Last week, neighborhood groups and the University announced the restart of negotiations over 2010 Campus Plan, asking the Zoning Commission to postpone their hearings on the matter to allow the new round of talks to proceed.

An exasperated Steven sees the process extending into the next calendar year:

It’s literally going to be 2013 before we approve a plan that was supposed to affect what we did in 2010.

typical asked the question that immediately came to Vox‘s inflatables-obsessed mind. And the answer is no:

does this mean we can have georgetown day back?

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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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This week, the Advisory Neighborhood Commission[PDF] and the Burleith Citizens Association/Citizen’s Association of Georgetown[PDF] filed their final responses to the University’s latest appeasement efforts with the Zoning Commission. And nothing’s changed. All three organizations want all students on campus, and all of the University’s actions have been nothing but ineffective posturing. But let’s jump into the interesting parts of their monstrous filings.

• First Vox is going to question the legality of the ANC’s filing. A resolution affirming this filing on behalf of the ANC 2E was not adopted at a public meeting, and Commissioner Jake Sticka (COL ’13) told Vox that Georgetown Metropolitan’s post was the first he saw of this. This was probably written by Commissioners Jeff Jones, Ron Lewis, and Ed Solomon (who included personal testimonies at the end). This wouldn’t be the first time certain ANC2E commissioners engaged in some misrepresentation of authorship.

• The BCA/CAG filing has multimedia by our favorite wanna-be paparazzi Stephen R. Brown, who included a youtube video of a student house in Burleith. Although still creepy as ever, Vox is happy he is expanding his artistic horizons. Maybe next he’ll shoot in 3D. Surroundsound? 60FPS?

• Not only have Georgetown’s efforts been ineffective, but they’ve actually made the problem worse! “The GU trash collection efforts (1.5 tons of trash per day, according to GU!) has [sic] perversely lead to even greater student disregard for trash collection times and container requirements.”

Also, those reimbursable details the University is paying for? They don’t just ignore the problem houses, but their very employment by the University means they can’t be hired by BCA/CAG. “This situation recently lead CAG to terminate its own reimbursable detail and rely instead on patrols by private security officers.” The ANC adds on that “moreover, the officers know they are sponsored and paid by GU, an institution that has demonstrated a disturbing lack of enthusiasm for effective MPD enforcement against student misconduct and noise.”

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Last night’s ANC2E meeting had a higher attendance than was usual, due to a visit by D.C. Mayor Vincent Gray. “We’ve had a standing invitation for months,” said Commissioner Ron Lewis, and it happened that last night’s meeting fit Gray’s schedule. By the start of the meeting, all of the seats in seats were filled, a sizable group of people stood in the back.

Mayor Gray took the podium to a loud round of applause after being introduced by Councilmember Jack Evans. The Mayor thanked Evans, and quickly remarked on the “Taxation Without Representation” sticker on the laptop of Commissioner Jake Sticka. Gray went on to reiterate his stance on Georgetown’s 2010 Campus Plan. “I support the community,” he said, followed by applause from the attendees.

Mayor Gray then described his four priorities in detail—fiscal stability, commitment to education, safety, and turning around unemployment in the District.

For the city’s budget for the 2012 fiscal year, Gray stated his desire to build a budget with “structural integrity.” “We won’t spend any more money then we take in,” he said.

As for education, Gray described how he supported universal pre-K services and made Washington, D.C. the only city in the country with them available. He wishes to extend the program to infants and toddlers. “If I could get a fetus into a program, I would,” he said.

Gray wishes to hire 300 new police officers this year to both replace an estimated 180 officers who will leave, and add an additional 120 officers to the force. He added that homicides were down 17% in the District, and were on track to be at a 42-year low.

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Just like last year, Vox is helping you get on top of “news you can use” with an excessively comprehensive review of last year’s important news stories. Today, we cover the off-campus issues that made headlines; noise, cronyism, and cannabis come after the jump.

We’ve got the campus plan blues

Every ten years, Georgetown must submit a campus plan to the D.C. Zoning Commission detailing proposed construction and land-use on its property.

Before the Zoning Commission approves the plan, it must hold hearings where civic associations in nearby Burleith, West Georgetown, and Foxhall Village can air their many grievances.

