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.

The full letter is after the break. Read the rest of this entry »

Last night, the Advisory Neighborhood Commission held a special meeting to discuss the 2010 Campus Plan.

Ed Solomon chaired the meeting because ANC Chairman Ron Lewis was home sick.

The first, and longest, topic of the night was student housing. Solomon started the discussion off with some background on the issue: the rise in students living off-campus in the past ten years and the University’s response to it, which was called a “second stamp card”. He recited the litany of programs the University has in started then handed the microphone off to Provost Jim O’Donnell.

O’Donnell began the University’s response to the issue of student housing. He acknowledged the neighborhood’s concerns, but said, “We live under the constraint of finances.”  Vice President Todd Olson outlined the Campus Plan in how it would strengthen on-campus student life. He argued that projects such as the New South student center and the library extension would make campus a more appealing home. New requirements such as making all transfer students under 21 live on campus and having all off-campus students sign community contracts are other measures the plan includes, according to Olson.

Lenore Rubino, president of the Burleith Citizens Association, stated that 48 percent of houses in Burleith are rentals, most of which are occupied by students. According to her, this number will grow if the Campus Plan passes.

“Band-aid solutions do nothing to mitigate problems,” she said, referring to the measures Solomon outlined.  “The issue of students living off-campus needs to be addressed as nothing else will improve our quality of life,” she said to raucous applause from residents.

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Unsurprising to anyone who has followed Georgetown University’s 2010 Campus Plan—which the University officially filed last week—the Citizens Association of Georgetown and D.C. Councilman Jack Evans have come out against the proposal.

In a press release, Evans said he was “disappointed to learn that the University’s proposed campus plan does not include any significant action to move more undergraduate students onto the main campus.”

He did, however, praise the University for dropping the proposed 1789 block and the chimney extension from the plan.

Jennifer Altemus (COL ’88), president of the CAG, released a much more critical statement regarding the plan.

“The plan is disappointing in that it proposes no new student housing,” Altemus wrote. The University dropped the 1789 block plan, a proposal that would have created student housing, but was opposed by the CAG because it fell outside of the defined campus area of the University.

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After the alcohol policy’s resounding victory, we’re moving onto a new category: Georgetown alumni. Whose diploma do you wish Georgetown would take back and tear to shreds? We’ll keep the polls open for your votes until next week, when we’ll tackle a new category. Ultimately, you’ll choose the worst move ever made by Georgetown.

Jennifer Altemus (COL ’88)

Remember that time that Hogwarts conferred a wizardry degree upon Tom Riddle, and he subsequently became the evil Lord Voldemort and his alma mater’s greatest mortal enemy?

This is kind of like that.

In 1988, Jennifer Altemus graduated from the Georgetown College, and now, she has returned to the neighborhood to wreak havoc on student life via a robust campaign from the Citizens Association of Georgetown against the 2010 Campus Plan. (This was presumably after Provost O’Dumbledore refused to let her teach Defense Against the Dark Arts. We’ve even heard rumors that she hid a horcrux in President DeGioia’s office—but he’s never there, no one’s found it yet.)

Heir to a Citizens Association that insists your bus ride to Dupont Circle be over 4 miles long because Georgetown private property owners apparently have jurisdiction over some public streets, Altemus is even more trouble than your ordinary CAG president. Thanks to her Georgetown degree, she can claim (and local news outlets can imply) that she has an understanding of both students’ point of view and her neighbors’.

But don’t be fooled. She’s not on Georgetown’s side, she’s on CAG’s. And if they had it their way, there would be a butterbeer keg ban levied on the entire neighborhood.

—Molly Redden

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In response to Georgetown University’s “misleading” point-by-point letter, the Citizens’ Association of Georgetown (CAG) published a letter of its own, titled “Setting the Record Straight.”

In the letter, CAG accuses the University of violating D.C. zoning laws by “[tolerating] poor, substandard housing conditions, trash and rats, and disorderly behavior by its students living off campus … [creating] an unjustified burden on the surrounding communities, city services, and on GU’s own students.”

CAG President Jennifer Altemus (COL ’88) believes that the University needs to listen to members of the surrounding community.

“It is wrong for them to think that the community can accommodate this onslaught,” Altemus wrote on a community listserv. “We are saturated. Adding more to this mix is a recipe for disaster.”

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On Monday night, the Citizens Association of Georgetown held its first public meeting on the 2010 Campus Plan since the final draft of the plan came out last Fall. And even though a lot of what was said has been said before—why neighbors dislike the 2010 Campus Plan, why students make awful neighbors, etc., etc.—this meeting was a pretty big deal.

CAG didn’t just hold another rant session—it kicked off the first truly organized (monetarily and politically) movement Georgetown University will have to combat if it wants to pass its 2010 Campus Plan in one piece. Or, as Lydia DePillis of “Housing Complex” wrote, they held a council of war.

The GU Relations Committee, the group of citizens who are organizing CAG’s campaign to influence the plan, outlined the aspects of the plan that will negatively impact the Georgetown neighborho0d. CAG also passed out contact information for elected officials and urged residents at the meeting to lobby officials on the plan, and pushed residents to donate to the “Save Our Neighborhood” fund, to hire experts to testify against the plan in its official review stage. Then residents were given a chance to ask questions, make suggestions, and comment on CAG’s strategy.

