The ANC will be meeting next Monday night for our February meeting. The preliminary agenda is below, but one item I wanted to highlight is a request for diplomatic parking.
As I reported in October, Romania is opening diplomatic offices in the former Long and Foster building at the corner of Wisconsin and Reservoir. As the time, I cautioned that while I hadn’t heard anything about diplomatic parking space springing up, I would keep an eye on it.
When, they’ve since sprung up. A request was filed to convert several parking spaces along Wisconsin Ave. to diplomatic parking. Here is the proposed layout:
The green would remain normal parking. The orange would be converted to diplomatic parking. (The red would be an expansion of the corner no-parking zone to increase pedestrian visibility and safey.)
So the proposal appears to be establishing 3-4 new diplomatic parking spots on Wisconsin. That would be somewhat par for the course, but the fact is that the building already has off-street parking. There are about 9-10 off-street spots, in fact. I am not terribly open to turning over public space to the exclusive parking of an office building with its own private parking simply because the office is diplomatic in nature. I have asked for more clarity from DDOT about this, but have not heard back yet. I hope to have more information by Monday, but lacking it I will likely oppose this request. (That said, I am not terribly confident DDOT will listen to this, especially if the State Department has already approved it.)
Here is the complete agenda:
The Georgetown Metropolitan 
I hope the ANC will report on efforts to get DPW to remove the leaves and dead Christmas trees from our residential streets. I’ve lived in Georgetown for 45 years, and up until the last several years, DPW always did a good job in the fall and winter, removing leaves (often making at least two visits), and dead Christmas trees. Last year, and this year the service has been awful. DPW made only one visit to Georgetown this fall, before all the leaves had fallen, and as Feb.1 approaches, there are still dead Christmas trees on all the curbs and dead leaves everywhere. Why aren’t we getting decent service from DPW in Georgetown any more?