The Ward 5 councilman is continuing an uphill fight against a proposed car barn for the future D.C. streetcar system, despite the city’s plans to move forward with it to meet a July 2013 start date for the first trolley line.
The recently elected Kenyan McDuffie wrote a letter to Mayor Vincent Gray last week asking the mayor to reconsider the plans for the storage and maintenance facility to be built on the campus of Spingarn Senior High School at Benning Road and 26th Street in Northeast, the councilman’s office said Monday.
The Committee of 100 for the Federal City, two advisory neighborhood commissions – 5B and 5C — plus a neighborhood association and Friends of Kingman Park are formally opposed to the site, he said.
Though the city is continuing with its plan despite the opposition, McDuffie proposed alternatives.
He said the Hopscotch Bridge, just north of Union Station, could serve as a storage site for the H Street-Benning Road line that is slated to end at the bridge in the short term. However, he acknowledged that space would not have room for the proposed streetcar training program that he called an “underdeveloped” idea anyway.
McDuffie also questioned why the facility could not be built among the parking lots at RFK Stadium, and said the city should do more to negotiate with the National Park Service.
McDuffie won the Ward 5 seat in a special election in May after Harry Thomas Jr. was convicted and sent to federal prison. But the election came after the city was far along in the process of deciding on the site.
In June, the city awarded a $50 million contract to Dean-Facchina LLC contract to build the facility and finish the line. This month, it awarded a $4 million annual contract to RATP Dev McDonald Transit Associates to handle the day-to-day operations of the 2.2 miles of track along H Street and Benning Road NE for the next five years.
