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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When Georgetown announced plans to establish Magis Row, the block of 16 townhouses designated for living and learning communities that sit on the only strip of University property facing residential homes, the Voice editorial board and many students instantly suspected that Magis Row was appeasement for neighbors frustrated by student trash and noise.

A set of e-mails that the Voice obtained under the Freedom of Information Act reveal that Magis Row’s establishment followed months of meetings between University administrators and community leaders in which the leaders tried to effect changes in student housing.  They also show that neighbors hope the University will turn more student housing outside the front gates into LLCs, too.

The FOIA request, which the Voice filed in March, obtained e-mails sent between Citizens’ Association of Georgetown directors and officers and members of Georgetown’s Advisory Neighborhood Commission 2E. Before submitting the results, the ANC redacted some street names and the names of the CAG members and ANC commissioners who sent and received the e-mails. Ron Lewis, the chair of ANC 2E, wrote in a letter accompanying the FOIA requests that redactions were made according to advice from the D.C. government.

Although it is unclear when the University or neighbors conceived of Magis Row, a September 1 e-mail indicates that neighborhood had long been trying to influence the makeup of student housing outside Georgetown’s gates, and the Georgetown had been attentive to their complaints.

“We have been in monthly meetings to discuss numerous student issues that effect the whole of Georgetown,” the sender wrote. The sender added that with regards to an unspecified block of academic housing which had been designated as normal student housing for that year, “We have solid commitments that that will change in the 2009 academic year.”

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Click image to enlarge, or download the PDF

There are elegant townhouses aplenty in Georgetown, but have you ever wondered who exactly our influential neighbors residing in the multimillion dollar abodes are?

Lucky for you, this week’s issue of The Georgetowner features a two-page spread (above) showing where some of the most important and influential Georgetown residents live. Though the map is a bit hard to read, the list of VIPs is quite impressive, consisting mostly of politicians, influential journalists, and other Washington heavyweights.

John Kerry and Teresa Hines and New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd show up on N Street, while Senator Arlen Spector and Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi appear down near K Street. Ben Bradlee and Sally Quinn, two former Washington Post editors, live on 30th Street, just a block away from famous Watergate journalist and author Bob Woodward.

The wide world of sports is represented, too—Paul Tagliabue, former NFL commissioner (and current chair of Georgetown’s Board of Directors), and Mark and Judy Lerner, owners of the Washington Nationals, live in Hillandale and by the waterfront, respectively. The rest of the list is rounded off by a mixture of television and print journalists, White House advisors, and philanthropists.

It’s a wonderful politically powerful day in the neighborhood!

Move-in time is a rather stressful period for everyone, but some of us handle it better than others.  One neighbor who’s not quite enthused by Georgetown students’ return?  “Alison,” the author of the blog Holden It Together.

In a Saturday post she welcomed us back a list of expectations, starting with this:

1) If it is at all possible, it would be lovely if you could keep your used condoms and your underwear out of my tree.

She goes on to explain that she will respectfully wait until 2 a.m. to call the police about parties, will not be amused if you throw up on her steps and would appreciate us taking care of our trash.

Overall, a fairly reasonable list of requests.  But then the next day, she launched into a full-on tirade about how lazy, entitled and sweaty we all are:

Returning from my run this morning, my little slice of quiet historic DC heaven has been taken over quite literally by an army of parents carrying load after load of crap from their respective mini-vans with mid-western plates into the neighboring houses …

The actual students are standing around chatting and drinking $5 coffee … I also refrain from asking [from asking one mother for her] email addresses to send pictures of their daughters’ multiple night time visitors and panties that will inevitably end up off of their bodies and somewhere in my neighborhood …

The international students won’t arrive until the very last minute, sending their “people” to set up their houses and purchase their books.  It is a wonder how they survive the school year alone, but they must have learned to wipe themselves and order in.

Inert and inept as we may be when it comes to moving, there are a few things we’re capable of, according to Alison: throwing obnoxious parties, making crime rates increase, and waging war against residents.

Nice to meet you, too, neighbor!

The West Village People: like this, but more concerned about trash and student noise

With the battle over Georgetown’s 2010 campus plan starting to heat up, a couple of new neighborhood groups have been formed to defend the interests of permanent residents, according to an article in the most recent edition of the Georgetown Current [PDF].

About three months ago, the “West Village People” group was formed as a way for permanent residents living close to the University to communicate their grievances.

Members send comments and complaints about the University and its students to gtown411@ymail.com. The anonymous person behind the email account then removes all personal information from the complaint and sends it out to Georgetown’s Advisory Neighborhood Commission, the Citizen’s Association of Georgetown and sometimes the University.

