Yesterday night, the student-run advocacy group DC Students Speak reintroduced an online petition against the D.C. Council’s proposed law to discourage students from parking around the District. The D.C. Council will vote today on this “Residential Parking Protection Act of 2011,” which, according to DCSS, “will, if passed, impose unnecessary and costly burdens on student drivers” and “remove common-sense rules with regard to college drivers in the District.” As of this morning at 10:30 a.m., the petition had 750 signatures.

The D.C. Council’s Residential Parking Protection Act on today’s voting agenda is part of a larger effort to reduce the number of residents with parking passes. Full-time students may be the first residents targeted for the denial of these privileges. The bill, according to the WJLA, “could mean those $35 a year residential parking permits will become more expensive, street parking rates may vary by demand and guest parking passes could come with a fee.”

DCSS encourages students to sign the petition to Mayor Vince Gray and Attorney General Irvin Nathan before today’s vote. According to the group, the law will force students to register their motor vehicles in D.C. and purchase D.C. car insurance. “Students will also be required to pay fees in order to register their car and obtain a D.C. driver’s license, potentially in excess of $150,” the petition reads. The group has introduced a Twitter hashtag, “right2park,” to spread awareness on the issue.

Photo: DC Students Speak website

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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Vox recently sat down with Dave Stroup (COL’ 06), a recent Voice alum that led the campaign to draft candidate Bryan Weaver into the latest at-large D.C. Council race. Stroup, who works in field support and operations at the Sierra Club, offered his perspectives on this campaign and on student involvement in city politics at-large.

VP: Why did you ask Weaver to run?

DS: I thought it was a great opportunity for someone to shake things up. Basically, the thing that really stuck me was his concerns for the neighborhood he lived in and, by extension, the city.

VP: How did you first get involved in D.C. politics?

DS: When I came to Georgetown, I learned everything about D.C. politics from Mike DeBonis, who was actually my editor at the Voice. I wrote the City on Hill [D.C. affairs] column for two years.

Since I stayed in D.C. and am naturally a progressive Democrat. I just felt like this was a fascinating town for politics. There’s a lot of history, which is often difficult to overcome. But there are also a lot of younger people that are trying to do a lot.

VP: What is your opinion of efforts like DC Students Speak?

DS: I was amazed by what I’ve seen just in this race and over the last few months with student involvement because it’s hugely different from when I was at Georgetown.

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Photos by Sam Brothers

Vincent Orange, a former D.C. councilmember and Pepco lobbyist, won  the vacant at-large seat on the D.C. Council. Orange is also a strong opponent of the 2010 Campus Plan.

“I know what happens when students move into the community,” he said in a February candidate forum. “It’s parties every single day.”

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Update: For anyone trying to fill out a same-day registration, your best bet is a driver’s license, bank statement, or tuition, phone, utility, or other bill in your name with a DC address on it. However, an official at the DC Board of Elections and Ethics has indicated that it would probably be sufficient to get a letter from University Housing saying that you live on campus. Housing provides these letters within twenty-four hours of a request. You can call them 9am to 5pm at (202) 687-4560 for details. Otherwise, you’ll have to cast a provisional ballot and provide this information at a later date.

Tomorrow, voters will elect a candidate to fill a vacancy in the DC Council’s at-large seat. Given that the current Council has passed measures such as the contentious noise law, their decision will shape student life for the next year until the 2012 General Election.

“At this moment, we’re seeing so much anti-student rhetoric and so many anti-student actions going on in this city,” student ANC Commissioner Jake Sticka (COL ’13) told the Voice in March as DC Students Speak’s first voter registration drive was winding down. The organization is trying to get students to vote in tomorrow’s election in order to curb what they see as a disturbing trend.

After an exhausting, months-long process of candidate forums and questionnaires, where even the the DC Food Truck Association saw fit to publish a candidate questionnaire, the race has narrowed down to four main contenders.

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This weekend, D.C. Students Speak, YouthPAC, and the DC Federation of College Democrats hosted a forum for the candidates running for at-large D.C. council seat.

