Here’s your February Northwest Georgetown ANC update:
Leaf Collection
The city’s leaf collection continues to disappoint as much as the snow gods have. Residents dutifully piled leaves in tree-boxes or packed them into garden waste bags, but the DPW crews came weeks late. In the meantime the leaves scattered and the paper bags disintegrated in the weather. The ANC sent a letter to DPW in response that stated in part:
It was extremely frustrating for our residents to rush to have leaves neatly raked into tree boxes only to wait for weeks for them to be collected with no updates from your agency. Furthermore, the deteriorating situation became dangerous at a certain point when leaves became wet and froze in clumps causing dangerous conditions for pedestrians. As you may or may not be aware, Georgetown has very old infrastructure and older/narrower pipes can become clogged from uncollected leaves.
Lastly, many of our neighbors have bagged their leaves into paper bags (as required by the District of Columbia) and called 3-1-1 for pick up only to have the paper bags sit for weeks and ultimately break down with leaves scattering the sidewalks and roads. For the remaining weeks left, we request DPW pick up the paper bags with Christmas trees.
Moving forward, DPW needs to roll out an entirely new communications and collection plan for Fall 2023 based on experience to date.
The focus going forward will be not on expecting DPW to perfectly predict months in advance how the collection will pan out, but rather on getting alerts much closer to the actual pick-up days. This will allow residents to wait to collect or put out leaves until just before they get collected, thus maximizing how many leaves actually get into their trucks and off our sidewalks and streets.
Quick Bites
Before I get to a somewhat lengthy summary of our ANC meetings, here are a couple quick bites of information you might like to know:
- The Volta Park field restoration is set to commence this fall. I am scheduling a meeting soon in the park with DPR officials and members of the Friends of Volta Park. I will pressure the city to keep to the schedule and ensure that the scope of the project is as broad as possible, given the budget.
- Parking tickets happen, but sometimes you don’t realized they happened to you until it’s too late. To avoid this, you can sign up for the DMV’s ticker alert system. This way you’ll get an email when you get a ticket, and you can pay it on-time (or contest it if you’re feeling lucky) and not get hit with the fine doubling after 30 days.
- No turn on red signs were added to Reservoir and Wisconsin, helping protect pedestrians from drivers who often don’t come to a stop or look to the right before turning.
- If you are interest in enrolling your children at Hyde-Addison for Pre-k next year, you’ll have to sign up at My School DC by March 1st.
- 🍩District Donuts🍩 are coming back to M St.!
- New Açai bowl shop opens in our district!
- Volunteers painted new pickleball court lines in the Volta Park basketball court.
- Georgetown is cool again!!
Up and Running
Since my last update, we’ve actually squeezed in two ANC meetings. The first was our January session, which was dominated by administrative matters. Most notably, we elected Elizabeth Miller to serve as chair, with Gwen Lhose serving as vice-chair, John DiPierri as secretary and Joe Massaua as treasurer. Elizabeth is dedicated to running a tight ship, so anyone speaking before the ANC better get their “elevator pitches” down pat!
On the substantive side, we took several actions we hope will lead to improvements around the neighborhood. This includes deciding to send the letter regarding leaves discussed above. Additionally we supported a proposal to remove several parking meters on N St. along the north side of Foxtrot Market. This stretch often gets gridlocked due to the fact it’s a bit too narrow for two-way traffic and the parking lanes. Removing those metered spaces should help ease the flow without limiting residential parking on the block.
Further we voted to send a letter to the city asking it to address crosswalks that are in disrepair around the neighborhood. We want the city to ensure that all crosswalks are high-visibility with the “ladder” style paint jobs. I walked throughout our district and found only one crosswalk that lacked some high-visibility crossings (34th and Q) and added it to our list of deficient crosswalks. Hopefully the city will address all the deficient crossings and pedestrian safety will be suitably improved.
Since the Old Georgetown Board didn’t meet in January, we had no OGB projects to review and the meeting ended at a reasonable hour. The February meeting was a horse of a different color however.
But before we got to the OGB calendar we had several notable items to discuss. One is the arrival of a new high-end sushi restaurant in the former L2 space across from Kafe Leopold. It will be called Kyojin Sushi and it will be the sister restaurant to Yume Sushi in Arlington. The proprietors are asking for late hours, but they say they are aiming for less of a club vibe than L2. And physically speaking, this is a location that is unlikely to cause many issues with late hours. So I believe they will open with the hours they ask for.
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