For as long as Dixie Liquor has been seeking an exemption to the Ward 2 ban on single bottles of alcohol, the Georgetown Advisory Neighborhood Commission has been trying to stop Dixie owners from getting one. Their logic? Allowing Dixie owners to sell super expensive microbrews and fancy culinary liqueurs will drive vagrancy and student drinking.

But earlier this year, ANC commissioners found themselves unable to stop the Alcoholic Beverage Regulation Administration from giving Dixie an exemption anyway. So the ANC has issued a strongly-worded resolution against ABRA’s decision to issue Dixie Liquor a singles ban exemption without ANC approval. (Strongly-worded!)

The resolution comes after a misunderstanding which caused the ANC to mistakenly believe that ABRA would not rule on Dixie’s application without an ANC resolution approving of the exemption. Wagner’s, a liquor store on Wisconsin Avenue, was also granted an exemption to the singles ban, which the D.C. City Council passed for Ward 2 in 2008, without ANC approval.

Georgetown Metropolitan has the full text of the resolution, which reiterates arguments against the exemption that ANC 2E commissioners have been making for more than a year-and-a-half. Echoing concerns they brought up in both a January 2009 ANC meeting and an emergency meeting this April to discuss Dixie’s exemption application, the resolution accuses Dixie’s single sales of contributing to the presence of homeless people in nearby Francis Scott Key Park.

It also disputes Dixie’s claim that it needs to be able to sell smaller-sized liquor bottles to chefs and expensive microbrews as singles, saying that anyone who cooks often will be willing to buy larger-sized liqueurs and that Safeway has had no trouble selling microbrews in six packs. And it obliquely suggests that allowing the exemption will contribute to drinking among Georgetown University students, the reasoning being that Dixie’s is the largest provider of kegs to Georgetown students.

GM thought—and we agree—that the resolution went too far:

“[T]he resolution’s overly cynical analysis of the merits of Dixie’s application is unnecessarily harsh and is inconsistent with past positions of the ANC. Remember that just last year the ANC and CAG were close to supporting a Georgetown-wide exemption from the single sales ban. That’s all ancient history now, though, since according to this resolution nobody but drunk Georgetown students would ever want to buy a single serving of alcohol and any liquor store that can’t survive without selling them isn’t trying hard enough.”

Hear, hear.

Photo from Flickr user Pedestrian Typography used under a Creative Commons license.

Although nothing agitates the blood of a Vox reader quite like a post about a Citizens Association of Georgetown meeting about the 2010 Campus Plan, you’ve got to hand it to our neighbors in West Georgetown—they know that plan backwards and forwards. CAG seems to have a clear idea about what exactly in the plan they don’t like and why it threatens their neighborhood.

Don’t believe me? Then you should go to the next Burleith Citizens Association meeting about the 2010 Campus Plan, where their take on the plan is unfortunately beset by speculation and half-truths.

If you read our coverage of the first meeting the BCA held about the final plan draft in April, you’re already familiar with Burleith residents’ main gripes with the 2010 Campus Plan. And if you didn’t, I’m sure you can guess the usual suspects. The plan doesn’t add new on-campus housing for undergraduates; it adds over 2,400 graduate students to the school in the next ten years; it threatens to increase traffic in the neighborhood; and in general, it gets residents talking about how awful it is to live near students. With a few adjustments, the slides at the two meetings that the BCA held this past Saturday and Sunday to talk about the 2010 Campus Plan were more or less the same as the last meeting.

So I’ll spare you another rundown of what Burleith hates about the plan. What’s more interesting is what they just don’t get about it.

Let’s start with the portion of the presentation led by Candith Pallandre, the BCA’s treasurer, which consisted almost entirely of assumptions and misunderstandings. Pallandre zeroed in on the road that will run the length of campus between the woods and Kehoe Field, the tennis courts, and the power plant.

“This was supposed to be a service road, and now they’re saying that buses are service vehicles,” she said. With a knowing smile, she continued, “Buses carrying students are not really service vehicles.”

