Bloomingdale resident Mat Bader responds to ANC 5E's vote on 06-17-2014 to agree to the Vision McMillan Partner's final community benefit agreement

Date: Wed, 18 Jun 2014 08:44:48 -0400
Subject: Re: Fw: McM | Best and Final Amenities offer from VMP
From: struggle09@gmail.com
To: dianne_brns@yahoo.com  etc.
                                          

Dianne and other ANC 5E Commissioners,
    
I would just like to express a few thoughts.
      

1) Why is $500,000 set aside for 'docents' for the site? To the best of my knowledge this is an amenity suggested solely by VMP and has never been an amenity requested by residents of the community. Somehow this amenity has continued through the process. Can you please let me know in what CBA input the community posed this amenity suggestion?
         

2) The $1.25 million proffered for the interim shuttle service is NOT an amenity. This project cannot happen unless traffic in mitigated. It has been made clear that the traffic mitigation efforts proposed in the PUD application, and to be funded by the city, will not be in place once this development is complete. As such, this shuttle service is supposed to serve as a mitigation measure until the city can find the funding and institute the mitigation efforts. As such, this is a service that is required of VMP expressly because of this development. Not an additional amenity to offset the impact on the community. This should never have been included in a CBA as a proffer from VMP.
     

3) The construction management plan needs to be fleshed out. A very specific concern from residents is the condition of their houses before and after construction. It was discussed that pre-construction surveys need to take place prior to breaking ground in case damage is caused to house foundations as a result of this project. This was performed by DCWASA for the First Street Tunnel project and should be fairly easy to emulate in this project. There is no mention of performing such work in the construction management plan. At the very least this should be included.
            

All in all I am disappointed and believe the CBA agreed to is incredibly short-sighted. I appreciate that you all have met over the past month but the process and end result has both disenfranchised the residents of ANC 5E and set the neighborhood up to be severely disrupted by the development both during and following construction.
                     

Thank you for your consideration in reading this email,
                
Mat Bader