “Today we, together, have filed a letter with the Zoning Commission requesting that they postpone the filing deadline on the 12th [of April] and on the 19th [of April] and then the hearing afterwards for 60 days so we can explore the possibility of reaching common ground in our talks about the campus plan.”

This decision comes after Zoning Commissioner Anthony Hood suggested at the February 9 hearing that university administrators meet regularly with community leaders to resolve the objectionable impacts of students. At the hearing, the Zoning Commission said that all parties must file documents commenting on the efficacy of the university’s mitigation efforts by April 12 and 19. The 60-day extension would move the deadlines to June 11 and 18 with the small-scope hearing moved to June 25.

Georgetown University Director of Media Relations Rachel Pugh issued the following statement:

At the last DC Zoning Commission hearing on February 9, all parties in our campus plan process – the university, our neighbors and the city – were asked to continue to work together to work toward agreement. Over the past six weeks we have been engaged in extensive work towards this goal, meeting with city and neighborhood leaders. This approach reflects our continued efforts to seek common ground and to engage with city and neighborhood leaders. Joining with our neighbors in requesting an extension is a meaningful sign of progress in a long process. We are pleased that the result of our work together over the last six weeks is a mutual agreement that it is in our best interest as a community to work together and with the city to find common ground.

Lewis added at the meeting that no reports would be issued from the negotiations.

“We can have better conversations if they can be conducted as candidly as possible,” he said.

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At an event hosted by DC Students Speak last night, D.C. Councilmember Tommy Wells (D-Ward 6) addressed approximately twenty students about a variety of issues facing the District and the Council, including Georgetown University’s 2010 campus plan, the use of RFK Stadium, and ethics reform.

While he spent most of the evening addressing District issues, Wells also discussed the vitriol that has defined the 2010 campus plan process. After lauding DC Students Speak for getting students involved in local politics, he compared the campus plan processes at Georgetown University and George Washington University. While GWU has an aggressive building plan that neighbors have sometimes disliked, its campus plan approval has not been a difficult fight. Wells credits this to the make-up of their leadership and their engagement with the community. ”GW has local influential people on their Board of Trustees,” Wells pointed out. GWU also employed a communications firm to interact with neighborhood groups to ease the process.

Wells contrasted this success story with Georgetown’s own efforts:

Georgetown did everything internally, and their board is not a board of local civic leaders, so they were isolated when they came out, so there wasn’t really a counterpunch to the neighbors that said, we don’t like this, guys. There wasn’t other neighbors or other influential folks to stand up and say, well we can compromise but we’re not going to give up our campus plan. There wasn’t effective pushback and the groundwork was not done.

Wells also relayed a lovely anecdote of his own interaction with the Office of Planning, which had recommended last year that Georgetown be mandated to house all of its undergraduates on campus offer housing (on or off-campus) to 100% of its undergraduate population by 2016 if it wanted to maintain its current enrollment cap:

I asked the person who’s head of the Office of Planning, why did you say Georgetown needs to do this—this isn’t realistic, no other universities are being asked to do this in terms of the number of students to be housed on campus and she essentially said, we just don’t like their attitude. And I said, well you don’t get to have that opinion, this is about planning. You can’t change based on attitude.

Wells’ take on luring the Redskins into the District, ethics reform, and Kwame Brown’s Lincoln Navigator after the jump…

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On Wednesday evening, President John DeGioia held his biannual conversation with campus media. Over the hour-long discussion, DeGioia discussed a wide variety of subjects, including the capital campaign, the campus plan, campus safety, Georgetown’s major construction projects, diversity initiatives, and the University’s international programs. Next week, the Voice will offer complete analysis of President DeGioia’s press conference.

Before taking questions, the president reflected on the broad themes of his fall semester:

“It was a great fall, I just think we had a terrific fall. For me, it was kind of driven by a couple of big things. We had to launch the public phase of the campaign. That was really quite an extraordinary weekend for us. It was us at our best and I was glad we were able to have such an inclusive experience with so many, including the big tent on the front lawn. Our fundraising success has continued very well, we’re over the halfway mark in the campaign, at the halfway mark. We feel very encouraged by the generosity of our community. We’re just going to keep at it, our highest priority is scholarships, support for financial aid. Given the challenging nature of the economy I don’t think we could have a more important priority- that priority emerged over roughly 8 years of planning going back to 2003, but certainly characterized all of the years of our quiet phase- that was our most dominant priority. We actually went out publicly with that priority in the quiet phase in a series of town halls across the country, where I talked about what we call the 1789 Scholarship Imperative, which is our way of characterizing the financial aid piece.

I think there were other issues that dominated my time- the relationship with the community and our engagement in the city was part of that. This is our cycle, to submit our campus plan and we’ve completed our public hearing on November 17th. And we have our final filing of documents this Friday, and on February 9th we have a read-out from the Board of Zoning where they think they’re going to come down in terms of the conditions for Georgetown, and we’ll expect some time later this spring, maybe mid-April, maybe May, that will be our expectation that we’ll get a written report, and that will give us a sense of the position of the Board of Zoning. But I think as you know, this was a three-year effort, but also really it’s not a episodic experience, it really is a full immersion for ten years with deep engagement with the community and lots of conversation. It just becomes particularly focused in roughly the final two years of that ten-year period where you deeply engage in the formal submission of documents to various city agencies and the like. So we went through that.

