The following posts from The Mail lay out my take on what has happened/been revealed since the Mayor's July 10th announcement.
Long story short, we've moved from a stage in which the fate of this project was in the Mayor's hands to one in which it's now the Council's decision. The Cheh/Brown letters (released to the public only after being reported on in the media) suggest that the CMs are starting to step up to the plate, but aren't exactly power hitters yet. Then again, what we're seeing now is just pre-season warm-ups. The Council doesn't return from its summer recess until mid-September.
UPDATE: Had a very reassuring meeting with Kwame Brown this morning (Wednesday). He clearly intends to take the Council's oversight role seriously. Expect at least two public hearings on this project next Spring from his committee (Economic Development) and, of course, Government Operations will need to hold a hearing on the surplussing issue as well. If Carol Schwartz (its Chair) survives the primary, I think she, too, will want to see this project thoroughly vetted.
Tales from Tenley (August 10th)
One month after the mayor pulled the plug on DC Public Libraries’ imminent reconstruction of the Tenley-Friendship library and handed that project and the adjacent Janney Elementary School modernization over to Deputy Mayor Neil Albert, the story has become even more fantastic. It turns out that the deal the Mayor was touting — a project involving 120-130 units of housing and “no loss of green space,” according to his July 10 press release — was a complete fiction. The development “partner” whom Fenty named had not agreed to these terms or anything like them. LCOR’s same-day press release referred to an 174-unit project, and Tim Smith, an LCOR Vice President, subsequently confirmed that the company had made no “best and final offer.” In fact, their only offer was the one that the community had seen last February. And that proposal consumed all of Janney’s playing field as well as a portion of the teachers’ parking lot.
But apparently it wasn’t just the community that Fenty and Albert were misleading when they suggested that subsequent negotiations had produced a new and much better plan. Ward 3 Council Member Mary Cheh, standing by the mayor’s side but looking uncharacteristically ill-at-ease, had written to Albert back in April, indicating that she found LCOR’s plan to be unacceptable.
Like LCOR, she had been called the night before and asked to attend the press conference the next morning. There was no opportunity for her to see the new (nonexistent) plan before she arrived. Once she learned that the new plan was essentially the same as the old plan, Cheh and Kwame Brown (who, as Chairman of the Council’s Committee on Economic Development, serves an important gate-keeping function on projects like this — if, that is, such projects actually are taken to the council before they are faits accompli) sent another letter to Neil Albert on July 24. According to three different media accounts this past week, that letter laid out a number of “essential conditions” that would have to be met before these Councilmembers could offer their support for the LCOR deal.
None of these conditions have been met (and, frankly, some probably cannot be met), so Cheh and Brown apparently are, for now at least, opposed to the deal. This is an important turn of events, since it was another letter from Cheh and Brown, sent to the mayor in June of last year, whose support for a public-private venture helped put the school and library land on the auction block in the first place.
So now we know that Fenty and Albert subverted the council, misrepresented the project to the community and to the Ward Councilmember, and announced a deal their putative partner had never agreed to. On top of that, the deal that LCOR has offered is a really bad one for the community. It will provide us with fewer/worse public facilities, delivered later, and at greater public expense. I’m delighted to see Cheh “join the opposition,” as the Post put it. Of course, talk’s cheap, and it’s a little unnerving to hear Cheh, once again, talking about “crossing her fingers” and hoping for the best. It’s time for the Council to develop and enforce standards (both procedural and substantive) for ensuring that public land deals serve the public interest rather than just enhance the power of the executive by providing a vast source of patronage.
Tenleytown Follies (August 17th)
In this week’s episode, Mary Cheh makes her letters to Neil Albert public. And standards are lowered, but still not met.
When Councilmembers Cheh and Brown wrote to the deputy mayor in early April, after seeing all three submissions received in response to the Tenleytown Request for Proposals, they stated “we cannot support any of the three proposals in their current form.” By late July, they are saying, “one possible way to move this project forward is to revert back to some of the features of the other developers’ plans.” In other words (judging from the suggestions that follow), if only LCOR would adopt Roadside’s (hitherto unacceptable) plan, we could support this project.
Meanwhile the affordable housing requirement for the project has fallen from 30 percent to 8 percent (less than would be required under mandatory inclusionary zoning). And Cheh and Brown find themselves begging for assurances (from an agency that has just betrayed their trust) that we’ll break even or not lose too much by accepting this deal — “no loss of “green space for Janney,” “no undue delay in building the library,” “LEED Silver” (when the DC Public Library’s architects think they have achieved Gold.)
While it’s a step in the right direction to see Councilmembers beginning to set standards for public land deals, Cheh and Brown’s “essential ingredients” don’t include the most basic features that should be necessary to justify devoting part of this heavily used campus to private development. There’s no requirement that Janney’s facilities needs be met before land is devoted to non-educational uses, that the school be modernized faster than it would without a public-private partnership (a requirement present in their April letter), or that the deal produce a better library than we’d otherwise have.
Is anyone at the table actually looking out for the community’s interests? When we point out that our facilities needs are being sacrificed to build apartments that could be built on private land in the immediate vicinity, we’re told not to worry because the Deputy Mayor for Planning and Economic Development and LCOR have “just begun negotiations.”
But there’s a difference between "having made no progress over the past seven months" and “just beginning.” LCOR submitted their proposal the first week in January and they haven’t budged since, despite being asked (at least twice) by DMPED to make a better offer. Why should they? They were selected despite the fact that a united community and the only two Councilmembers to weigh in all considered their proposal unacceptable. As long as these Councilmembers keep lowering their expectations, it’s just a waiting game.
And experience tells them it could be worth the wait. Last time LCOR negotiated with DC government, they emerged with (and quickly sold!) a property tax break lasting more than twenty years for the apartment tower they built. And Oyster’s students lost more than half of their already comparatively small campus.
This whole episode is a case study in why we need to reform (or at least enforce) our process for disposing of public property. The threshold question here should have been “is there land at this site that is no longer needed for public use?” But DMPED chose to skip that step (also known as the surplusing decision) and the council chose not to object. As a result, this project has been driven by ideology and wishful thinking rather than an analysis of public facilities needs and the economic and physical constraints of this particular site.
When every submission the RFP yielded was unacceptable because it didn’t provide the “hoped for” benefits, that should have functioned as a reality check for the Mayor and the Councilmembers who urged this project forward in the first place. It certainly did for the community — once people saw the actual proposals, a consensus quickly emerged that a public-private partnership was not the right approach to this site. The mayor created that consensus (by issuing the RFP) and then ignored it.
The question now is whether Councilmembers Cheh and Brown (and the Council generally) will stop this madness or just content themselves with wringing their hands, crossing their fingers, and passing the buck. Stay tuned.
