Reprinted from the Old Towners. . .
HARC attack coming to UDC Committee Wednesday
The proposed changes to the UDC regarding HARCs authority will come before the UDC Advisory Committee this Wednesday, March 13, at 3:30 pm, in the old library on the corner of Eighth and MLK, at 808 Martin Luther King Jr Street.
Here is the agenda and the Coversheet. Public comments received at the open house are attached to the coversheet, and they’re worth reviewing. The proposed code changes are attached also.
This is a public meeting, feel free to attend. It’s also not too late to write to the Committee at udc@georgetown.org.
In part these changes propose to update the notice requirements for a Certificate of Appropriateness, but I don’t find any clarity in the code. Currently the HARC recommendations appear to come to the Consent Agenda to be rubber-stamped by council, but the mechanism for pulling an item from this agenda to bring it for further review by council is not spelled out in the code.
At the open house I was told that there is no mechanism for an applicant to request council review of a recommended HARC denial and, most crucially, if such a review does occur there is no provision for adequate public notice before it gets heard. I emailed the Committee this afternoon asking it to examine and clarify this process on Wednesday.
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There are more concerns in these changes, the two largest of which I can see being the ending of a super-majority to overturn HARC, and the ending of HARC review for demolishing low-priority homes in Old Town.
Majority Vote. It currently takes a super majority vote of 5-2 to overturn a HARC decision, and one of the public comments mentioned that it still takes a 5-2 vote to overturn a recommendation from the Planning and Zoning Commission. Why would HARC be any different? This is obviously not a fair application of process. If you think the HARC recommendations that will now come to city council for final approval or denial should require a 5-2 vote to overturn, please write to the Committee and advocate for this, or attend the meeting and make your opinion known.
Demolition. It currently requires HARC scrutiny to demolish a low-priority house in Old Town. This will change to no review. I gather that demolitions are typically approved, but I’m afraid that residents of Old Town who fear the worst will be proven correct. The lazy kind of “fix-n-flip” developer will be attracted to Old Town to scrape old homes and put up modern boxes of maximum square footage. It’s happened in every city in America, it’s inevitable that it will happen here. I suppose the business forces behind these changes want exactly this kind of unbridled license. The story of the goose that lays the golden egg is lost on a certain type of greedy person.
It’s not too late to make a difference to the way in which this process turns out. There will be the UDC committee with its recommendation, P&Z with its recommendation, then 2 city council hearings, all with public input and discussion between members on the dais.
The UDC Committee is next up.