Pallandre didn’t give any clues as to why it would be a problem for GUTS buses to drive along a road that is bordered by woods and Georgetown University property. But it’s clear that she assumed the University thought it was being sneaky by classifying GUTS buses as service vehicles, and that this would have sneaky consequences.

In reality, the road will allow Georgetown University to pick up passengers from the north end of campus and then exit out Canal Road—which is what Burleith residents have been demanding for years.

After the jump, we recap the rest of the gripes from last weekend’s BCA meeting.

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So, maybe Georgetown students aren’t drunk all of the time.

In recent days, both the University and students have responded to “Drunken Georgetown Students,” the website that’s fueled rampant procrastination all week long.

In an e-mail statement, Director of Media Relations Andy Pino wrote, “[The University does] not believe the site is a constructive attempt  to improve safety or quality of life issues in our community, and we believe it runs contrary to the collaborative efforts we’ve engaged in with many of our neighbors.”

Meanwhile, students have launched websites and Facebook groups that lampoon Stephen R. Brown, the Burleith resident who runs “Drunken Georgetown Students.”

One student, who declined to be named, even made a video titled “Fun with Stephen Brown.”

“I just wanted to comment on Mr. Brown’s godawful blog while standing up for my fellow constantly intoxicated Georgetown students,” the student said in an e-mail.

Vox has also learned that Brown has been photographing student parties since last summer.

After the jump, hear from some of the students who Brown has photographed.

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Drunkengeorgetownstudents.com, the website every Georgetown student loves to hate, was taken offline these evening by server host Heller Information Services (HIS), only to reappear hours later at drunkengeorgetownstudents.blogspot.com.

“I was pressured by the server to take [the site] down,” Stephen R. Brown, the Burleith resident who runs the site, said in a telephone interview. “I was told that at 7 p.m. tonight they would shut it down and they did.”

In coverage earlier today, Vox reported that HIS requested in an e-mail that Brown “either remove the pix or blur the faces” because the photographs violated the server’s Acceptable Use Policy.

Before the original site went offline, Brown put out a call for residents’ photos of Georgetown students. “If you can get some pictures without confronting the offenders, please do so and we’ll being posting as soon as I find a more aggressive server who’s up for a 1st Amendment lawsuit,” Brown wrote.

Brown claims that Blogspot edition of his site “is totally legit.”

On the latest post, he doesn’t waste any time to beat his chest a bit, while making some bizarre claims about his life and the success of the site.

“I am one of the few people in the world who is ‘persona non grata’ in the State of Israel and proud of it!!! So if you don’t like this site, tell it to God (or in this case, [Google CEO] Eric Schmidt)” Brown wrote in his latest post. “I am getting requests for footage from ‘Inside Edition’ so …thanks…and welcome to ‘Drunken Georgetown Students’!”

“I apologize to students who are doing a great job at Georgetown University and doing something,” Brown said. “But those drunks in my alley—fuck ‘em.”

After the jump, read Brown’s latest rants:

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Heller Information Services (HIS), the server operator behind the website “Drunken Georgetown Students,” has asked Stephen R. Brown, the Burleith resident who runs the site, to “either remove the pix or blur the faces,” according to an e-mail posted by Brown.

Yesterday, Vox reported that Brown has been publishing photographs of Georgetown students on his website, www.drunkengeorgetownstudents.com. But, a visit to the site earlier today revealed that Brown has blurred out the faces of all persons in photographs published on the site.

That’s not to say that Brown censored his site willingly, however. At the top of the site, Brown posted a missive about how “[his] first amendment right to photograph has been usurped by the Universtiy.”

According to the excerpted e-mail written by an HIS representative, “[Brown's] site has stirred up quite a hornet’s nest, and [HIS] received several dozen complaints about the photographs … We’ve looked at the pix, and whether or not there are any legal issues with them, in our opinion they do meet our criteria for harassment mentioned in our [Acceptable Use Policy.]”

