Photo by Brownpau.
Good morning Georgetown, here’s the latest:
- Students uncover emails showing a lot of discussions between the ANC and the Office of Planning before OP’s report was published on the campus plan. Of course, anyone that was familiar with the ANC’s own conclusions should have recognized how similar OP’s report was to them. Whether you view this a nefarious or simple lobbying probably correlates to whether you’re for the campus plan or not. (And huzzah to the students for getting the emails, that was a sharp move.)
- Want your mascara to last six weeks? There’s apparently a place in Georgetown for that now.
The Georgetown Metropolitan 
Super cute cat.
Also note that other documents show a reconsideration of a zoning overlay for the area: http://dcstudentsspeak.org/2011/06/15/freedom-of-information-request-also-points-to-zoning-overlay-reconsideration/
I don’t see any sort of “smoking gun” here. I would have to presume that the University also lobbied OZ (or at least had the opportunity to) so what is the big deal?
It is not credible to say that “receiving advance copies of the plan, which you then make revisions to” is akin to “simple lobbying.” Certainly not in the case of an executive agency.
At the risk of repeating myself over and over again:
The purpose of the OP report is supposed to be for them to offer their professional take on the campus plan from the perspective of the District’s planning and development goals, the comprehensive plan, etc. They can take outside input into account to some extent, but the real mechanism for consideration of community and other views is supposed to be submissions and hearings before the ZC, NOT during the writing of the OP report. And certainly not to the extent demonstrated here.
This is akin to having a hearing before the City Council on some matter, where one of the parties to the hearing gets to ghostwrite portions of the testimony to be given by a DC government agency. It would be as if Wal-Mart coached OP people and edited their report prior to a council hearing on Wal-mart.
There’s a process for airing these parties’ claims, but they want to circumvent this and instead have them appear under the seal and imprimatur of a government agency. Introducing a claim as part of an official OP document makes it seem a lot more credible than if it is introduced before the Zoning Commission as “the testimony of Stephen R. Brown, Persona Non Grata in the State of Israel and Proprietor of DrunkenGeorgetownStudents.com”
The record also shows that OP had practically no contact with the University (one meeting, before the original plan was submitted, IIRC) and brushed off requests for communication from the student ANC, all the while given inappropriately extensive access to other parties.