Attention Burleith residents:  If you don’t have time to write your own letter about Georgetown’s 2010 Campus Plan to University officials and local politicians, don’t worry—the Burleith Citizens Association is here to help.

The BCA created a form letter for residents of Burleith to send to a number of people who have the ability to affect the 2010 Campus Plan, including President John DeGioia, Mayor Adrian Fenty, Councilmember Jack Evans and Harriet Tregoning, Director of D.C.’s Office of Planning.

Like any good political campaign, the letter has a few misleading points—many of which Vox debunked following last month’s BCA meeting.

One such issue is the number of students that the University plans to add.  The BCA’s letter states that the current plan “to add close to 3,400 new students by 2020 without providing additional housing on campus or in satellite communities is unacceptable.”

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Our trip into Burleith yesterday got us thinking about a few things. Why should the residents be the only ones who get to have fun with signage? How can students get involved with the 2010 Campus Plan? And why has it been months since our last contest?

And so, in the spirit of fairness, we’re launching a “2010 Campus Plan” sign contest. All next week, we’ll be checking blog@georgetownvoice.com for submissions. If you’d like to enter, don’t forget to include your name, school, year, and a little bit about what inspired your sign.

Next Friday, we’ll choose our favorite signs and then pit them against one another in a vote. That’s right—you choose the winner! Lucky you!

The winner will receive a yet-to-be-determined prize.

After the jump, we’ve posted a sample sign to spark your creativity.

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If you’ve walked through Burleith lately, you’ve surely seen the red and white signs that have popped up on residents’ lawns over the past week.

The signs, which read “OPPOSE GU’s Campus Plan” and “Our Homes Not GU’s Dorm,” are a part of the Burleith Citizens’ Association’s campaign against the 2010 Campus Plan. As we’ve reported here (many, many times), Burleith residents largely oppose the 2010 Campus Plan because they worry about the consequences of increasing the graduate student enrollment.

Vox decided to take a stroll through Burleith this afternoon to talk to some residents about the signs. While some residents are knowledgeable about the 2010 Campus Plan, others remain poorly informed about the Plan’s details. And many, such as S Street homeowner Larry Torrez, only put up signs after BCA representatives knocked on their doors asking for support.

“Personally, I like the thought of living in a college town,” he said. “To be honest, this is a nice, sleepy, little neighborhood.”

But if student behavior can be ascribed to “college students being college students,” as Torrez argued, then why did he agree to put up the sign?

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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 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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Spring is in the air, and Burleith residents are concerned that the noise from partygoing Georgetown students is, too. So the Burleith Citizens Association has offered new a way to combat students students’ noise and “nuisance properties”—a database where residents can make their complaints about noisy, unkempt, or trash-filled properties a ‘historical record.’

In an e-mail to the Burleith listserv, BCA President Lenore Rubino advised residents to call 911 in addition to Georgetown’s party-busting service, the Student-Neighbor Assistance Program, when they want to report a noise problem. (“MPD has always advised us to use 911.”) But she also said that residents should use a new e-mail address to make an additional record of the problem house.

“Document what happened by sending an email to the BCA at
burleith911@gmail.com,” she wrote. “This new email will enable the BCA to maintain an historical database of all calls and events.” The database, the BCA said, would give neighbors a way to provide additional oversight on noise issues when talking to the Metropolitan Police Department and the Georgetown administration.

“Try to include as much information (address, time, description of noise). While the BCA welcomes photographs and videos, please make sure you follow privacy laws,” Rubino wrote, recommending the Wikipedia page for “Photography and the law.”

Meanwhile, the University is preparing for Spring partying, too. On March 24, Anne Koester, the director for Student Affairs, sent an e-mail out to the Georgetown community reminding residents of SNAP’s services.

Photo from Flickr user Ivy Dawned used under a Creative Commons license.