Happy New Year! Here is your January Northwest Georgetown ANC update:
Volta Park Update
I have been receiving many questions from constituents asking about the status of the Volta Park field renovation. As many have observed, after an initial flurry of work, it appeared that the construction ground to a halt in the early fall. I was repeatedly told by DPR that there was an issue with a pipe order. I had a growing doubt about that explanation, so I had a long conversation with the DPR rep in December. He assured me once more that as well as the delay over the pipe order, the contractor had run into some unexpected issues at the site, including the discovery of an ancient pipe that wasn’t on any of the existing maps. But he assured me that work was continuing even though it didn’t always look like it.
And last week DPR issued an official update on the project, which you can see below:
The ket takeaway from this recent update is that they are forecasting a completion date of this spring. I am not sure whether that also includes time for the grass to grow, during which the field will continue to be off-limits or not. I will update when I find out.
This has been a frustrating project, but I hope the final result will be worth the wait.
(Since first sending this update out on Saturday, I became aware of this article where a resident reports finding human remains on the worksite. I am very alarmed at that and am following up for answers from DPR.)
Parking
The TL:DR version: We’re thinking about pursuing the addition of resident-only parking for parts of Georgetown. Fill out this form to let me know what you think.
As discussed at the December ANC meeting, a few of my colleagues and I are exploring the possibility of introducing resident-only parking in Georgetown. We’ve continued to have discussions with the city since then and are eager to learn more about what is possible and what people think about the idea.
In short, this is how resident-only parking (or “ROP”) works: Right now, most of the residential blocks in Georgetown allow for anyone to park for 2 hours while residents with a Zone 2 parking permit can park an unlimited time. These are known as “RPP” spots (i.e. Residential Parking Permit spots). With the ROP program, a portion of these spots would changed to require a Zone 2 permits to park in them at all during some or all hours. So if you don’t have a Zone 2 sticker, you can’t park in that spot during the restricted hours.
Typically when DDOT implements this program, it sets aside approximately 50% of the spots on each included block as resident-only. And generally they simply designate one-side of the street as resident-only. (If there is parking only on one side of the street, they split whatever there is there between ROP and RPP.)
In other words, on ROP blocks, half the parking would be essentially reserved for people with Zone 2 stickers for some period of the day (or all day). The other half would remain as they current are, namely that anyone can park there for two hours and residents can park there unlimited. (And like now, the two hour rule doesn’t apply to non-residents when they park overnight, on Sundays or on holidays.) Residents can continue to park unlimited in all of the spaces. (And people with valid visitors parking passes can also continue to park just like a resident in any of the spaces.)
I first explored this option almost three years ago. This was driven by the sharp uptick in non-residents completely ignoring the two hour rule. It is fairly obvious that during the height of Covid, when the city basically stopped ticketing, a lot of people who routinely come to Georgetown for work or other reasons got used to simply driving here and parking all day long. While the city reintroduced ticketing a long time ago, it’s clear that they are not effectively enforcing this particular rule.
And the statistics back up this observation. I recently learned that the city publishes data on each and every parking ticket it issues. The dataset is gigantic, and frankly I don’t have the know-how to look at the data over a long period of time. But I took January 2019 and compared it to January 2025 as a way to compare pre and post Covid. The results were shocking.
In January 2019, the city issued roughly 6,800 tickets in Georgetown. Last January they only issued about 3,500. That’s basically a 50% drop.
And even more alarming, in January 2019, the city issued about 2,100 tickets for cars exceeding the 2 hour rule. Last January the city only wrote 650. That’s a 70% drop. Do you think there’s been a 70% drop in people exceeding the 2 hour rule? I sure don’t.
Since first floating the idea three years ago, I wanted to first explore what could be accomplished working directly with DPW to ask for more enforcement. The numbers show that this was mostly futile. A different approach is necessary.
The primary challenge to enforcing the two hour rule is that it requires a ticketing agent to:
A. Notice the car
B. Wait at least two hours
C. Come back and notice the car again, and
D. Decide to actually issue the ticket.
People who want to come and park all-day in Georgetown face a fairly low risk of getting a ticket as a result. And even if they do get a ticket, it’s only for $35. That’s a fairly safe gamble for a daily commuter who’d rather not pay to use a garage instead.
The advantage to ROP parking is that when a non-resident parks there, the DPW ticketing officer only needs to come by once to give the ticket. And moreover, the ticket can be issued immediately after the person parks and walks away, not hours later. Obviously it still depends on some enforcement—and staffing shortages are surely impacting DPW’s abilities on that front—but lowering the threshold for a violation most certainly changes the risk calculation substantially.
There are obviously trade-offs for a ROP program. Residents might find it harder to get a spot in the normal RPP spots if all the non-residents are forced to park there. So if your side of the block is the RPP side, you might have a tougher time finding a spot directly in front of your house. (Ideally this would be off-set by the increased chance that you’ll get a spot on your block in the first place.) Additionally, non-residents will likely have to drive further away from M and Wisconsin to find parking, which has the potential to impact parking supply on blocks far from the commercial streets. These are considerations that I think we need to keep in mind.
This would not be a perfect solution. But it’s really the only tool the city is offering us at this time and right now I think on balance it would be an improvement to the quality of life of Georgetown residents.
The process to actually implement this is not short, and if we do move forward with asking DDOT to give us a proposal, there will still be plenty of discussions to be had with all the relevant stakeholders concerning what the program would look like and whether we should do it in the first place. Right now. what I’d love to hear from my constituents is this:
- What do you think of the idea?
- Would you want it on your block?
- What concerns do you have if we do move forward with it?
Please fill out this form to let me know the answers to these questions! Alternatively, you can email me your thoughts at 2e02@anc.dc.gov.
The Georgetown Metropolitan 