According to the HIS Acceptable Use Policy, clients are prohibited from “[using] the service for illegal purposes,” “[using] the service in such a way as to cause harm to HIS or other parts of the internet,” or “[using] the service to abuse or harrass others.”

After the jump, read Stephen Brown’s response to the HIS e-mail, as well as the excerpted e-mail Brown posted on his website.

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Be wary the next time you head out to an off-campus party—you just might end up on “Drunken Georgetown Students,” a website run by a Burleith resident which publishes photographs and written accounts of off-campus student life.

The site, which dubs Georgetown “AN EAST COAST PARTY SCHOOL,” is run by neighbor and former American University professor Stephen R. Brown. Besides being a place for him to make bizarre claims like, “Unfortunately if two students hadn’t died on campus this year in alcohol related students (and who knows how many more that are ‘in official denial’, it might be amusing,” he makes as suggestions on the site about how Georgetown and Burleith residents can best report student disturbances.

In an interview this afternoon, Brown, a Villanova graduate, said, “I live across from six student houses and two young professional houses. I document what happens in the alley … I report everything to the police that is put on the blog … [The site] is just an attempt to make sure that the University is aware that there’s trouble.”

In addition to publishing photographs of students, Brown also posts residents’ accounts of student activity off-campus.

“I don’t consult with [the students who I photograph.] I’m doing what I’m doing … I have the First Amendment right to photograph whatever is going on,” he claimed.

While the only photographs currently posted to the site are his own, Brown hopes to post other residents’ photographs of students in the future.

“I might run a contest. I was thinking of having a drunken Georgetown student photo contest,” Brown said. “Maybe we could have a urination category.”

After the jump, check out some excerpts Vox plucked from Brown’s site.

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On Friday, Vice President for Student Affairs Todd Olson sat down with members of the campus press to discuss the new elements of the 2010 Campus Plan in the final draft that the University released earlier this week. Vox brought those to you Friday morning—you can check them out here.

Also, don’t forget to go to tonight’s Final community meeting on the 2010 Campus Plan if you want to speak up. It’s the last chance you’ll have to comments on the plan before the University finalizes it and submits it to the Zoning Commission late this spring or early this summer. It’s from 6:30 to 9 p.m. at Georgetown Visitation in the Heritage Room—the first building on the left through the gates of Visitation, on the second floor, at 1524 35th Street.

Here’s what Olson had to say on some of the bigger new elements:

On the University hiring 3 additional Metropolitan Police Department officers to patrol areas where Georgetown students live on Thursday through Saturday nights, Olson said that while they would “provide some sort of a calming presence in terms of noise and activity on the streets,” first and foremost, they were there for safety purposes.

“I do want to make the connection up front that between this additional police presence and safety,” he said, adding that this partly reflected the University’s response to recent crimes. “This is certainly not only for campus plan reason but for safety reasons. They will be assigned to areas around campus where students move and live on some key weekend nights. Their focus is, number one, on safety, and we do believe that they will be helpful.”

The additional police forces will begin to patrol the area this week, he said.

Olson also said that the two Community Advisers who will live in non-Georgetown housing near students, one in Burleith and one in West Georgetown, are meant to help “set a context” for students living near neighborhood residents, and build relationships between students and neighbors.

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Since Real World: DC ended, you may not be meeting your quota of watching over-privileged kids live extravagantly in the Nation’s Capital. Never fear, though, because MTV’s got another dose of the good stuff: Teen Cribs, Georgetown Edition.

Apparently MTV Cribs was so wildly popular that it has been resurrected in the form of Teen Cribs, where the camera follows teenage who, by sheer luck, were born into wildly decadent homes. Georgetown Metropolitan dug up a recent episode that features at a home right in our neighborhood—1633 29th Street, to be exact. Check it out around the 14:45 mark.

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It’s the moment you’ve all been waiting for. Right?

