District Dig article on McMillan: "Heads in the Sand"

Click on the link to read the entire District Dig article by Jeffrey Anderson.

Here is a comment on this District Dig article by Stronghold resident Kirby Vining.

From: HistoricWashington@yahoogroups.com
Sent: Saturday, September 29, 2018 7:50 PM
To: HistoricWashington@yahoogroups.com
Subject: [HistoricWashington] What`s Behind McMillan Case`s Return to Court October 17?   
                                   

Investigative journalist Jeffrey Anderson has just published on his District Dig blog a piece looking closely at what is behind the return to court of the McMillan site development case and what has gone on since the Mayor's "sand breaking" event on December 7th, 2016, intended to kick off demolition and development of the McMillan site (and the December 8th ruling by the D.C. Court of Appeals overturning the zoning and preservation decisions the city made).  

                                                                                      

Take a look for some very carefully written details, including plain-language rendering of some extremely technical legal arguments.  And as you read, ask yourself why the major papers in this town are not covering this story.  We know that the administration asked the major papers not to publish anything about any opposition to the Mayor's project -- that's a fact -- but apparently the major papers have agreed to avoid the subject.  So we have Mr. Anderson's piece, in spite of efforts to silence this story. 

                                                            

September 28, 2018

Heads in the Sand

Did Mayor Bowser’s “Big Deal” team listen to the court in the McMillan case? Or did they just listen to themselves?

By Jeffrey Anderson | Photographs by Andy DelGiudice

The skies were clear and blue in the winter sunlight in early December 2016, as Mayor Muriel Bowser plunged a gleaming shovel into a pile of sand and declared the ground broken at McMillan Sand Filtration Facility.

It was a perfect day for a groundbreaking, a proud moment for a business-minded mayor whose mother often asks her, “When are they going to do something with that site?”

The 25-acre expanse on North Capitol Street with the odd cylindrical towers marks a historic landmark that served as D.C.’s primary water filtration facility for most of the 20th century, and has become ground zero for resistance to developer-driven city planning in recent years.

Make that decades. Since the 1990s, citizens groups have protested, advocated, agitated and litigated to force the city to develop the site with less density, more green space and an emphasis on historic preservation.

Yet as Bowser and a phalanx of city officials, builders and political players posed for TV cameras one could imagine the sound of bulldozers.
…