Eastern Market Manager Stuart Smith is experiencing cost overruns in his 2005 budget while merchants at the Capitol Hill icon say services have deteriorated.

Merchants pointed to 12-foot-high piles of trash that periodically accumulate behind the busy market — much of it highly flammable cardboard and cooking grease — but Smith’s financial statements reveal that the money budgeted for trash collection this fiscal year is more than two-thirds gone.

Smith responded that the Eastern Market budget was “on track, and we will meet our overall goals.”
Smith and partner Bruce Cook run Eastern Market Venture (EMV), which is paid $117,000 in fees to manage the market and the North Hall. The pair also received an additional $16,000 for “construction management” during the building of the new farmers’ outdoor shed.

A nonprofit organization, EMV collects rent from merchants and then pays operating expenses. When Smith presented financial statements through March 31 covering the first half of the financial year (which began in October 2004), the figures showed that EMV has overspent its budget in 11 categories, including security, rat control, plumbing repairs, parking enforcement, insurance, legal fees and cleaning.

Some Eastern Market Community Advisory Committee (EMCAC) members are in a stew over what to do, but EMCAC finance committee Chairman David Sheldon is incendiary. “You can quote me,” he said. “This is shocking.” Cost overruns will not be taken out of EMV’s fees, but from the market’s income. The city insists that no deficits accrue.

Sheldon zeroed in on the trash situation, where nearly $6,000 of an $8,000 budget has been spent, yet merchants say recent pickups have been lagging and piles of trash have accumulated, sometimes sitting for four days, even though three pickups are scheduled per week.

Smith took issue with Sheldon’s criticism, saying that some items (such as insurance, where rates rose) were “uncontrollable” with estimates. “I must question why [he] would go to a reporter instead of bringing this to the attention of [EMCAC Chairwoman] Donna Scheeder.”

Smith’s figures also show that the market benefited from a faulty gas meter that recorded only $171 worth of gas in the first six months of the financial year. But Pepco officials, who corrected the meter, said no more than that was due.

A battle featuring Sheldon, who wants more and better financial information from EMV and the Smith-Cook partners, is heating up. EMV has spent little on promoting the market, merchants complain, is seldom on the site and has been so slow to resolve long-standing lease arrangements that merchants now complain that the “long term” lease promised now amounts to two years — and it has not yet been agreed to.

BP battle ends in development

As neighborhood battles go, the BP gas-station affair was a lulu.

Enter a large international energy company, British Petroleum (BP), focused on the western end of a famous near-Hill shopping strip, H Street N.E., five years ago. The company had big plans, buying a group of town houses in order to tear them down and build a totally modern fuel outlet for motorists, with more pumps than any other in the city, plus a food store with electronic bells and whistles.

At first, the community was a bit dazed. BP already had a small station at the site. But gradually, opposition grew and local political organizations, such as the Advisory Neighborhood Commission, the Stanton Park Neighborhood Association and the H Street merchants group, become involved and took sides.

BP officials tried to accommodate the gripes — mainly that the modernistic design was out of tune with the 100-year-old row-house milieu and the station too large. The company reduced the size and changed the outline. Roadblock after roadblock on a route stretching back to 2001 dismayed BP officials. A mediator was brought in, but he, too, produced no forward progress, and BP put its plan on hold.

But today, almost five years after the fuel company announced its plan, the BP station is dead as an idea, the row houses are razed and the site is empty. There will be no gas station there, and landowner Stuart Investments has moved the underground tanks.

Rumors are rife that Stuart, which has bought out the BP lease, is now thinking of a big mixed development with an upscale grocery store as an anchor, with retail and apartments a possibility.

Activist/neighbors such as Pat Lally, who fought the gas station, couldn’t be happier. “There is a lot going on on H Street,” he said last week.

9-11 grove: First memorial trees

While a Navy Yard singing group harmonized and crowds gathered nearby for a Washington Nationals game, a group at Congressional Cemetery held solemn dedication ceremonies for the first of nine Washington “memorial groves” of trees dedicated to the dead of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

The Hill’s grove is a long line of young trees, a gift of the Casey Trees Endowment, planted on either side of a pathway leading toward the Anacostia River. It features handmade benches made from trees planted during George Washington’s lifetime, according to donor Tom Stoner of the Evergreen Strategies Foundation, one of the groups supporting the remembrance effort.

The benches make an interesting historical note, Stoner said, because their wood was once part of a pickle vat on the Eastern Shore of Maryland dating back to the 1790s. The vat was later exhumed and the wood saved; it was so thoroughly soaked with vinegar and salt that it was perfectly preserved.

Congressional Cemetery Chairwoman Linda Harper said, “This is a place where we remember not terror but hope.” A letter from Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.) was read, and the House chaplain, the Rev. Daniel P. Coughlin, led a prayer.

Among speakers, Abraham Scott of the Pentagon Memorial Fund (whose wife was killed here during the attack) presented a memorial medal to Stoner.

METRO

• That Navy Yard “river walk,” which will bring pedestrians to the banks of the Anacostia for the first time, will be open “in two or three months” and will be turned over to city control, according to Navy Yard official John Imparato. …

• Hill East residents are smarting over the efficiency of the city’s parking-enforcement squads, which have combed the neighborhoods close to Robert F. Kennedy Stadium to punish illegal parking during games. They suspect that many among the 220 tickets issued per game and the 30 cars towed during the first few Nationals games may have involved legitimate homeowners. ...

• “Green” buildings are those that conform to high environmental standards, with such eco features as “rain garden” drainage, use of recycled materials, reduction of waste, and energy-efficient heating and cooling. A Hill institution, the D.C. Department of Employment, will move from its present 6th and H streets N.E. location to a new green building at Benning Road and Minnesota Avenue N.E. in 2007. This will be the first D.C. government agency to go “green.” ...

• U.S. District Court Judge Ricardo M. Urbina has ruled against a suit brought by the environmental group Earth Justice, which charged that D.C. sewers violate Clean Water Act regulations on turbid water. Urbina said users of D.C. waters could stay away from the rivers after downpours, when sewers habitually overflow into city rivers. The plaintiffs plan an appeal. ...

• Not overjoyed by the success of the Washington Nationals: farmers at the open-air market at RFK Stadium Lot 6. Displaced on game days, reduced in number since the D.C. Sports and Entertainment Commission evicted the crowd-bringing flea market from the site, the farmers now say they want former farm market manager Al Smith to be reinstated in place of Maryland resident James Williams. ...

• Dennis Bourgault, the jovial merchant who reinvented the urban pet store, turning it into a kind of club for animal lovers, has received a $5,000 grant from the Barracks Row Foundations for his new mega pet emporium, Chateau Animaux, on 8th. The amount is trivial compared to the $1.4 million he’s spending to redo his building at 524 8th St. S.E.