A house fire in Burleith caused an estimated $10,000 worth of damage to a two story house at 3824 T Street NW. Deputy Fire Chief Reilly said that the damage caused by the fire, which started in a bedroom on the second story of the house, was confined by D.C. Fire Department to the room where it started and its contents.
The fire was discovered by a 22-year-old female living in the house, the only person in the house at the time. When Vox arrived at the scene at about 6:30 p.m., she was being treated for smoke inhalation and the cause of the fire was still under investigation. It is unclear whether the woman is a Georgetown student.
“The houses around here are pretty expensive, so you break a couple of windows and cut a hole in the roof to let the smoke out so we don’t burn up, that’s a couple of thousand dollars right there,” Reilly said.
Reilly said that the fire—which the DCFD responded to just after 6 p.m.—looked very serious when the first engines arrived but was brought under control quickly because emergency vehicles and workers were able to respond and extinguish the fire very quickly. At 6:30 p.m., there were nearly a dozen emergency vehicles at the scene.
University administrators held the first of five November meetings with neighbors about their new draft of the 2010 Campus Plan last week. There seemed to be a fair amount for neighbors to be excited about at the meeting (whcich covered enrollment, student housing and off-campus life), such as the University not increasing undergraduate enrollment and the creation of “Community Advisers” to live in West Georgetown and Burleith.
But it seems the Burleith Citizens Association is less than enthused by the plan. Yesterday BCA President Lenore Rubino sent an e-mail out to the Burleith listserv detailing the organization’s objections, which mostly focus on the proposed increase of graduate student enrollment:
There is no proposed new housing planned except for possible a small dorm for grad students on the “1789″ block which is opposed by the Georgetown community.
The possible 58% increase in grad students could have a significant effect on housing, parking, traffic and transportation.
The e-mail exhorts Burleith residents to attend the rest of the meetings (the next of which, incidentally, is tonight at 6:30 p.m. at Georgetown Visitation) and “go on the public record” about the plan.
During the last ten-year plan process, neighbors caused trouble for GU by raising objections with the Board of Zoning and Adjustment, the body that reviews campus plans, and the e-mail hints that the BCA will be going down the same route again this time around.
While the BCA is working to formulate a plan of action, please make best efforts to attend the GU upcoming meetings as we need to go on public record that we oppose their plan.
GU’s campus plan is subject to review by the Board of Zoning and there will be a period of public comment and testimony. This process will most likely take us well into 2010.
You can read the full e-mail after the jump. Make sure you check back later today for Vox’s reporting on tonight’s 2010 Campus Plan, which will deal with transportation.
Last Thursday, the Burleith Citizens’ Association held its annual meeting. Yes, annual.
“One per year? I love it!” exclaimed guest of honor Mayor Adrian Fenty (D). “That’s unprecedented, at least in D.C.”
With only one meeting per year, the agenda was pretty packed, with Burleithers (Burleithians?) discussing everything from 61-D citations to the University’s ten-year plan, parking changes, D.C. Public Schools and cracking down on neglectful landlords.
MPD and 61-Ds: Lieutenant John Hedgecock, who has been in charge of West Georgetown and Burleith since early August, talked about the neighborhood’s crime stats and how the Metropolitan Police Department has been using 61-D citations.
When Hedgecock announced that issuing 61-Ds has been “very effective in quelling parties,” the crowd broke out in applause. According to Hedgecock, once MPD receives a call, they assume that there’s been a breach of the peace. If they observe a party and the noise “is too much for a residential area,” they will issue a 61-D citation to the person on the lease of the house or in charge of the party.
Hedgecock says while last year there were six “problem houses” in the area (four in West Georgetown and two in Burleith), this year there is only one.
“When we see a party starting, we put an end to it or advise them what will happen,” Hedgecock said.
One neighbor voiced concerns about the citations saddling students with a criminal record; Hedgecock replied that those who receive 61-Ds can contest them in court.
There are a few issues that really get debate going on local listservs—political partisanship, newspaper-nabbing students, et cetra—but few topics are as controversial as the question of whether or not sidewalks should be paved with brick.
The issue recently raised its head when a Burleith listserv participant asked Burleith Citizens Association President Lenore Rubino if there were any plans to replace Burleith sidewalks with brick.
