Neighborhood Notes - Foxhall: 3 October 2001

It has now been almost two years since Mayor Williams last held a Citizen Summit, and Saturday October 6 he will hold it yet again from 8:30 a.m. until 4 p.m. at the Washington Convention Center. Some people have become jaundiced about just how effective their voice can be in a gathering that might yet number in the thousands, and with the major categories to be worked upon already set in advance.

But with what happened September 11, there is no more important time to help the heads of city agencies to adjust their priorities in a way that preserves the rights of citizens. For example, DDOT wants to mount 100 cameras to monitor key street intersections – shouldn’t that same information be just as available to all the drivers of the district via the web, as to the traffic engineers in a central control room? One of the clear communication problems when the federal government evacuated personnel is which roads and bridges were not yet clogged.

Also, lots of hard work has already gone into Ward-level planning – for example in the Cluster 13 that includes the Foxhall neighborhood, ideas to be presented include a god balance between Residential Development Controls, Traffic Management and Enforcement, and Environment (Greenspace, Trees, Wildlife, and Noise Pollution).

For the Tenleytown area, for the first time in years DC’s Office of Planning propose to conduct a formal "Small Area" Plan to address the balance between residential and commercial in this nexus between main roads and the Metro bus and subway systems.

If you have not done so already, let us suggest you go to http://neighborhoodaction.dc.gov and register!

© Bob Andrew, Foxhall