CONSPIRACY THEORY NO. 4: The developers can't finance this project.

As the crowd swelled to roughly 115 on Saturday, resident Gwen Southerland, wearing pearls, stepped up to the mic with some pointed inquiries. "I want to know, do you have the money to pay for this? EYA? Jair? Do you have the money?"

"Good question, good question," responded EYA representative Aakash Thakkar before launching into an explanation of the project's economic feasibility.

Southerland wasn't getting it and cut him off about 15 seconds in. "OK, you make a good con man. I'm not trying to be funny. Can you slow up? With the money: You said EYA had the funds?" Thakkar then interrupted her: "If you could let me finish..."

She could not. "OK, I'm an old lady. Work with me? OK? I mean go a little slow with me, son. How much is the project? Your housing? Your commercial? Your retail?"

Thakkar eventually got a word in. The project, in total, would cost between $300 million and $500 million. The infrastructure costs-demolishing the old sand filtration site, creating parks, preserving the distinctive water-silo structures, etc.-would be at least $55 million.

In an interview prior to the meeting, EYA president Bob Youngentob says his group intends to submit a plan with retail, residential, and office components to the zoning commission. That's what the city requested from developers, and it's what his team offered to do.

"We cannot come forward with a plan that's not economically viable," he says. He expects the proposal will be submitted within the year. He's aware that community opposition could influence the zoning commission to turn down his group's plan.

On Saturday, that option sounded fine to Southerland. "I just don't want us to get stuck with something that's not finished, cheap, cookie-cutter," she said.

"Are we open to making changes? Of course, we're open to making changes," says Youngentob, adding: "You can't be successful all the time in reaching that consensus. We've been successful, honestly, in the majority of the [development] communities that we've taken before public approval process."

The McMillan Sand Filtration Plant site is a 25-acre plot of land north of Bloomingdale. In the mid 1980s, the plant closed, leaving the city to determine how to redevelop the land. In December, Vision McMillan Partners, a group of developers, unveiled plans to transform the parcel into a mixed-use community with housing, retail, office space, and park land. Since that time, rumors, conspiracy theories, and chatter about the project have sparked huge debates about the project.

CONSPIRACY THEORY NO. 3: Developers may be paying off the local ANC commissioner.

Barrie Daneker is the Advisory Neighborhood Commissioner for an area that includes all the residential areas bordering the McMillan site. He's among those responsible for shielding his constituents from high-rises that threaten to puncture the Bloomingdale bubble of tranquil Victorian row houses, neighborhood barbecues, and quiet dog-walking. But is Daneker properly executing his duties or simply a pawn in the hands of Vision McMillan Partners?

Former ANC commissioner Allison Defoe, for one, finds his behavior distrustful. In the two years she's served with him, Defoe says her colleague repeatedly rebuffed her on questions about the development. She'd ask him about gatherings of the McMillan Advisory Group. He'd provide less than illuminating responses, like "'It was a private meeting,'" end of discussion, recalls Defoe.

To rounds of gentle nodding and open ears, Defoe relayed these exchanges toward the end of the Tuesday night meeting.

"My thing is: If I'm your fellow commissioner, and you can't even provide information to me, how are you passing that information to your community?" she said. "I know a lot of the residents would come to me and I would not have any information to tell them, and couldn't-because he wouldn't pass it on."

At this point, Defoe was interrupted by another resident.

"He's getting paid!"

Defoe would not dip to that accusation: "You said that. I didn't. I don't know what the motive was," she immediately responded.

But the next person to speak also had his suspicions: "I will say, he's very invested in this developer."

Daneker was not at the residents-only meeting to defend himself. But in an interview on Saturday, he refuted the claims. Daneker, who has been involved with the McMillan Advisory Group since late 2006, says he's reported four or five development updates at ANC meetings in the last year. In addition, he says, he attends monthly meetings of the Stronghold Civic Association, which represents residents across North Capitol Street, who face the McMillan site.  The group's leader, India Luckett, backs his claim.

"Barrie's been a faithful ANC," she says, though she adds there haven't been many meetings called for his entire district.

Overall, she gives Daneker high marks. "We get information that we should get," says Luckett.

The McMillan Sand Filtration Plant site is a 25-acre plot of land north of Bloomingdale. In the mid 1980s, the plant closed, leaving the city to determine how to redevelop the land. In December, Vision McMillan Partners, a group of developers, unveiled plans to transform the parcel into a mixed-use community with housing, retail, office space, and park land. Since that time, rumors, conspiracy theories, and chatter about the project have sparked huge debates about the project.

