D.C. Council Passes Two New Measures

The D.C. Council Committee on Government Operations and the Environment unanimously passed two new measures during a meeting Thursday.

Committee Chairperson Mary Cheh along with committee members Kwame Brown, David Catania, and Tommy Wells first voted to pass a measure that ended a decade long debate over the riverfront area between M St. and Water St. SE.

The controversy began back in 1999 when the D.C. Redevelopment Land Agency leased the land to the IMF realty corporation. When IMF tried to then give their lease over to another company, D.C. council got in the way of the deal. This led to IMF suing D.C. government for tortuous interfering with contract and the decade long battle that followed.

This new measure was first proposed by Chairman Vincent Gray on December 11th, 2009, and would give control of this area to the Cohen Companies, a realty group that already owns land in the direct area. About this measure, Committee Member Brown says, “we’re going to bring light to one side of M street, from the fish market all the way down to SeaFair.”

The measure was discussed at length during a February 17th hearing, where the disposition was laid out and people such as Cohen Companies Vice President, Eric Siegel, gave testimony in support of the measure.

Before the measure was passed, Committee Member Brown made sure to thank Attorney General Peter Nichols for his work in helping this measure come to fruition.

The second measure voted on during the meeting was the Energy Efficiency Financing Act of 2010. This measure was also originally proposed by Chairman Gray on December 11th, 2009.

This act will authorize the Mayor to use bonds to provide funding for clean energy improvements in D.C. Seed money from the Federal Government will go towards the creation of the National Capital Energy Fund.

These funds will be invested in loans to private, commercial, and residential property owners for the purposes of making their properties more environmentally friendly. The property owners will repay the loans over the next 10-20 years in the form of additional property taxes that will be put into another newly created district fund.

Testimony for this act occurred on January 25th before being passed Thursday. During the Thursday meeting Committee member Wells said that, “this is a progressive and far-reaching bill. It’s a model that puts us at the forefront.” During the January meeting Chairperson Cheh stated that the bill was only the second clean energy loan program in the country after Berkeley, California became the first municipality to have such a program in November 2007.

The committee also voted to approve the minutes from their previous two meetings on January 21st and January 27th. After no new business was brought to discussion, the meeting was adjourned.