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Recently, a Voice staffer discovered two suspicious-looking cameras peeping out of a house on the corner of 34th and N Street, about three blocks from campus. Careful where you stop to surreptitiously kiss your loved ones or relieve yourself after a night of drinking, because there’s a good chance a neighbor is watching.

The products were identified as Linksys and Wansview surveillance cameras. The smaller, Wansview camera faces the intersection, while the Linksys camera faces N Street.
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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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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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Earlier this week, when the Washington Post‘s editorial board got in the University’s corner for the battle royale that is “D.C. vs. Georgetown,” pretty much everybody anticipated that our friendly neighbors would be less than thrilled with this endorsement. Today, as reported by the Georgetown Dish, the Citizens Association of Georgetown published a very angry letter about the newspaper’s assertions that the University’s neighbors are attempting to stunt the intellectual and economic growth of the city.

“We strongly support planned and thoughtful growth,” the letter states. “We strongly oppose, however, the objectionable results an expansion of more than 4,000 students in the past 10 years has had on the communities surrounding Georgetown University.”

CAG goes on to defend its position that an Arlington satellite campus is a valid solution to the student overpopulation problem, and ends by foreseeing the impending doom of the District as a whole if Georgetown goes through with its plan.

“If Georgetown University is allowed to continue to expand irresponsibly, the danger exists that valued residential neighborhoods will become predominantly student housing,. Such a development would be a significant loss not only to the residents but also to the city as a whole.”

But despite CAG’s discontentment about the University’s newfound support, other neighbors are, much to our pleasant surprise, not quite so upset about the University’s expansion. In a letter submitted to the Northwest Current, a handful of residents of Georgetown, Burleith, Foxhall, and other surrounding areas came out in support of GU’s recent efforts to make itself more neighborly. Citing the new trash patrols, police officers, and M Street Shuttle, the signers assert that Georgetown isn’t the all-consuming entity that some of their neighbors think it is. They also mention that Georgetown students might actually have something to contribute to D.C. besides noise pollution and beer bottles:

“GU undergraduates and graduate students provide countless hours of volunteer public service to District residents each year at free health clinics, soup kitchens, and other social service agencies.  Overall, Georgetown University’s positive impact on our city is broad and deep.  When the University prospers, it enhances all of our lives.”

Aw stop, you’re making us blush.

Full text of the letters, as published by Georgetown Dish, after the jump!

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In a recent joint press release by the Burleith Citizens Association and the Citizens Association of Georgetown, respective presidents Lenore Rubino and Jennifer Altemus remind whomever is listening that they do not like students in their neighborhoods.

It’s nice that some things never change.

In the letter, Rubino and Altemus cite that the “proposed mitigations for the adverse impacts students living off campus have on the community,” which include daily trash pick-up and the M Street Shuttle, miss the point.

These “limited initiatives” fail to address the most important issue: students live off campus. And no number of daily trash pick-ups can fix that (we think).

So what’s the solution? It’s a shocker: House 100% of students on campus.

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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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Last night’s marathon Advisory Neighborhood Commission meeting covered everything from crime to tree boxes. As always, we’ve picked out the meeting’s highlights just for you. Let’s get to the recap.

The name is Bond. Revenue Bond.

Linda Greenan, associate vice president for external relations, presented the University’s application for tax-exempt revenue bonds incited an onslaught of heated reactions from audience members. A proposed $60 million of the bonds, a majority, will go toward funding the new science center. The rest will cover the cost of maintaining on-campus residences, including $12 million to outfit all residential halls with wireless Internet access.

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Last Saturday, a fence surrounding a townhouse on the 3200 block of O Street was vandalized, according to a post on the Georgetown listserv.

This is about when we figured that the poster, Robert Laycock, would accuse Georgetown students of the damage. Let’s just say he surprised us.

“[S]everal individuals, probably inebriated, pulled off the wrought iron railing on the steps leading to the front door of the house,” Laycock, who moonlights as the treasurer of the Citizen’s Association of Georgetown, wrote. “The noise woke up almost everyone on our block.”

He added that the townhouse’s elderly residents, who did not respond to our contact attempts, “depend on the rail for support going up and down the steps.”

In summary: Georgetown residents’ property was damaged on a weekend night. The incident disturbed a number of sleeping neighbors. Another resident, who is involved with a group that isn’t on friendly terms with the University, wrote about the incident without immediately blaming students.

Shit, you guys. Is this a trap, somehow?

Photo: Robert Laycock

Last April, the Burleith Citizens Association started soliciting donations for their anti-Campus Plan campaign; five months and $11,000 later, the community group has finally hired zoning and urban planning consultants to help build their case.

“As we move into the fall, activity surrounding the GU campus plan will heat up,” BCA President Lenore Rubino wrote in the Burleith Bell [PDF], a monthly newsletter. “The BCA in conjunction with the Citizens’ Association of Georgetown is working with our consultants to build our case before the zoning commission.”

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