Georgetown 2028 Report Finalized

Last week, the board of the Georgetown BID approved the final report of the Georgetown 2028 task force. GM was on the task force in his capacity as a CAG board member, so he was restricted in talking very much about the details here. Now that the report is finalized, he’s free to walk you through all the great things that are in it. He’ll spend the next several days doing so.

Today he’s going to talk big picture, and the big picturest item in the report is just one word: Metro.

Early on in the process, it became abundantly clear that when trying to plan for the future of Georgetown, the elephant in the room is Metro. Transportation is such a critical challenge for Georgetown, and there is no solution more dramatic and effective than Metro.

The long term planners for WMATA have floated plans for at least one Georgetown but the time frame is 2040. Meetings with the planners revealed that that time frame was not due to logistics but rather politics. If the politics were changed, the time frame could be changed too.

That’s where Georgetown 2028 comes in. It proposes to move that time frame up by twelve years. It’s a goal that the BID, the Georgetown Business Association, Georgetown University, the ANC, and CAG have rallied behind.

Putting out a report and getting some resolutions of course is not going to mean the difference between Georgetown getting a Metro or not. But the hope is that it is only the beginning to a concerted political effort that can change the time frame for Metro.

Ultimately it might take the creation of an entity similar to the Metropolitan Washington Airports Authority to drive the project. But to get to that point, we need institutions like the BID and GU lining up behind the idea, and that is now a box that can be checked.

Tomorrow GM will talk about the smaller transportation ideas floated by the report.