Reply to DCPS students shafted again - sign petition to keep Jelleff field public

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I have nothing to do with Maret, Hardy, their rival schools, or the neighborhoods.  I'm just a DC resident trying to get my head around the issue.

In 2008 DC borrowed $15ish million at 5ish% interest to buy a property in Upper Georgetown and then gave the sports team.at Maret, a private school in Woodley Park, exclusive access to the property for a decade in exchange for up to $2.5m in renovations and improvements with a life span of 10-20 years.  DC however was still responsible for general maintenance and the exclusivity arrangement meant that DC has to pay to transport the public school sports teams across the street to other DC owned facilities.  Now they want to re-up the arrangement for another 10 years at only $900k.

I'm struggling to see the benefit of this arrangement for DC.  It's already cost us way more, in interest alone, than what Maret has contributed and now they want to re-up for 10 years and reduce their "payment" to $900k.  Why is the DC Government spending $1+m per year on Maret's sports teams?

Did Maret use their connections to get us a sweetheart deal on the land?  Am I missing something?[/quote]

The testimony from the Maret folks on Monday suggested that they entered into the original 10-year easement with DPR based on an understanding that it would extended pro forma for another 10 years following that provided they fulfilled the terms of the original contract. A number of Maret affiliates claimed that Maret would never had done the deal if they thought it was just for 10 years. However, this doesn't seem to have been committed to paper anywhere and so they are effectively asking us to take their word for it.

Why Maret and DPR didn't just do a 20 year deal in 2009 is murky. Some Maret affiliates implied that it was precluded by city regulations, although there are certainly cases to disprove that - LAB has a 25 year lease on a DCPS building in Foxhall, for instance. It was also suggested - perhaps by Elissa Silverman - that anything longer than a 10 year deal would have had to be approved by the DC Council. Some have thus made the case that the original 10 year easement - coupled with an informal agreement that it would be extended - was thus deliberately structured to avoid scrutiny by the broader Council.[/quote]

They can't have it both ways. If the 2009 discussions were binding, they would have required Council approval. So either they're not binding, or they're not valid.

Conveniently for Maret, nobody in a policy position at DPR remains from 2009. So everyone just has to take their word for it. [/quote]

[b]+1. Maret is being a terrible public citizen.  [/b]The city is flush with tax revenues and doesn’t need Maret’s million dollars for a 10 year exclusivity.  Someone should write a case study about how wealth and privilege at Maret has influenced poor public outcomes.[/quote]

That part is no surprise. Nor is their acting like such fvcking babies at the slightest criticism now that their sweetheart deal is getting some sunlight.

[/quote]

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