Mayor-elect Vince Gray says he will consider removing caps the District has placed on the growth of the city’s universities as part of an effort to create jobs for D.C.’s lagging economy. The universities are required to keep to long-term planning guides that have been approved by District officials, the result of long-standing tensions between the schools and the communities that surround them. Those plans put caps on the growth of student populations, the number of employees the schools can hire and the universities’ physical size. On Monday, school officials argued during a summit on job creation led by Gray that the District should remove those caps to help grow the city’s economy.
After the meeting, Gray told
The Washington Examiner that he was open to the idea, although cautious about moving forward. “I need to understand more about what these [university] jobs would be and reasons for those caps,” Gray said. “Historically, there have been tensions between the universities and the neighborhoods in which they reside.”
Those tensions are alive in Tenleytown, where American University is in the midst of its campus planning process. School officials said on Monday that if American University’s plan is approved, the university would spend about $250 million on construction. As A.U. and other schools expand, so too do their property-tax free footprints.
There’s also concern in Tenleytown that the university has been buying up property beyond what the campus plan calls for, said Jon Bender, an advisory neighborhood commission representative for the area.
“American University does seem to have a limitless appetite for acquiring property,” Bender said. “It breeds suspicion among some folks that A.U. has imperialistic designs on the community.”
On Monday, however, university officials said that more students could deliver more cash to the District’s economy through the food, clothes and drinks they buy. That would combine with the dollars the schools could spend on expansion and the potential for hiring more employees if the caps were lifted.
“We can better serve the communities by creating jobs and bringing in retail dollars,” said George Washington University President Steven Knapp. The university, Knapp said, is currently exporting jobs to Northern Virginia due to the cap the District has placed on the number of employees the school can have.
“We need to have a change in philosophy that sees universities as economic drivers and not as an economic drain,” Knapp said.
