Washington Business Journal - by Sarah Krouse Staff Reporter
The McMillan Park Committee filed a lawsuit March 22 to force the D.C. Deputy Mayor for Planning and Economic Development to make public a number of documents and e-mails associated with the redevelopment of the old McMillan Reservoir sand filtration site.
The community nonprofit requested 43 different documents and e-mails Feb. 19, 2009, including draft development plans, staging plans, budgets, a land disposition agreement and documents discussing public financing for the 25-acre site in Northwest D.C.
The deputy mayor’s office sent several hundred pages of the requested documents in May and August 2009 but said it could not provide others that involved ongoing negotiations, according to documents filed in the civil division of the Superior Court of the District of Columbia.
Sean Madigan, the Freedom of Information Officer for the deputy mayor, said in his response letter that the e-mails his office did not send “represented correspondence between our staff” and the Vision McMillan Partners, the project’s development team led by Bethesda-based EYA.
“We consider these exchanges as deliberative process between partners,” the letter said. “Many of the messages have government staff and our development partners negotiating documents, terms, process, etc. We think of this work as pre-decision in that it is all moving toward the production of a document or an agreement in which we decide the terms and conditions of a land disposition agreement.”
Vision McMillan Partners was selected in July 2007 to develop roughly 1,200 residential units, 400,000 square feet of office space, a hotel and 100,000 square feet of retail space on the site, but the park committee says the developer selection process was neither competitive nor transparent.
Tony Norman, chairman of the McMillan Park Committee, which opposes the project for its proposed density, says his group wants to know where the project stands and how much public money is tied up in it.
Norman said his group, which serves as an umbrella group for area civic associations and Advisory Neighborhood Commissions, thinks it’s time to rethink the plan after three years of unsuccessful negotiations with EYA.
In its letter to the deputy mayor office, the group says it wants to view the documents “to better understand the conditions of McMillan Park and to ensure that if development occurs on the site, it is undertaken in a manner consistent with local and federal laws that protect human health, the natural environment and historically significant resources.”
“We want to know in general what’s going on and we don’t necessarily oppose development, we oppose the large density development they want to put there. Now they have pulled back their plans and haven’t been communicating with us for the last six months,” Norman said.
The lawsuit follows the group’s Feb. 22, 2010, appeal of the Freedom of Information decision, which it said did not receive a response from the deputy mayor’s office.
Madigan declined to comment on ongoing litigation.
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