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Last night in Healy Hall, administrators, neighborhood residents and community leaders gathered for the university’s twelfth annual holiday reception with Georgetown’s neighbors. Notable attendees this year were University President John J. DeGioia, D.C. Assistant Police Chief Patrick Burke, ANC commissioner Ron Lewis, City Councilmember Tommy Wells (D-Ward 6), and after an hour filled with anticipation and regular updates on his progress down the Whitehurst Freeway, the real star, D.C. Mayor Vincent Gray.

With the 2010 campus plan still up in the air, the reception was held with the hopes of a more productive future for University-neighborhood relations. DeGioia kicked off the gathering, deeming it “one of the great events of the holiday season.” He thanked the many community leaders for their presence at the reception.

“I know there are many challenges that we’ve faced together,” DeGioia said. “I am grateful for the fact that we can all come together like this…and work together to ensure a better future for our neighborhood and for this city.”

Mayor Gray’s late arrival lent more holiday cheer to the evening.

Though realistic, the Mayor’s assessment of the campus plan negotiations remained hopeful. “It’s been—I don’t know if I want to say delightful—it’s been interesting working with the University on the campus plan,” Gray said, as the audience laughed. “But I think we’re going to get there. It’s wonderful to be able to walk in this room during the holiday season and see members of the ANC and members of the community here as part of the Georgetown community. That shows me that we are really going to get to a conclusion.”

Gray pointed to the significant progress made so far (“I think we’ve already had 723 hearings,” he quipped to laughter) and said a successful conclusion was in sight.

Gray ended his speech with a call to action. “There are so many problems that are insoluble, and many times the government, despite how many employees we have, just doesn’t have the resources to be able to address those issues….I ask you to work together in the spirit of one city to continue to make this the absolute greatest city in the United States and in the world.”

Photo: Tim Markatos

If you ask just about anybody who’s been following the campus plan debacle (if you read this blog, we’re willing to bet that you’re one of them) to sum up the process in a word, you’re going to get a variety of not-so-nice answers. So when Georgetown resident and University alum Jacques Arsenault (COL ’01, GPPI ’07) posted yesterday on Greater Greater Washington saying that planning between the school and its neighbors can be more constructive, we all thought that was a pretty gross understatement.

But Arsenault’s post goes deeper than just pointing out the glaringly obvious. He takes a position about students in the area that we haven’t really heard from those neighbors who have vocalized their opinions about the campus plan—that, for the most part, having us around makes Georgetown better.

“The opponents’ position suggests that the very presence of students in the neighborhood is an insurmountable problem,” Arsenault writes. “This ignores the many positives that students bring to the community … My wife and I feel safe walking home at night knowing there are other people walking about. Without the presence of so many students in the neighborhood the streets would be emptier, and would feel darker and less safe.”

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Tomorrow is the culmination of the approval process for Georgetown’s 2010-2020 campus plan. Or, at least it’s supposed to be the finale, but there is a good chance the plan will be dragged to court by one party of another like during the 2000-2010 approval process. Basically we are certain that the seventh zoning commission hearing is happening tomorrow. Here’s Vox‘s predictions of how it will go down:

The university will play the good-neighbor card

Vox predicts that the university’s tactics will be three-fold. First the university will flaunt its eleventh hour initiatives in front of the zoning commission. The university has been performing its look-how-much-we-care-about-our-neighbors’-well-being dance directly for the benefit of the zoning commission because God knows the community won’t be won over. This might not be the university’s primary argument, but it will get a mention. Now there is the possibility that the zoning commission will question the university’s motives on the eleventh hour initiatives, but that won’t go beyond speculation (and Vox doubts Chairman Anthony Hood will tolerate that).

The second organization the university aims to impress (and already did impress) is the District Department of Transportation. In their June filing, DDOT opted to not support the campus plan for various issues including an incomplete traffic report. DDOT made a series of recommendations, including the M Street Shuttle, to which the university acquiesced. And it worked. Earlier this month, DDOT filed again, rescinding their opposition on certain conditions (that the university continue to provide data on traffic patterns, basically). DDOT seeing no objection is a serious win for the university, and Maureen Dwyer, Georgetown’s lawyer, will undoubtedly bring this up.

Third, the university will try to put a muzzle on the neighbors to keep them from yapping. The university filed a request to have the community groups/ANC’s recent filings be dismissed on the grounds that, in June, the commission closed the record to everything not regarding transportation. The neighbors disagreed with the university’s interpretation of the closing of the record in a rebuttal filing. This should play out early on in the proceeding. If the neighbors are allowed to testify, the university will most likely try to discredit them with some conflicting evidence. For instance, Rocky’s reports contradicts one of the neighbor’s testimonies about the number of parties on a weekend and some vandalized flower pots on 36th street.

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