Because this was a hefty meeting, Vox is going to recap this list-style, and in two separate posts. What follows is summary of neighborhood sentiment toward the campus plan. Later this afternoon, we’ll run a summary of some of the more interesting discoveries CAG made about the Georgetown neighborhood in its research.

The timeline:

Cynthia Pantazis, the chair of the GU Relations committee, kicked off the formal presentation.

“The core of this presentation is really about responsible growth in the community,” she said.

Pantazis laid out the timeline for the review of the 2010 Plan by the City. Georgetown will submit the 2010 Campus Plan to the D.C. Zoning Commission, and the Office of Planning will write a report on the plan within 90 days. Then the Zoning Commission will set public hearings on the plan—probably six to 10 of them.

“Parties are able to interface with the [Office of Planning] to provide information to them while they write their report, and CAG will definitely be a part of that.”

The best part of these posts are always the residents’ comments. They’re after the jump!

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I hope you’re happy, students of Georgetown. Because remember that string of posts we ran a while back, about how the Citizens Association of Georgetown, led by President Jennifer Altemus (COL ’88), was raising funds to defeat portions of the 2010 Campus Plan? And how neighborhood blogger Carol Joynt thought Georgetown was too good for D.C., and should secede? And how Philly Pizza had been shut down? And then you guys were all like, “What?? These neighbors are so crazy!!” and one of you left Altemus’s home address in the comments section?

Well, thanks to that, you’ve gained yourself notoriety in the pages of the Georgetown Current, which recently ran a story about the fight that’s heating up around the 2010 Campus Plan (pdf, page 7). When interviewed for the piece, Altemus took the opportunity to point out that when students get riled up about town-gown issues, you are not very nice. From the Current:

“Over the hours of community meetings, the tone of conversations between residents and university officials has been fairly civil, with some exceptions. But online opinions went quickly negative after university news blog ‘Vox Populi’ covered the fundraising campaign.

‘I don’t know why they have to get so personal,’ Altemus said of largely student-written comments, which included, along with epithets, her e-mail address, Facebook page and — at one point — her home address, which an editor later removed.

‘I wonder if they even know what’s in the plan,’ said Altemus.”

Altemus has a good point, because neighborhood residents are never, never mean and nasty when they respond to our blog posts, right?

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For this year’s March Madness, Vox has assembled the most eclectic group of tournament brackets Georgetown’s ever seen. Famous and “famous” Hoyas alike opted to fill out a bracket for our pool—and while characters like President John DeGioia, Provost Jim O’Donnell, and Professor Madeleine Albright declined to participate, don’t follow basketball very closely, and didn’t respond, respectively, we’re pumped to share the responses we did get.

Our pool pits alums like First Lady of South Carolina Jenny Sanford (MSB ’84), comedian Mike Birbiglia (COL ’00), and Washington City Paper’s Mike DeBonis (COL ’04), against professor Sen. Chuck Hagel, Dean of the College Chester Gillis, and Director of Student Programs Erika Cohen-Derr.

Students Nick Troiano (COL ’11) of GUSA, Corp CEO Brad Glasser (COL ’11), and ANC Commissioner Aaron Golds (COL ’11) are playing, as are CAG President Jennifer Altemus (COL ’88), Casual Hoya, and nodak89 (Chris Tiongson (COL ’89)), of musical fame.

There’s no prize for winning—just bragging rights. The entries are below, and you can click each image to make it bigger.

Jenny Sanford

Sanford has Kentucky winning it all. In her bracket, Georgetown loses to Ohio State in the Sweet Sixteen.

Chuck Hagel

Hagel has Kansas beating Georgetown in the Elite Eight. But there’s no shame in being beaten by the best, right?

Mike Birbiglia

Birbiglia’s true blue. He’s got Georgetown going all the way, beating Kentucky in the championship game.

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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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We’ve been speculating about whether or not the 2010 Campus Plan would be hampered by the kind of neighborhood opposition that beset the 2000 Campus Plan. We can stop wondering now. Georgetown alum and CAG President Jennifer Altemus (COL ’88) has announced that the Citizens’ Association of Georgetown is launching a campaign against the Campus Plan—and it’s not just an advocacy campaign.

“[I]t is clear that we will need support from experts to enhance our efforts in advocating the needs and concerns of the residential community,” Altemus wrote in an e-mail that went out over the Georgetownforum listserv. “To that end, we are asking you to help us fund this important effort.”

She goes on to ask residents to visit the CAG website and donate to the “Save Our Neighborhood” fund, where suggested donations start at $300 and go up to $5,000. Or neighbors can make a (tax-deductible) donation of any amount. In either case, they’ll receive an invitation to the “Save Our Neighborhood” cocktail party at Georgetown restaurant il Canale.

She also announced an April meeting among neighbors to discuss the 2010 Campus Plan specifically from the neighbors’ point of view.

Members of the CAG and the Advisory Neighborhood Commissioners have made no secret of how much they dislike Georgetown’s 2010 Campus Plan. Even at a community meeting where Georgetown administrators more or less promised that they were rerouting the GUTS buses according to the ANC’s wishes, ANC Commissioner Ron Lewis openly threatened to impede the plan’s passage if Georgetown did not acquiesce to more neighborhood demands.

“There is a problem,” he said. “And the problem is that people who come to your classes are jamming up our streets by parking. It’s not our role, it’s not our job to figure out the solution—it’s the University’s. But there is the problem. And unless the problem goes away, it’s going to be a problem for the plan.”

I guess those problems start now. Read Altemus’ full letter after the jump.

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