Well, it wasn’t the late January or early February date they had hoped for. But the 2010 Campus Plan steering committee has announced the last community meeting it will hold regarding the 2010 Campus Plan before it files the plan with the Old Georgetown Board and D.C. Zoning Commission for approval.

On Monday, April 26, from 6:30 to 9 p.m. at Georgetown Visitation, members of the Georgetown administration will present their final draft of the plan with information residents asked for in previous meetings. Those meetings collected community feedback and questions on three specific elements of the plan in November—Transportation, the 1789 Block, and Housing, Enrollment, and Off-Campus Life.

Material on the final draft of the plan will become available here as the meeting date approaches, but so far, the final draft is not available yet. In anticipation of the final draft, let’s recap: what are the major flashpoints for Georgetown neighbors going to be when it does become available, and what did they ask to know about the plan?

• Increased graduate enrollment — Currently, Georgetown is seeking to increase its graduate student enrollment by about 3,200 students, most of whom will be in the School of Continuing Studies. While the University is not going to increase undergraduate enrollment, neighbors are still furious. They want to know how many graduate students they can expect to move into the area.

• New undergraduate housing — Right now, there is no new undergraduate housing proposed in this plan. This is particularly irksome to neighborhood residents who remember that in a May 2009 presentation, the architecture firm working said the University could add 800 beds within Georgetown’s gates. (Although adding that many beds would have required Georgetown to build on nearly every open space left on campus, including the Harbin patio). Expect this to incense neighbors again, unless Georgetown has changed its plans.

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While University officials have been floating plans about student life and transportation over the past couple weeks, this week is the big unveiling of the full first draft of the plan.  The University will be holding three meetings with neighbors and one for students this week.

In preparation for the big week, the University put its 2010 Campus Plan presentation outline [PDF] online this weekend.  Here are some of the most interesting tidbits from the presentation:

• The slide on off-campus student life activities since the 2000 campus plan boasts that the University has implemented “stronger, swifter sanctions for violations of the Code of Conduct occurring in the community.”
• The University is planning on doubling the SNAP staff and “establish two Community Advisor positions in Burleith and West Georgetown.”
• The University is requesting the opportunity to increase graduate enrollment by more than 3,200 students, the majority of which would be in the Continuing Studies program
• Georgetown is hoping to add 480 employees
• Plans for the proposed Graduate/Faculty student housing on the 1789 block may involve the conversion of six houses on N Street currently used by undergraduates
• Facilities is considering a relocation from their current headquarters under Harbin to an “alternative location on the edge of campus”

With more details the plan coming to light, the Citizens’ Association of Georgetown is weighing in on the plan.  Like their peers in Burleith, CAG is less than psyched about the proposals.

CAG President Jennifer Altemus (COL ’88) wrote in an e-mail to the Georgetown Forum listserv this weekend that she was not pleased with the fact that the University is not proposing any new undergraduate housing:

Currently there are 5,053 beds in what GU considers “on campus.”  111 of these beds are in the University owned townhouses.  The lack of on campus housing puts a huge strain on the community.  I am extremely disappointed with this aspect of their proposal.

To help with off campus issues they will add a second SNAP car to patrol on Thursday, Friday & Saturday nights.  And they plan to institute two Community Advisors who will be RAs for off campus students living amongst the students.  While this is a start, I do not believe it will offset the added burden of the growth in enrollment for an already saturated community.

You can read Altemus’ full e-mail after the jump…

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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.

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GU’s Charles DeSantis

On Tuesday night, University officials revealed their tentative plans for the future of enrollment, student housing, and off-campus life at Georgetown to an audience of about forty West Georgetown and Burleith residents. It was the first in a series of community meetings designed to give neighborhood residents an idea of what its Ten Year Plan will look like.

Emphasizing that the plans shown last night were part of the unfinalized “draft plan,” the Georgetown administrators said the University intends to cap its undergraduate enrollment at its current level of just over 6,000 and instead increase enrollment in its graduate programs from 5,512 to about 8,700 in the next ten years.

The presentation of the plan was accompanied by several University pledges to improve the quality of life for neighbors living near campus who often complain about student noise, parties, and trash. Beginning in August of 2010, Vice President for Student Affairs Todd Olson said, the University will place an adult “Community Advisor” in both West Georgetown and Burleith to act as the equivalent of ResLife Hall Directors among upperclassmen living in those areas. Because Georgetown does not own housing in the Burleith neighborhood, Olson said after the meeting that the University will rent a house for the Community Advisor to live in.

While it is unclear whether the creation of the Community Advisor positions came at the request of neighborhood residents, last week, the results of a Voice FOIA request revealed that community leaders have been lobbying the University to place “adult live-in supervision” among students who live outside of Georgetown’s gates.

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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.”

This Saturday, some Georgetown administrators, including Vice President of Student Affairs Todd Olson, Vice President for External Relations Linda Greenan, and University Architect Alan Brangman, were lucky enough to spend nearly five hours in the cafeteria of the Duke Ellington School of the Arts’ cafeteria presenting the skeleton of Georgetown’s 10 Year Campus Plan to a group of about twenty neighborhood residents and their Advisory Neighborhood Commissioners. It was the second of such meetings, the first having taken place in November, that will occur before the University must present a plan for review near the end of the calendar year.

Aside from a handful of miscellaneous issues, the bulk of the meeting was spent on often heated discussions about student housing and the effect the University’s plan would have on traffic and human congestion (two posts, one about the University’s housing proposals and one about transportation, including GUTS buses, will follow this week).

For their part, the neighbors were present to insist that the Campus Plan address the perennial issues that they feel plague the neighborhood, such as trash and the number of students living off campus. And the ANC commissioners who were present, Bill Skelsey, Bill Starrels, and Ron Lewis were clearly advocates of all the neighbors’ proposals (Georgetown University’s student ANC commissioner, Aaron Golds, attended a wedding yesterday but wrote in an email that he plans to attend subsequent meetings).

Among these is the demand that the University cap its undergraduate enrollment at its present maximum number, 6,016. University administrators plan to do so, they said, largely because they anticipate the expansion of their graduate programs instead.

The incomplete state of the University’s 10 Year Plan—it is currently more a collection of suggestions than an actionable plan and lacks some of the studies that will be critical to it finalization—visibly upset the neighbors in attendance.  They were dismayed, for example, to hear that the University would like to build a “whole new hospital facility more internal to the campus” but could not specify the location or coordinate its affect with other aspects of the plan, like traffic, until negotiations with MedStar, the company that owns the existing hospital buildings, had concluded (The preferred location for the new hospital is on what is currently the hospital parking lot).

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