CONSPIRACY THEORY NO. 2: Developers have "plants" in the audience.

Last Saturday's meeting started with a presentation by EYA representative Aakash Thakkar and Jair Lynch, whose company is part of the development team. After the usual rounds of diagrams, photos, plans, and explications, the meeting opened to community inquiries.

Following some back-and-forths, a slender, blond woman in a red V-neck sweater stepped up to a centrally located mic. She then loosened the mic from its holder and, with the wire dangling behind her, turned away from the developers and faced the other half of the room. Her name was Robin Buck, and she had a message to deliver: "This is called a community meeting but this is clearly a developer-led meeting. The developers are presenting the information, and then they are allowing us to speak."

In other words: Buck felt the place was planted with people favorable to developers. And she's not alone. An ANC commissioner wrote this note to another commissioner, which ended up being passed around to several constituents:

"Talk about setting up the questions and discussions in a way to maximize a particular response: that has been the format of the meetings I attended. The meetings are also liberally salted with plants who will advocate the developer's line. That was clearly how the April meeting was set up with Washington Hospital Center people and developer staff people evenly spread among the [actual] community members."

The developers don't refute the allegation, at least in the case of an April 2008 meeting. According to EYA President Bob Youngentob, that first meeting was set up to gather community input from small groups of residents. Developer reps, yes, were planted there to "facilitate" discussions, he says, and they acknowledged who they were.

To counter the strategy, Buck has been doing some "facilitating" of her own.

She attended Tuesday's residents gathering and hosted a similar get-together the following day. In January, she attended one meeting with the McMillan Advisory Group, a longstanding group of civic association and ANC leaders who meet with the developers on a monthly basis. "People got their permission to speak from the developer. There were three or four Jair Lynch people strategically placed around the room, and they gave the marching orders from the moment we got in," says Buck.

On Saturday, Buck held a couple of clipboards in her free hand. She asked people to sign them, so they could be contacted for "alternative meetings."

The McMillan Sand Filtration Plant site is a 25-acre plot of land north of Bloomingdale. In the mid 1980s, the plant closed, leaving the city to determine how to redevelop the land. In December, Vision McMillan Partners, a group of developers, unveiled plans to transform the parcel into a mixed-use community with housing, retail, office space, and park land. Since that time, rumors, conspiracy theories, and chatter about the project have sparked huge debates about the project.

CONSPIRACY THEORY NO. 1: Trader Joe's is a pipe dream. The retail's going to be cheap chicken joints. In the mix of the developers' unveiling of plans was their "Retail Merchandising Strategy," a strategy punctuated by the names of recognizably nice restaurants, stores, and groceries. Among them: Ray's the Classics, Cactus Cantina, Sala Thai, Busboys & Poets, Ceviche, CVS-CVS!-Griffin Cycle, Harris Teeter, and Trader Joe's.

It was all very exciting. But to some in the audience, it smelled like a ploy: Dangle a Yes! Organic Market in front of a bunch of fringe-y neighborhood residents, and of course they'll support development. Then, the developer does whatever the developer wants and/or was planning to do all along.

At the Tuesday residents-only meeting, Jim Wieber presented one version of this theory: "If you look at their drawings, the development's perfectly upscale." And the problem? "They can bring in cheap strip-mall designers to design that," he says.

But the first to poke holes in the retail strategy was probably Paul Andrew Kirk, the Bloomingdale resident who launched the blog No Drilling at McMillan in late 2008.

In a December post, Kirk tackled the developer's list, calling it "sexy fantasy retail." He wrote: "All of this talk about sushi restaurants and a Trader Joe's is complete propaganda. The developer has NO control over who pay rents here."

Kirk, or someone claiming to be him, is also active on the Greater, Greater Washington blog, where he writes about the hoards of people who will clog up the neighborhood, "driving in to enjoy the next fried chicken joints."

Countered another resident: "I would like mr. kirk to give me one scrap of information that would lead anyone to believe that the retail at this location would consist mostly of 'fried chicken joints'Š"

Next, a developer representative railed on Kirk's "repeated diatribe about check cashing places and chicken joints," saying she had "no idea where he's getting this information."

Then Kirk pointed out that Cluck-U Chicken was also on the developer's merchandising strategy list, at which point another commenter decided he/she had had enough: "What is wrong with Cluck U chicken?????"

Coming to the defense of developers is EYA President Bob Youngentob. He says his group, which is composed of six development companies, could potentially bring in additional companies to develop parts of McMillan's retail. But they wouldn't clog up the area with KFCs and Yumses.