More recently, CAG has formed a committee to deal specifically with “longstanding differences” between neighbors and GU, mostly “quality of life” issues like alcohol, noise and trash, as well as the 2010 campus plan.

More about the new committee’s plans after the jump!

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You’ve come a long way, baby

The Wisconsin Ave. Safeway has been closed for about a month and a half and construction has started in earnest.

Unsurprisingly, it’s already started to irk the neighbors. On the GeorgetownForum listerv, a resident named Michael wrote yesterday:

Construction vehicles at the 1855 Wisconsin Ave site started at 6:30 AM today with their beep beep beep alarms, audible from at least 2 blocks away. Tuesday June 9 they finished after 11:15 PM. Are there limits on when construction activity can occur and if so, who’s responsible for enforcing them? How can the community assure the volume of the beep beep beep be muffled so they can be heard on site and not 2 or more blocks away from the site?

No one is against construction activity if it really has to proceed late at night. The community wants a grocery store sooner rather than later. It seems we can have both the construction activity and reasonable noise levels in the neighborhood. Any ideas?

Now that’s a pretty reasonable complaint, especially by local listerv standards. According to Safeway’s website (www.socialsafeway.com, I kid you not…), they’re doing special nighttime construction this week, so that may explain the after hours beeping. Still, it’s going to be a long year on the listservs…

How’s the actual construction going, though, you might wonder. The ever-obliging Safeway has set up a construction webcam which is updated daily with a new, impressively high-resolution photo of the site. So now you can stare longingly at the mound of dirt, remembering the good old days when it used to house actual groceries, as you try to figure out what else to add to your online cart to get to the $50 free-delivery threshold…

Photo from Safeway’s construction webcam.

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.”

On Sunday, Molly Redden offered an overview of Saturday’s six-hour-long community meeting (yes, we stayed the whole time, and not just for the paltry cold cuts lunch buffet). The first part of the meeting, in which the campus plan’s architects from Cooper, Robertson & Partners presented their overview of possible options for campus development, went rather smoothly and quite quickly. But only because most of the attendees were champing at the bit to get to the next, and last, item on the meeting’s agenda: the open discussion.

Having attended a community meeting before, in which “open discussion” was the only agenda, I steeled myself for a long afternoon of student berating. There was, in fact, less than I expected—as Molly will cover on Thursday, Georgetown neighbors spent as much time hammering the University on the “adverse impact” of the traffic it draws to the area as they did bemoaning the students’ day-to-day drunkenness, noisiness, littering and general lack of consideration for others.

University architect Alan Brangman kicked off the discussion with a presentation of the University’s physical boundaries, which were set in 1966 by the National Capital Planning Commission. Brangman had a brief tiff with one of the neighbors over boundary lines, specifically regarding the houses on the 36th Street between O and P Streets and the 3500 block of Prospect Street, which Georgetown acquired after boundaries were set. The houses’ backyards fall within University property lines—the houses themselves do not.

The houses, however, are considered on-campus, or at least their beds are included in the on-campus bed count. The neighbor took issue with this tactic, because he and his fellow community members consider the houses off-campus. Essentially, they are unsettled by the “gray area” surrounding Georgetown’s loose definition of on-campus beds—if the University can buy up houses outside the property lines and count them as on-campus, what’s to stop it from encroaching further into the neighborhood?

The question is a valid one. While Georgetown hasn’t expanded much more into the neighborhood, Associate Vice President for External Relations Linda Greenan said that when houses come up for sale, often the University takes a look at them, adding for reassurance, perhaps: “and often we don’t buy them.”

Nevertheless, Georgetown and the community members seem to be at an impasse. Brangman said that currently there are no plans to change the “on-campus” status of the disputed student townhouses. In a particularly heated moment, a neighbor offered Brangman the analogy: “Just because [you] own a gun doesn’t mean you can shoot me.”

“But I might,” Brangman said.

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Most people see graduations as joyful, special occasions. Not our neighbor, Matthew Donahue, though.

In response to an announcement of transportation recommendations for grads and their guests on the GeorgetownForum listerv, which included information about which streets would be closed for parking (3700 block of Prospect Street, 3600 block of O Street, 1200 and 1300 blocks of 37th Street and 3600 block of N Street NW), Donahue sent one of the grumpier emails ever written:

I object to Georgetown University closing streets and making certain streets one-way and having their campus police impersonate DC Metropolitan Police enforcing their illegal behavior. They prohibit parking space for my guests. They deprive parking space for Holy Trinity parishioners. They deprive the District of Columbia income from the parking meters. Were such proposals presented to the ANC?

Sincerely,
Matthew E. Donahue

Would you like a little cheese with that whine?

Photo from Flickr user michellebflickr, used under a Creative Commons license.