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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Photography by Helen Burton