Rubino responded saying she didn’t know of any such plans, but asking if the community had any feelings about brick sidewalks. Boy, do they!
Messages on the Burleith listserv are generally constrained to the topics of handy men, lost pets, and yard sales, one member, Paul Diego Craney, has decided it’s his duty to up his neighbors’ political awareness.
Craney, the Executive Director of the D.C. Republican Committee (a.k.a. the saddest committee in the whole city), has posted threads like “RNC Chairman and DC native Michel Steele Challenges Obama” and “DC Council Passes New $9.5 Million Dollar Bag Tax.”
When he posted a rant about D.C. Councilmembers salaries being too high this Monday, a fellow listserver had had enough, and replied:
My suggestion Mr. Craney is that you consider using a more approriate forum than our local community list serve to advance the ill-conceived notions of the Republican Party, which, thankfully, enjoy little traction in D.C ….
We agree that there are serious financial challenges facing the District — this is not unlike other cities and states in America — but I’m confident the Republican Party’s tedious rant that all politicians are paid too much and all taxes are bad … are not the reasoned, responsible and long-term solutions we need.
This prompted a flurry of other responses, some chiming in with their own political views, but most were just angry that the listserv was devolving into a poor impression of the Huffington Post comments thread.
Luckily, things seem to be dying down. Earlier today someone else on the listserv replied with this discussion-ender:
Would the adversaries please get a room? … Can anyone report a lost dog, to get back to normal?
Last Friday’s thunderstorm caused four big trees in Burleith to fall, crushing the cars parked near them. Now some neighbors are suggesting that some of the damage could have been prevented if the D.C. government had been more responsive to complaints.
On the Burleith neighborhood listserv, Martha Ann Clark, who lives on T Street between 36th and 37th said she had alerted the Urban Forestry Administration that several trees on her block—including the one pictured above that ended up crushing a car on Friday—might fall because of termite damage.
In her email, Clark included a time line of her interactions with the D.C. government about the problem, dating back to the beginning of the April. In early June she wrote to a Brian LeCouteur, a Senior Environmental Planner with the Metropolitan Washington Council of Governments:
I inspected other trees and found at least five where termite invasion had begun and reported this back to the powers that be. So far no one has inquired about those additional trees.
Is there anything at all you can do to hurry this along before a storm knocks over the tree and/or a limb injures someone? Because if injury does occur or tree does damage my house by falling on it during a thunder storm I am holding the City responsible with all the notice they have received on this matter.
Officials at the UFA and MWCOG have not responded to requests for comment, but we’ll update you if they do.
This evening saw hurricane-like thunderstorms. In Burleith, the heavy rains and wind felled quite a few large trees, crushing some unfortunately parked cars. At one accident site (near the intersection of 37th and T Streets), the owner of a green SUV was in his car when a tree fell on it, but he was not injured.
Photos by Molly Redden
Update (10:50 p.m.) The following message was just posted on the Burleith listserv:
There are a number of trees down in Burleith. ANC Commission, Ed Solomon has called them in and hopefully we will have DC services here this weekend. Fortunately no one was hurt as the trees fell on a few cars.
The University is formulating its 2010 Campus Plan, which, once it passes ANC and D.C. Zoning Commission muster, will dictate how the University can expand over the next decade. Previous Campus Plans excluded neighborhood input in their planning stages, much to the neighbors’ dismay. So this summer, University officials will hold a series of meetings to gather community input. For those of you who aren’t here, Vox will be attending all meetings and recapping them here on the blog. Keep in mind that the proposals under discussion are only tentative. At the same time, they do comprise, as University architect Alan Brangman told Vox, Georgetown University’s “wishlist.”
On Sunday, Molly Redden offered an overview of Saturday’s six-hour-long community meeting (yes, we stayed the whole time, and not just for the paltry cold cuts lunch buffet). The first part of the meeting, in which the campus plan’s architects from Cooper, Robertson & Partners presented their overview of possible options for campus development, went rather smoothly and quite quickly. But only because most of the attendees were champing at the bit to get to the next, and last, item on the meeting’s agenda: the open discussion.
