Opinions

Yesterday the D.C. Council passed a $9.4 billion 2013 budget on a first vote; a second and final vote will come on June 5. The council’s spending plan for the coming fiscal year made a number of changes to the proposal presented by Mayor Vince Gray (D) in late March, though much of what Gray proposed remains. Here are some of the things you should know for the 2013 fiscal year, which starts in October.

●No new taxes.

●Good news for affordable housing in D.C., which is quite scarce these days — D.C. Council Chairman Kwame Brown (D) reinstated $18 million to the Housing Production Trust Fund and added $4 million to a local rent subsidy program and $2.5 million to the Home Purchase Assistance Program.

● Gray and council member David Catania (I-At Large) worked together to save $20 million in funding for the D.C. Healthcare Alliance, a program that offers health care to 19,000 undocumented immigrants in the city.

●Bars won’t be able to stay open an hour later on weekdays and weekends, as Gray had proposed, but will instead enjoy extended hours on 19 days, including the weekends coinciding with New Year’s Eve, Memorial Day, Independence Day and Labor Day. (Longer hours will also come with the next two presidential inauguration weekends.) Council member Mary Cheh (D-Ward 3) included an amendment that would require Gray to report on how the extended hours affect D.C. neighborhoods. Liquor stores will remain shuttered on Sundays, but retailers — including supermarkets, corner stores and liquor stores — will be able to open two hours earlier than usual, at 7 a.m.

● In other booze news, the budget will allow distilleries to sell their spirits directly to consumers. The owners of New Columbia Distillers, who we spoke to a few months ago, pushed for this change so they could host tasting and sell their gin and whiskey once they start operations in the next few months.

[Continue reading Martin Austermuhle’s post at DCist.com.]

Martin Austermuhle blogs at DCist . The Local Blog Network is a group of bloggers from around the D.C. region who have agreed to make regular contributions to All Opinions Are Local.

Maryland has officially finalized its planning for the Corridor Cities Transitway (CCT). In so doing the state has finally answered a number of lingering questions about the Gaithersburg-to-Clarksburg route.

●The line will be bus rapid transit (BRT) rather than light rail. With light rail being advanced for the Purple Line and Baltimore Red Line, the more suburban Corridor Cities Transitway would have been one rail line too many for the state to afford. Everyone would rather have light rail, but as I said in 2008 and again in 2009, doing BRT for the CCT is the right decision given the constraints.

The planned route for the Corridor Cities Transitway in Montgomery County. Click here to view a larger version of this map. (Maryland Department of Transportation) ●It will be built in two phases, with the first ending at Metropolitan Grove in northwest Gaithersburg, where there’s a MARC transfer available.

●The route will follow its long-planned alignment along King Farm Boulevard, despite objections from some neighbors.

●The Crown Farm station will be located to maximize the planned transit oriented development at that location.

●There will be four stations in the Life Sciences Center office park, which will serve a lot of workers and help to redevelop that area, but which will also slow down buses considerably.

●The Kentlands station is sensibly placed on the west side of Great Seneca Highway, where it will be ideal for future infill.

●The final station is at Comsat office park in Clarksburg, which means the route unfortunately misses two potentially major nearby centers, Clarksburg Town Center and the Milestone shopping center.

Overall, the adopted plan addresses many of the problems I identified in 2006. It’s not perfect, but it’s workable, and it will have a hugely positive effect on how Gaithersburg operates.

Maryland can now move the project into the federal government’s New Starts process, where it will compete with other projects around the country for funding. Ideally they will move into more specific engineering in another year or so, with construction beginning in 2018 and service beginning on the first phase in 2020.

Dan Malouff is an Arlington County transportation planner who blogs independently at BeyondDC.com. The Local Blog Network is a group of bloggers from around the D.C. region who have agreed to make regular contributions to All Opinions Are Local.

It was big news last week when Citibank offered up $41 million to brand New York’s nascent bike-sharing system. Not only will the sponsorship offer the new system much-needed operating cash, but it will also allow Citbank to paint the system’s 10,000 bikes blue for five years.

In January, our own iconic Capital Bikeshare bikes became focus of similar discussions — according to the Huffington Post, D.C. officials are floating a number of sponsorship, branding and advertising opportunities to help cover the costs associated with running the popular and ever-expanding bike-sharing network. (Next stations? Near the U.S. Capitol.)

That, of course, got us to thinking. Should it ever come to pass, who could step up to be a title sponsor for Capital Bikeshare?

[Continue reading Martin Austermuhle’s post at DCist.com.]

Martin Austermuhle blogs at DCist . The Local Blog Network is a group of bloggers from around the D.C. region who have agreed to make regular contributions to All Opinions Are Local.

Richard Florida’s interview with Jonah Lehrer over at the Atlantic Cities about “creative density” got me thinking about the work I did on “degree density” in 2010. The concept that Lehrer describes is relatively simple: lots of like minded people in close proximity to each other drives creativity because these people can bounce ideas off of each other and learn from each other.

Lehrer talks about David Bryne of the Talking Heads:

David Byrne, after all, wasn’t influenced by the Latin rhythms of some distant musician. Instead, Byrne was seduced by his local dance clubs, blasting those songs he could hear from the sidewalk. It is the sheer density of the city — the proximity of all those overlapping minds — that makes it such an inexhaustible source of creativity.

A major flaw with my 2010 analysis is that it focused on entire cities and counties. It ignored the fact that the size of cities is somewhat arbitrary and that density is more of a neighborhood phenomenon than a city or metro area phenomenon.

Within a single city, there can be pockets of degree density (which, admittedly, is a very crude proxy for creative density as Lehrer describes it, or even for intelligence, as many commenters have pointed out). There can be neighborhoods where lots of educated people are highly concentrated, while another neighborhood in the exact same city could be much less dense and not a place where many degree holders live.

The easiest way for me to explain this is visually. First, here’s a map of the Washington D.C. metro area. Each dot represents 1,000 adults 25 and older with at least a college degree. Not surprisingly, degree holders are much more sparely populated in the fringe parts of the metro area than in the urban core.

[Continue reading Rob Pitingolo’s post at Extraordinary Observations.]

Rob Pitingolo blogs at Extraordinary Observations. The Local Blog Network is a group of bloggers from around the D.C. region who have agreed to make regular contributions to All Opinions Are Local.

I thought I’d use today to share with you a tool I use quite frequently in my research: the Office of Zoning’s Zoning Map.

This is a simple Google Maps utility that allows you to zoom down into any property in the District and quickly find out useful information.

As you zoom in to any particular property you start to learn certain things. First you’ll see what zoning district the property is in. For instance, most of Georgetown is R-3 (rowhouses), but the commercial strips are C-2-A, and some of the northeast sections are R-5 (detached houses). Interestingly there’s a fourth major zone in Georgetown: W (Waterfront). The only other areas of the city with this peculiar zone are around Buzzards Point and Anacostia.

Zoom in further and you’ll see the square number (i.e. the block number). This is the official ID the city has for a particular block. Zoom in further and you see the lot number. Someone once told me that if the lot number is a small number from 1 to 200 or so, it is a lot that has been surveyed. If it’s in the 800 range, it hasn’t.

[Continue reading Topher Mathews’s post here at The Georgetown Metropolitan.]

Topher Mathews blogs at The Georgetown Metropolitan . The Local Blog Network is a group of bloggers from around the D.C. region who have agreed to make regular contributions to All Opinions Are Local.