Sent: Friday, May 19, 2017 2:55 AM
Subject: McMillan- A Great DC Central Park or Tysons Corner? Recreation/Historic Green Space or Concrete Canyons?
We
need a public conversation, forums and Town Halls, since in no way have OUR
public servants done anything to gain consent from the people to
"re-develop" or give away OUR last open 25 acres of DC public land.
Pope Francis
"we have created new idols. The worship of the ancient Golden Calf
has returned in a new ruthless guise in
the idolatry of money and
the dictatorship of an impersonal economy lacking a truly human purpose"
The DC Govt. joint Vision McMillan Re-development plan scandal!
"you don't put condos on an Olmsted Park!!!" ------ Mrs.
Farrell McCoy DC historic Preservationist
McMillan Park links to articles and video
McMillan Coalition for Sustainable Agriculture
amglassart@yahoo.com
Tel: 202-232-8391
Excellent articles with additional links
http://www.huffingtonpost.
com/entry/the-fight-to-save- mcmillan-park_us_ 586fcb3ce4b0a5e600a78a2eExcellent articles with additional links
VIDEO
Bloomngdale elder Ms.Ella relates her childhood spent in the PARK,
the children called McMillan "paradise" and "our beach".
This message is also posted at the Bloomingdale Neighborhood blog:
http:// bloomingdaleneighborhood. blogspot.com/2017/04/intowner- mcmillan-park-redevelopment. html
McMillan Park Redevelopment Sinks Further into the Muck
Published: April 18th, 2017
By William G. Schulz*
Peoples Plan for McMillan Park as a World Class
"destination" and alternative to VMP
Prof. Miriam Gusevich Catholic University of America with Collage
City Studio You tube power point ignored by all DC agencies, McDuffie,
Commission on the Fine Arts, DC Historic Preservation Review Board, DC Zoning
Commission, DMPED, Office of Planning, etc.
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National Register of
Historic Places McMillan nomination
Architectural
Historian Kim Williams.
She describes a remarkably intact, fascinating, even charming engineering
marvel built as a hybrid city utiity and outdooor green recreation sward from
1888 to1906. For massive 50 structures, concrete canyons now slated for
demolition in violation of federal law.
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To force the VMP plan
down our throats the DC govt. hired Jamie Fontaine PR firm to "neutralize
opposition", a violation of the Constitutional right to "petition the
govt. for redress of grievances". When long term activist for McMillan,
Brookland landscape architect Mary Pat Rowan, testified to Bowser that Gray's
Deputy Mayor (DMPED) paid for the PR campaign and lied in City Council
testimony about his office paying for Fontaine! First historic restoration
professional Daniel Goldon Wolkoff testifies to Bowser on adaptive re-use of 25
acre McMillan Park in 2014.
DC Wolf Trap at McMillan outdoor concert stage with sunset vistas, Glen Echo arts/performance campus, Wine cellars, City Bazaar, Breweries and food services, performance space, public land for the public use, and ownership, start the Conservancy NOW! DC Central Park is looking for families to become "founders".
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The community struggle
to Save McMillan Park, preserving the ENTIRE "GREAT PLACE", Olmsted
designed surface-park and existing 20 acres underground, creates the exciting
potential for Sustainable large scale "indoor agriculture", and
numerous adaptive re-use that is consistent with Historic Preservation Law.
Parks are economic development.
Tel: 202-232-8391
Accompanying images can be viewed in the April 2017 issue pdf
A series of early April
filings with the DC Zoning Commission raises the smell of corruption and
levels of bureaucratic muck now surrounding — perhaps engulfing — the city’s
highly controversial plans to redevelop McMillan Park Reservoir, an historic
site which spans the Bloomingdale and LeDroit Park neighborhoods just to the
west of North Capitol Street and the seven-square block Stronghold neighborhood across North capitol in
Northeast.
Through Freedom of
Information Act (FOIA) requests, Friends of McMillan Park (FOMP) — the
neighborhood organization long opposed to redevelopment of the site as planned
by developers Vision McMillan Partners (VMP) — has produced more documentary
evidence of credible allegations of malfeasance and bribery that the city has
long kept buried.
The filings with the Zoning
Commission are part of so-called “remand hearings” now being held in response
to a DC Court of Appeals decision issued Dec. 28, 2016, that brought VMP’s
project to a screeching halt. As reported by The InTowner, in a
unanimous decision by a three-judge pa nel the court vacated the commission’s
remapping and Planned Unit Development (PUD) decisions that were a greenlight
for subdividing and redeveloping the 25-acre McMillan site. In fact, Mayor
Muriel Bowser held a groundbreaking ceremony at the site just one day before
release of the court’s decision which effectively shut the project down once
again.
One of the newly released
documents, a June, 2011 letter to former Mayor Vincent Gray, from an anonymous
ANC 5C commissioner, stated that the commissioners were “being bombarded and
even bullied to take a vote on the McMillan development plan by MVP,
particularly EYA [one of the developer partners that also includes Trammel Crow
and Jared Lynch]. We have been offered gifts of money, meals and ball game
tickets, etc. They have approached us with offers to help us in ‘anything. . .
. This is corruption and it comes at a time when the city is already under
scrutiny. . . .”
The letter writer further
stated, “I understand that McMillan has been a long time in the making, but it
is not fair that we are being pushed to the point of being bullied to hurry up
and vote of [sic] this.”
