ANC 5B Meeting Notes

What follows are notes on last Thursday's ANC 5B meeting. These notes came from Geoff, who recently relocated to Trinidad from Bloomingdale. While there he ran the blog bloomingdale (for now). From time to time he might write the occasional post that will appear on Frozen Tropics. Anytime that happens I'll make it clear that he is the author. Thanks for the notes Geoff!

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Last night, I attended the ANC 5B monthly meeting at the Washington Center for Aging Services, located at 2601 18th Street NE. The big news was an announcement regarding a sewage line break at the Arboretum. I’ll go into that further down.

(This was the first 5B meeting I have attended, after years of 5C meetings while I lived in Bloomingdale. The meeting moved very quickly (perhaps due to the fact that there was very little on the agenda), but it just felt like it was run better than the 5C meetings are.)

Anyway, the meeting was scheduled to begin at 7:30. It was gaveled to order at 7:45, with a few seconds for silent meditation immediately following.

It was determined that there was a quorum, with the following members in attendance:

• 5B01—William C. Shelton
• 5B04—Rayseen Woodland
• 5B05—Rosetta B. Davis
• 5B07—David L. Hooper
• 5B08—Tina Laskaris
• 5B09—Jacqueline Manning
• 5B12—Maude Ababio

(5B03 commissioner Regina James arrived 25 minutes later, near the end of the meeting)

The following commissioners were absent:

• 5B02—Patricia Brown-Daniels
• 5B06—Wilhelmina P. Lawson
• 5B10—India Henderson
• 5B11—William Myers

Approximately 9 people were in attendance in the audience, as well as Gottlieb Simon, the executive director of the city’s ANC office.

The agenda was approved unanimously.

Chair Shelton announced that the next ANC meeting (on December 3rd) will be held at Love nightclub in Ivy City. It will be brief, with a community awards ceremony followed by a holiday get-together. All the community is invited.

There was a presentation by Dr. Jerome Paulson (the medical director of national and global affairs) and Tessa Chubbs-White (from the advocacy and community affairs department) of Children’s National Medical Center. The discussed the benefits that the hospital provides to the neighborhood, the city, and the country. There is a report outlining this available on the hospital’s website (www.childrensnational.org, click on ‘advocacy’). They would love to receive feedback (email to communitybenefit@cnmc.org).

The big news of the night came next: commissioners Manning and Shelton discussed a broken sewer line in the National Arboretum. It turns out that this line broke 6 months ago, but there was no public notice, and it was leaking raw sewage directly into a tributary of the Anacostia River. WASA repaired the break, but another break occurred recently. Again, there was no public notice of this sewer line break.

The ANC will be calling a special meeting, asking members of the EPA, Department of the Environment, and the Department of Health to attend. The ANC wants soil sampling to be done to determine if the E. coli commonly associated with untreated sewage has posed a threat to the people and animals living in the surrounding community, specifically those living in the Arboretum neighborhood. Chair Shelton noted that the ANC learned about this from the feds, and not any city agency, and he’d like to know why the city agencies don’t seem to be sharing information about what’s happening here in the city with the citizens.

There was a brief discussion about turning the block of Evarts between 18^th and 20^th Streets to one-way operation in front of Langdon Elementary School. The commission will likely put their full support behind a petition to have this done. Speed humps might also be requested.

There was no public safety report from the Fifth Police District, since there was no 5D representative at the meeting.

The chair gave the treasurer’s report, since the treasurer was not in attendance. There are issues with unnecessary service charges on the ANC’s bank account, which is currently at Wachovia bank. The commission moved to study other banks to move the account to, since Wachovia isn’t considered trustworthy anymore. PNC, TD, SunTrust, and Bank of America were all brought up as possible places to move the account to.

The 4^th quarter financial report was briefly discussed, and since there was no old or new business, the meeting was adjourned shortly before 8:30 pm.