Neighborhood associations are irate [PDF] because some Georgetown students are loud and drunken. If the Zoning Commission doesn’t force us on-campus, they say, the neighborhood will become a “student ghetto.” To support this cause, which has gained the endorsement of several D.C. councilmembers, they are putting up yard signs, forming coalitions, and speaking out in public forums.

These activists also have recourse to a unique form of hyper-local government called the advisory neighborhood commission. There are 38 ANC’s throughout the city that provide official community input on everything from liquor licenses to traffic and land-use planning. In keeping with its history, Georgetown and Burleith’s ANC 2E opposes the 2010 Campus Plan. Because of clever gerrymandering of the dorms, there is only one student commissioner, Jake Sticka (COL ’13), on that commission.

The University, for its part, has tried reaching out to neighbors and stumping for support across the city. Georgetown has also ceded to several neighborhood demands, from scrapping graduate housing just off-campus to turning the Leavey Center Hotel into a dorm, in hopes of winning the endorsement of city agencies.

The D.C. Office of Planning didn’t return the love; they recommended a hard cap on undergraduate admissions and 100-percent on-campus residency. The Zoning Commission is due to issue its ruling in November. Depending on the verdict, neighborhood groups or the University will petition the D.C. Court of Appeals to reverse the directive.

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In the next couple of weeks, D.C. will redraw the boundaries of its 37 Advisory Neighborhood Commissions – bodies that provide formal community input on everything from liquor licenses to campus plans.

On Tuesday, the D.C. Council altered the boundaries of its eight electoral wards to reflect the 2010 Census returns. Each Councilmember will now appoint a “ward task force” to redraw ANC boundaries and those of the single-member districts that individual ANC commissioners represent.

According to guidelines issued by the Council, each single-member district must contain between 1900 and 2100 residents.

Georgetown Metropolitan‘s Topher Matthews has provided a helpful breakdown of current population estimates in each single-member district in ANC 2E, which includes the University’s Main Campus:

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In response to the contentious campus plan battles raging across the District, neighbors living near American, Georgetown, Howard, Catholic, and George Washington Universities have formed a District-wide group to advocate for neighborhood concerns.

The District-Wide Coalition of University Neighborhoods plans to incorporate as a non-profit advocating for stricter enrollment caps and neighbor-friendly housing policies at these universities.

Foggy Bottom Association president Asher Corson–a freelance political consultant, current ANC 2A Commissioner, and 2007 GW graduate–will help DCUN get on its feet. He attributes the group’s founding to the bitter battle over GW’s plan in 2007 in which neighbors spent $30,000 litigating against the university with little gains to show for it.

“GW really got away like bandits. Literally getting everything they wanted from the city,” Corson told Washington City Paper. “All these other universities saw that. You’re seeing conflict throughout the entire city, basically, because of these precedents that were set from GW.”

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Yesterday, two Advisory Neighborhood Commissions and a neighborhood group requested that D.C. Zoning Commission Chairman Anthony Hood postpone community members’ campus plan testimony scheduled for Thursday.

According to the Georgetown Dish, the Citizens’ Association of Georgetown and ANC commissioners from Georgetown, Burleith, Foxhall, and other neighborhoods farther from campus filed the request in light of changes the University made to its plan earlier this month. The letter argues that community testimony should be delayed until the D.C. Office of Planning revises its report about Georgetown’s 10-year campus plan.

“Georgetown University filed voluminous new material only recently, and the parties need time to digest, analyze and respond to it,” the letter, which was supported by D.C. Councilmembers Jack Evans and Mary Cheh, reads. “We need to have the [Office of Planning] and the [District Department of Transportation] reports in hand as the foundation for our presentation.”

Evans, who unlike Cheh does not plan to testify at the hearing, supported the request “to ensure that the community has ample opportunity to express their views on this very important issue.”

Representatives from the Office of Planning and DDOT are scheduled to testify on May 12, according to the Dish. While both ANC commissioners and community leaders have been openly critical of the plan, which they claim does not provide enough on-campus housing to students, the details of the community testimony are largely unknown.

“If the Office of Planning needs more time to present its findings, the community representatives should be able to see what those findings are,” Cheh told the Dish.

[Editor's Note: We'll have more about the community's delay request later today, and in tomorrow's issue of the Voice.]