Having attended a community meeting before, in which “open discussion” was the only agenda, I steeled myself for a long afternoon of student berating. There was, in fact, less than I expected—as Molly will cover on Thursday, Georgetown neighbors spent as much time hammering the University on the “adverse impact” of the traffic it draws to the area as they did bemoaning the students’ day-to-day drunkenness, noisiness, littering and general lack of consideration for others.
University architect Alan Brangman kicked off the discussion with a presentation of the University’s physical boundaries, which were set in 1966 by the National Capital Planning Commission. Brangman had a brief tiff with one of the neighbors over boundary lines, specifically regarding the houses on the 36th Street between O and P Streets and the 3500 block of Prospect Street, which Georgetown acquired after boundaries were set. The houses’ backyards fall within University property lines—the houses themselves do not.
The houses, however, are considered on-campus, or at least their beds are included in the on-campus bed count. The neighbor took issue with this tactic, because he and his fellow community members consider the houses off-campus. Essentially, they are unsettled by the “gray area” surrounding Georgetown’s loose definition of on-campus beds—if the University can buy up houses outside the property lines and count them as on-campus, what’s to stop it from encroaching further into the neighborhood?
The question is a valid one. While Georgetown hasn’t expanded much more into the neighborhood, Associate Vice President for External Relations Linda Greenan said that when houses come up for sale, often the University takes a look at them, adding for reassurance, perhaps: “and often we don’t buy them.”
Nevertheless, Georgetown and the community members seem to be at an impasse. Brangman said that currently there are no plans to change the “on-campus” status of the disputed student townhouses. In a particularly heated moment, a neighbor offered Brangman the analogy: “Just because [you] own a gun doesn’t mean you can shoot me.”
Every time you procrastinate, Georgetown kills a kitten. No, but seriously, they do.
Here at Georgetown, it’s pretty much a given that the neighbors are going to complain about the University—our buses are too loud, our parties are too loud, etc—but last week on the Burleith listserv, “Renee” came up with a novel (and horrifying) accusation: ruthless cat killing.
I would like to know why Georgetown University is killing the stray cats left behind by their own students. They have done this several times and it truly sickens me. Part of a university’s job is to teach their students to become responsible adults and leaving cats behind so the university can trap and kill them is extremely inhumane and irresponsible …
All local PETA, adopt a cat programs and local shelters that don;t kill animals are aware of Goergetown U’s horrible actions.. You can also check on the web that Georgetown repeatedly trapped cats and send them to killed at animal shelters. They claimed the cats were feral when in actuality they were had belonged to uncaring students who left them to fend for themselves. All the cats Georgetown U. trapped were euthanized.
Yikes. So is it true? University Spokesperson Julie Green-Bataille says no, we don’t “destroy” cats, we send them off to the bucolic farmlands of Pennsylvania:
Not sure where this is coming from –there is currently nothing of this sort taking place on campus [nor] has there ever been, best I can tell. I think several years ago in response to a ferrell [sic] cat problem on campus, Georgetown humanely worked to remove some cats using cages and relocating them to a farm in Pennsylvania—none were ever destroyed.
Odd choice of a verb, but, for my peace of mind, I’m going to believe her. I guess we can’t trust the fine reporting from Hoya Suxa after all…
Photo from Flickr user Tom Clifton, used under a Creative Commons license.
Yesterday on the Burleith listserv, “M Clark” let loose with a rant about how people had been stealing newspapers. He said his delivery-man told him that he had more than 20 calls about missing papers from Burleith alone and Clark describes seeing “a driver get out of his SUV stopped in the middle of the street, run to the edge of my neighbor’s yard, retrieve a (neighbor’s?) newspaper, run back to his car while apologizing to oncoming traffic for holding up traffic.”
Totally reasonable complaints. I’d be pissed too if someone was getting between me and my Marc Fisher. What isn’t reasonable? His first suggestion for how to fix the problem:
Is this an issue we could bring up with Georgetown University in event students are sharing and not returning our easily obtainable papers?
Vox Populi is the staff blog of the Georgetown Voice, a weekly newsmagazine at Georgetown University. Opinions expressed in posts are those of their author alone unless otherwise stated.
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