Single Member District 3 of the Georgetown Advisory Neighborhood Commission, which includes Copley and Harbin Halls, as well as dozens of student townhouses, also hosts the strongest opposition to Georgetown’s 2010 Campus Plan. The winner of the November’s ANC election will be an important voice in ongoing debates over the plan as the community pushes the University for more concessions.
Unfortunately, the only candidate on the ballot to replace incumbent Bill Skelsey is Jeffrey Jones, who explicitly avoided voicing his position on the campus plan. When asked about his stance by the Voice, Jones said, “I don’t want to say anything that could inflame either side at this point.” Jones’s vague position on the plan—the central issue for many of his potential constituents—is unacceptable. Before he is elected, Jones must be more open to discussing the plan with both the residents and the students that he is running to represent. But student residents of Single Member District 3 must pressure him to have these discussions. The approximately 700 students who live in the district, 600 of whom live in on-campus residence halls, are a sizable minority of the district’s population of roughly 2,000 residents, and should use their power to encourage their ANC representatives to substantively address the campus plan. These students can advocate for our interests and positively affect town-gown relations during this election, but only if they make the effort to participate.
When two Georgetown students were elected to the ANC in 1996, not only were student concerns adequately represented at the commission for the first time, the students’ dedication to the ANC opened up a productive and positive dialogue between the community and the University. Since then, student involvement has dwindled. Ever since the 2000 Census, when Georgetown was gerrymandered in a way that effectively limited the number of student representatives on the ANC to one, the level of representation that students enjoy relies more than anything on their effort and involvement.
This year has been a particularly difficult one for the relationship between the neighborhood and the University community, marked by angry lawn signs and exaggerated rhetoric. Were students to engage the community through the ANC as we have in the past, perhaps the neighbors would realize that Georgetown students do care about the long-term issues facing our community.
