A while back, a Vox Populi post saw a rash of upset comments about the Georgetown University Hospital’s role in the 2010 Campus Plan. Specifically, a Vox reader noticed that in the open letter Citizens’ Association of Georgetown President Jennifer Altemus (COL ’88) had sent to University President John DeGioia outlining the community’s concerns about the proposed Ten Year Plan, she had made this suggestion regarding the Georgetown University Hospital:

“Relocating the hospital to another site on the University campus accessed from Canal Road would avoid these objectionable impacts and also create a large space for the construction of new student housing.”

Subsequent student commenters were not pleased, and responses ranged from this:

“What an idiot. She actually suggesting moving the hospital? I had thought the association was comprised of slightly cranky but generally reasonable non-student residents, but not actual extremists. The author is a true fool.”

To this:

“Jennifer Altemus deserves every bad thing that ever happens to her in her life.”

But Altemus’s suggestion that the University move the Hospital did not come out of nowhere. Vox is guessing that her comments derive from the fact that plans to build an entirely new Hospital facility really are part of Georgetown’s 2010 Campus Plan. Only, construction of a new facility isn’t going to free up any room for more student housing, because the current Hospital facilities don’t seem to be going anywhere.

Read more after the jump, plus some seriously nasty e-mails between a Georgetown alum and the CAG Vice President about the Hospital

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Wingardium leviosa!

The impending scuffle over the 2010 Campus Plan has the residents of Georgetown chatting about how to keep the University from creeping into their neighborhood. Last week, local leader Jennifer Altemus (COL ’88) announced over the georgetowforum listserv that she had sent President John DeGioia a letter outlining their concerns with the 2010 Campus Plan.

More recently, a man who identified himself as a graduate of the Georgetown Medical School kicked off a curious debate about the prospect of moving the Medical School. Vox was pretty surprised at some of the suggestions neighbors made in response to the his e-mail, particularly those from a resident who we’ll identify by his initials, “RR”:

[RR]: “if the University moved the Medical School next to the Law School and the owner of the hospital moved it to North Capitol next to Gonzaga College HS, we wouldn’t have these growth problems into the neighborhoods and campus housing would be on site.”

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The president of the Georgetown University Hospital, Dr. M. Joy Drass (left), recently got a new gig: executive vice president for operations of MedStar Health Washington, the company that operates the hospital.

In her new position, Drass will be responsible for “overseeing all operations, market strategy and program development of Georgetown University Hospital, Washington Hospital Center, National Rehabilitation Hospital and Montgomery General Hospital,” according to the Georgetowner.

Drass started in her new position last Wednesday and is no longer serving as president of the hospital, according to GU Hospital Director of Communications Marianne Worley. Dr. Richard Goldberg, who has been with the GU Hospital’s psychiatry department for the past 20 years and graduated from Georgetown Medical School, will be serving as interim president of the hospital.

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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