Change is afoot at the Old Naval Hospital site on Pennsylvania Avenue SE. The city announced officially last Friday that the decrepit building will become the “Hill Center,” a community space for meetings, classes, receptions and recitals. The Old Naval Hospital Foundation, a group of pre-eminent Capitol Hill neighbors, crafted the proposal.

As with many stories of government-sponsored development around here, some people say this one has a familiar unfortunate side — that the unfortunate are being pushed aside.

The Hill Center plan calls for the hospital’s two-story carriage house to become a café. The structure’s current tenant is the administrative offices of the Community Action Group, a rehabilitation organization for poor people. CAG President Hal Gordon, who moved his operation into the carriage house 17 years ago and fixed it up himself, says replacing his office with a café would be unconscionable.

“The mad rush for economic development has cast away all other considerations,” he says, sitting at his desk beneath three beautifully refinished hay feeders. From his perspective, the Capitol Hill bourgeoisie is treading on poor black people — a way of looking at the situation that the Capitol Hill bourgeoisie finds simply dreadful.

The money behind the Hill Center proposal comes from Congress via the District government. Friend-of-the-neighborhood Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-La.) saw to it that a total of $2.2 million went to the Old Naval Hospital Foundation through D.C. budget appropriations in 2003 and 2004. Gordon thinks the city is in a rush to appease its money-bestowing masters in Congress.

Bill Rice, spokesman for the Office of Property Management, refused to comment on that theory, insisting only that the bidding process was fair and competitive. But Gordon says that nobody alerted his organization when the latest request for proposals went out in February. (The city requested proposals for the site in 2003, but two years later it rejected both plans that had been submitted, one of which was for a library-focused version of the Hill Center.)

The Foundation rebuffed Gordon’s request to let CAG stay in the carriage house under its proposal, since it expects the café will generate needed revenue for the rest of the Hill Center. Gordon says he then suggested that his group could raise the money, which he was told would be about $50,000 a year — five times his current rent — only to hear from the Foundation that it wasn’t really about money after all. CAG then put together its own proposal for the entire site and was rejected by the OPM. In turn, the Foundation offered CAG some space in the carriage house, but Gordon says his board disliked the idea.

According to Foundation President Nicky Cymrot, “Representatives from the Old Naval Hospital Foundation met in serious conversation with CAG representatives and tried very hard to find a compromise to permit both programs to move forward.”

Hill Center boosters point out that it’s not like CAG will be shut down — the organization owns several other properties around town. But this argument only infuriates Gordon.

“My other properties have no relevancy to this situation. Because I have been industrious enough to create some equity, to invest in some properties, that doesn’t give you a right to tell me where I can go,” he says.

Gordon is ready for a fight. He said keeping the carriage house is a matter of dignity and credibility for the city’s poor.

“I will raise unmitigated hell,” he warns. Possible options include chaining himself to the building and perhaps even bringing a lawsuit. But he says he doesn’t want to go to court: “I’d like to see Capitol Hill come to its senses.”

Federal law requires that all jurisdictions provide free public education for all students with disabilities. The District pays through the nose for its failure to do so. It works like this: If evaluations find that a student has special needs that the District can’t meet, a routine lawsuit by parents forces the city to send the kid to a school that can do the job.

The kicker is that the D.C. school system must pay for everything: evaluation, placement, transportation and tuition for the new school at a cost of tens of millions of dollars every year. And don’t forget the legal fees, which some attorneys make enormous by calling for unnecessary administrative hearings.

In 1999, Congress imposed a cap on the amount the District could pay in legal fees, limiting most cases at $1,300. When it considered lifting the cap in 2001, various members of the D.C. Council, including now-Mayor Adrian Fenty, sent a letter to Congress urging it to do so.

“A cap makes it more difficult for children to obtain special education to which they are entitled,” the council members wrote. They argued that a frozen cap would mean that attorneys would shy from special ed cases, that low-income families would come up short, and that ultimately the poorest students would receive less-favorable treatment than any other students in the nation.

Congress heeded the Council and dropped the cap, and the cost to the city skyrocketed from $4 million to $14 million in fiscal 2002. In 2003, Sens. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) and Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-Texas) bailed the school system out and re-imposed the cap at $4,000 per case.

Now, as a mayor without a school board to serve as scapegoat, Fenty has reversed himself and asked Congress not to remove the cap in a June 26 letter to Rep. Carolyn Kilpatrick (D-Mich.):

“[A]s Mayor, I am obligated to protect the fiscal health of the city,” Fenty wrote, noting that the budget he submitted to the D.C. Council this year “does not include the multi-million dollar increase in attorney payments that the District would be required to pay if the cap is lifted this year.”

Previous mayor Anthony Williams switched positions on the issue multiple times, ultimately favoring caps. Fixing the special education racket will be one of Fenty’s biggest challenges in improving the school system.

The men’s room at Union Station is famous now. Swirling about the story of Sen. Larry Craig’s (R-Idaho) downfall are rumors he had been naughty in Union Station as well. 

Every time Hillscape has used the men’s room near the trains at Union Station, the place has been bustling with activity. But usually it was homeless people washing up. Does the D.C. police department conduct sting operations like the one that foiled Craig?

“If we get a complaint about something occurring that’s illegal, we’ll use whatever tactics we have to investigate the crime,” says Capt. George Kucik of the Metropolitan Police Department’s Narcotics and Special Investigations Unit. Kucik declined to give details on tactics, but the MPD is no stranger to sting operations on other crimes, such as underage alcohol sales. So it’s probably not a great time for the wide-of-stance to use the public restrooms in Union Station, if you get my meaning.