Vying for the open are Sekou Biddle (D), Tom Brown (D), Dorothy Douglas (D), Arkan Haile (I), Joshua Lopez (D), Patrick Mara (R), Vincent Orange (D), Alan Page (Statehood Green), and Bryan Weaver (D). All of the candidates, minus Haile and Orange, were present for the forum at the Martin Luther King, Jr. Library.

Scott Stirrett (SFS ’13) of D.C. Students Speak asked the candidates for their opinion about the recently amended noise law. Biddle and Lopez opposed the idea of arresting students for excessive noise, while Weaver explained that the original intent of the law was to prevent protests by union and religious groups in residential areas and that he was opposed to both the original intent and current effect of the law. Mara noted that, as a former student body and fraternity president, he was well aware of the student perspective, but he also argued that universities placed an insufficient emphasis on on-campus housing. Mara, Brown, and Douglas felt that the issue boiled down to a lack of communication between students and neighborhood residents. Page said that he had not read the law, but he understood the need to prevent the “criminalization of student behavior.”

The next question pertained to the gerrymandering of the ANC single-member districts in the neighborhoods surrounding universities. All the candidates agreed that students should have a say in the ANC redistricting process, with Weaver musing, “There are two things that you don’t want to watch while they’re being done: sausage-making and ANC redistricting.”

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Today, DC Students Speak, YouthPAC, and the DC Federation of College Democrats will host a forum for the candidates running for At-Large DC Council Seat. The date of the election is April 26th.

[Editor's Note: An earlier version of this post incorrectly reported that DC Student Speak's voter registration drive ends today. In fact, only the dorm registration efforts end today. We apologize for the error.]

Today marks the final day of efforts by grassroots advocacy group DC Students Speak to register voters in University residence halls, as the group works towards its broader goal of registering at least 1,000 students to vote in the District by November 2012.

The group was founded in November 2009 to give students a greater role in D.C.’s political process and encourage cooperation amongst university students across the district.

According to Scott Stirrett (SFS ’13), a principal organizer of the drive, the lack of students registered in D.C. hinders the student voice in city government.

“There are 100,000 students in DC, but 98 percent of students aren’t registered to vote in D.C.,” he said.

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D.C. Students Speak, a student-run advocacy group that was behind the petition in support of the 2010 Campus Plan, has created a petition opposing the recently amended D.C. noise law.

The recent amendment makes it “unlawful for a person to make an unreasonably loud noise between 10:00 p.m. and 7:00 a.m. that is likely to annoy or disturb one or more other persons in their residences.”

DCSS claims that the amendments to the law are too vague, as there is no definition in the law of what is to be considered likely to annoy or disturb.

Under the changes that took place at 12:01 a.m. Tuesday, the noise violation is an arrestable offense and carries a penalty of up to a $500 fine and/or 90 days in jail.

As of early this morning the petition had more than 1,000 signatures, over 80 percent of which are from the D.C. area.

For those who want to fight for their right to party (or have a conversation outside after 10:00 p.m.), the petition is available to be signed online.

At last Thursday’s special Advisory Neighborhood Commission meeting regarding Georgetown University’s 2010 Campus Plan, D.C. Students Speak—an advocacy group for students in the District—presented a petition to the commissioners in support of the plan.

As Scott Stirrett (SFS ’13) attempted to present the petition, Commissioner Jeff Jones questioned him about how legitimate the signatures for the petition were. He noted that when he had looked at map of the signatures there was an unusual amount of signatures from the same location in Kansas. Update: Commissioner Jake Sticka has informed Vox, and GoPetition has confirmed, that signatures without a listed zip code are classified as being from this location. This creates a credibility issue for these signatures in the petition, but negates Jones’ claim that all of them came from the same location in Kansas.

Stirrett said that although it is possible that this is true, a significant number of the signatures came from the Georgetown area—and included local residents—and many more signatures came in from across the country.

However, the D.C. Students Speak petition is not the only flawed petition in the Campus Plan debate.

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