Another letter uncovered
through the FOIA process and filed by FOMP with the Zoning Commission strongly
rebuts VMP and the city’s conclusion that VMP’s high-density development of the
site is the only plan that can work:
“The demolition of 90% of
the underground vaults, paired with new construction of buildings reaching up
to 115 feet high, is not necessary,” Paul Millstein, a vice president of local
developer, Douglas Development Corporation, wrote to city officials in October
2014. “Proceeding with such a design would be destructive to the fabric of the
land without just cause. The cost-reward implications to the community and to
the District does not justify such a high-density development.”
The DC Mayor’s office and
City Council have been repeatedly criticized for choosing VMP through a
questionable, no-bid contract, and for also refusing to hear credible
alternatives to VMP’s radical redevelopment plan.
Kirby Vining of FOMP and the
McMillan Park Advisory Group says he has information that the Mayor’s office
may be conducting an investigation of the criminal allegations made by the
anonymous ANC commissioner to former Mayor Gray.
The McMillan project remains
on an indefinite hold as the Zoning Commission tries to make its way through
the list of remands from the Court of Appeals. Jason Klein, one of the
attorneys who argued the case for FOMP and affiliated opposition parties,
suggests that is a tall order.
“What the [court] said was
not that what the Zoning Commission did was not allowed, but the way they went
about it is illegal,” Klein told a University of the District of Columbia Law
School-hosted forum in late March. The Zoning Commission picked the policies
that supported their plan and ignored the rest, Klein said. “The court said to
the Commission, ‘you can’t just do whatever you want and give some willy-nilly
justification after the fact.’”
Klein is skeptical that
VMP’s project will restart anytime soon. On its remand, the court made clear
that a repeat of arguments in favor of the project won’t cut it. Justifications
for remapping and rezoning the McMillan site must be based on additional and
sufficient evidence to sway the court. What’s more, Klein said, any appeal of
the DCCA ruling would have to go to the U.S. Supreme Court where it is unlikely
to make it on to the high court’s docket.
[Editor’s note: Klein’s
forum talk,
followed by questions and answers can be viewed starting at 55:13.]
followed by questions and answers can be viewed starting at 55:13.]
FOMP’s Vining says he thinks
the city, at this point, is holding public hearings to save face while city
officials figu re out what to do next. The scheduled hearings are now
stretching into late April and early May.
Klein didn’t elaborate at
the UDC Law School forum, but another critical portion of the court’s ruling
held that a designation by the so-called Mayor’s Agent giving the McMillan site
“special merit” status to allow higher density and height development as well
as destruction of otherwise protected historic structures on the site, was not
valid. Such special merit designations, the court ruled, must be justified with
extensive documentation that the city ignored almost entirely. The VMP plan,
for example, would mostly destroy the remnants of a 19th century engineering
marvel — the old sand filtration units and underground caverns once used to
purify the city’s drinking water that in part gives the site its historic
landmark status.
As a key to unlock all of
the VMP project, the lack of a special merit designation forces VMP and the
city into a complete do-over.
And now the documents made
public by FOMP’s efforts would seem to further undermine the city and the
developer’s increasingly shaky arguments, justifications, and legal contortions
to allow them to subdivide the site, erect high-density office buildings, new
housing and retail space while leaving the city with but a shadow of the
original parkland for public use.
Still, it has begun to seem
that nothing VMP and city officials do in relation to McMillan Park is too
outrageous or scandalous to discredit the project or quell their determination
to move forward. While city officials and VMP long ago stopped speaking to the
media about the project, they have announced no plans to give up on or
significantly recalibrate the project.
Years of reporting on the
McMillan Park Reservoir redevelopment by The InTowner
reveals the widespread and strenuous objections of city residents about the
lengths officials are willing to go to see VMP’s plan happen:
Using taxpayer dollars to
hire a PR firm to discredit VMP’s opponents; flouting open-hearing and
competitive bidding laws to keep VMP — with little or no justification — as the
development team; ignoring land use covenants that conveyed when the parkland
was purchased by the city from the federal government some 30 years ago; and,
perhaps worst of all, for all of those 30 years keeping the beauty and sweeping
vistas of the McMillan Park Reservoir site off-limits to the public, and behind
a strong, chain-link fence.
* Associate Editor William G. Schulz, a resident of Dupont Circle since the
1980s, has been a journalist specializing in science and investigative
reporting for over 30 years.
DC Appeals Court Decision Vacate and Remand McMillan Zoning Order
and Mayor's Agent decisions
Jan. 8, 2017
Council Member Emails:
pmendelson@dccouncil.us
dgrosso@dccouncil.us
abonds@dccouncil.us
esilverman@dccouncil.us
rwhite@dccouncil.us
bnadeau@dccouncil.us
jevans@dccouncil.us
mcheh@dccouncil.us
btodd@dccouncil.us
kmcduffie@dccouncil.us
callen@dccouncil.us
vgray@dccouncil.us
pmendelson@dccouncil.us
dgrosso@dccouncil.us
abonds@dccouncil.us
esilverman@dccouncil.us
rwhite@dccouncil.us
bnadeau@dccouncil.us
jevans@dccouncil.us
mcheh@dccouncil.us
btodd@dccouncil.us
kmcduffie@dccouncil.us
callen@dccouncil.us
vgray@dccouncil.us
McMillan Park links
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