On Thursday, Georgetown University publicly released the final draft of its 2010 Campus Plan (PDF), which it will present to the community on Monday, April 26. Administrators have already presented most of the plan to Georgetown residents in a series of community meetings in November—Transportation, the 1789 Block, and Housing, Enrollment, and Off-Campus Life, but at least a few things have changed in this final draft—we’ve listed them below.

Meanwhile, the neighbors have been gathering their forces to fight the campus plan once it goes before the Zoning Commission for approval, where it will be studied at length by the Office of Planning.

Both the Citizens Association of Georgetown and the Burleith Citizens Association are raising funds to hire urban planners and zoning experts to counter the findings and testimony of Georgetown University’s experts, influencing the Office of Planning report and the Zoning Commission’s ruling on the plan. BCA President Lenore Rubino wrote in an e-mail to the Burleith listserv that in the last three weeks, the BCA has raised $4500.

In any event, here’s what’s new or has been clarified in the 2010 Plan:

• The convocation center, which would have been built on the McDonough parking lot for events like graduation, has been removed from the plan.

• The two staffers who will live near students in off-campus, non-Georgetown housing and act as Resident Advisers will start work this August. The summer SNAP car that Georgetown is funding will be patrolling neighborhoods this June.

• Three additional MPD officers will be hired through the reimbursable detail program to patrol “higher activity areas” on Thursday through Saturday nights.

• The University has scaled back its plans to develop the 1789 block, where it will build graduate housing. Instead of building housing for 250 – 300 students, the new apartments will house 120 students. The structures will be three to four instead of five stories high. Ten percent of the 80 parking spaces under the structure will be reserved for resident use. The retail the University planned for that area—like a coffee shop or a dry cleaner’s—will take up 8,500 square feet instead of 26,000 square feet.

• The University had originally proposed 1,000 new parking spaces for University and Hospital use. They are now only proposing 700 new spaces.

• Georgetown will explore the feasibility of getting a ZipCar station located closer to campus, potentially near the main gates.

• A quadrangle will be built between the Hariri Building and the new science center.

• Georgetown will explore adding new solar panels to campus buildings and “wind spires for on-campus outdoor lighting”

On Wednesday night, Burleith residents crowded into a tiny classroom in the Washington International School, there to hear to a presentation by members of the Burleith Citizens Association about “why the Georgetown campus plan is bad for Burleith,” in the words of BCA President Lenore Rubino.

Surrounded by kid art and shelves stacked with school children’s board games, thirty or so Burleith residents listened as the BCA described the neighborhood as a peaceful, idyllic community whose culture and way of life is being tested to its outer limits as students slowly overtake the area. With the 2010 Campus Plan proposing the enrollment of 3,200 more graduate students at Georgetown over the next decade, the BCA expressed fears that Burleith’s “quality of life and diversity” would come under even more direct attack.

“Each of us chose this community for one special reason of our own. And I think after we moved here we all found some very interesting things about this community,” former BCA President Pat Scolaro said. She described all the benefits of living in Burleith—a large park, open fields where children could play, the ‘tot lot,’ the soon-to-reopen Georgetown Library, and “Ellington and the University, which provide education opportunities and entertainment opportunities.”

“In any city, change is inevitable, and that is certainly true of Burleith. Sometimes in a good way …. But two diverse groups with two completely different lifestyles converged on this small community,” she said. “Today the BCA is dealing with one of its most serious issues, and let me tell you it’s facing it head on, with every intention of preserving this community.”

Glen Harrison, a member of the BCA Committee for GU Relations who said he moved to Burleith very recently, led a portion of the presentation off of a slide entitled “Burelith—A Village or a GU Dorm?” He also said that the neighborhood’s close proximity to Georgetown gave residents access to “interesting lectures and fine arts programs.” But these benefits of living so close to Georgetown, he said, had begun to be outweighed by the downsides.

“In a nutshell, GU students living in our community are affecting our community’s health, crime, and domestic tranquility,” he said.

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