With vampires all the rage in the popular culture these days, recent news of our own version of the “undead” boomeranged from Palisades to FB/WE to Georgetown/ Foxhall to Dupont and back again. What residents in these neighborhoods thought they had quietly and finally laid to rest—yet another multimilliondollar effort to study the feasibility of tearing down the Whitehurst—in 2007 has risen from the dead again.
Buried in the five-year “Regional Transportation Improvement Program” for Metro Washington is DDOT Agency Project IDED083C entitled Whitehurst Freeway EIS. This time, the teardown has been revivified as a way “to examine improvements to the Georgetown area transportation network and waterfront access, and to provide safe and efficient mobility to and through the Georgetown area, pertaining to the removal of the Whitehurst Freeway. (Guess all those other neighborhoods are just ghost towns to DDOT.)
Even scarier, DDOT has earmarked $2 million per year for fiscal years 2012 and 2013—a total of $4 million of federal and local taxpayer monies—to fund an Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) that would support and justify the Whitehurst’s removal. See the ghoulish reference on page 78 of the full proposal: [http:// www.mwcog.org/clrp/projects/ tip/fy0914ti /FY_2009-2014_ TIP-COMPLETE.pdf]
Tired of having to repeatedly fight off these ghosts of bad decisions past? Contact your ANC commissioners and At-Large Councilmembers—Kwame Brown, Michael Brown, Phil Mendelson, and David Catania (202/724-8000)—as well as Mayor Fenty (who pronounced the original 2005 teardown proposal “a dumb idea” in his 2006 campaign), and tell them this zombie should never see the light of day. Remove its line item from the TIP and the DDOT budget as was done in 2007. The FBN will be keeping you updated. We have our garlic at the ready. ~ FBN