"Bloomingdale and the hospital center-these are great areas," Youngentob says. His feeling abbreviated: People there can afford nice stuff. So that's what they'll be able to buy. "The area's starving for quality retail," he says. "I hear the fears. But, I'm not sure why that perception exists."

Image by Darrow Montgomery

There's more than old sand swirling around plans for the McMillan site.

On a recent Tuesday evening, about a dozen Bloomingdale-area residents gathered around a fire for wine, cheese, mini spinach pastries, and their shared desire to take down a group of D.C. developers. It was one of two strategy sessions-a pre-public meeting before a big public meeting last Saturday at Trinity University.

The subject of all this strategizing: 25 acres of green, one of the largest undeveloped parcels in the city, known as the old McMillan Sand Filtration Site. Since the mid-1980s, the land's water filtration plant has been inactive. At least since then, the District has been deciding and re-deciding what to do with it. Different groups have lobbied for it be a museum, a library, a park, and a national memorial for dogs that died in war. In 2007, the city pulled the trigger, picking Vision McMillan Partners, a group of companies led by Bethesda-based EYA.

EYA unveiled its plans to the community in December. Artistic renderings showed grassy quads surrounded by ethereal, translucent trees, a community amphitheater, and broad corridors of retail. There would be eight acres of public green space, 1,000 to 1,200 units of mixed-income housing, and 400,000 square feet of office space, according to developers.

As the plans got passed around and republished on the Web, one resident launched a blog devoted entirely to criticizing them. There and elsewhere, the rumor mills churned; alliances and conflicts were made and aired out. It all came to resemble a season of Survivor.
Some of the conspiracy theories taking hold in Bloomingdale prove more suspect than others. This week, we'll examine a few of them, one by one:

CONSPIRACY THEORY NO. 1: Trader Joe's is a pipe dream. The retail's going to be cheap chicken joints.
CONSPIRACY THEORY NO. 2: Developers have "plants" in the audience.
CONSPIRACY THEORY NO. 3: Developers may be paying off the local ANC commissioner.
CONSPIRACY THEORY NO. 4:The developers can't finance this project.

Image by Darrow Montgomery

On Saturday, representatives from the Vision McMillan Partners said they were launching a website to release development information for Bloomingdale's 25-acre McMillan site.

The site is currently up, with this weekend's presentation posted. Transparency, transparency, transparency seems to be the developers' mantra. Thank god, they're not selling their plans with some riff on "hope" or "change," at least.

But looking at the site, there are some immediate questions that arise. Instead of just using a regular webpage, the developers chose a blog format. But there's nowhere to raise concerns or post comments. And second, how long is it going to take to get all those community impact studies up?

Oh lord. Where to begin?

For those that haven't been following the McMillan site proceedings, here's a recap: The McMillan Sand Filtration Plant site is a 25-acre parcel of land by the intersection of North Capitol Street and Michigan Avenue, Northwest. In December, a development team unveiled plans re-imagining the land as a mixed-use community with up to 1,200 housing units, a grocery store, retail—the works. In the following month, a Bloomingdale resident launched a blog "No Drilling at McMillan" and local residents started banding together and holding neighbors-only meetings, claiming developers were controlling all the community meetings, and generally treating people like elementary school students—i.e. only letting people speak when called on, shushing them, etc.

All this set the stage for Saturday's meeting which kicked off around 10 a.m. at a building in Brookland on the Trinity College campus. Clint Jackson, the city's project manager for this site, opened with a very clear description of the District's expectations for the site:

• Generate $25 to $35 million annually in city taxes. Yeah, increase the tax base! He said it!
• Increase the District's affordable housing stock.
• Create more open green space.
• Preserve some of the site's historic elements.
• Open more retail outlets in the District of Columbia, so people stop spending all their money in Maryland and Virginia.

"This is not a political rally. We don't want things to get out of hand," he said, a clear reference to the clipboards being passed around by people that had attended residents-only meetings earlier that week.

Developers then began their presentation, eventually unveiling their new site plan, which showed:

• Mmmm, slightly, more contiguous park space, toward the southern end of the site between some rows of townhouses and other residential buildings.The new plan showed about a half acre more of contiguous space.
• A new road on First Street entering the development and greater access to the park from multiple sides. A walkway from Channing Street was widened. Other entrance points from First Street and North Capitol Street now go directly to contiguous park space (No cars buzzing by to kill your kids as they head out to play Frisbee).
• A different historic preservation plan. Previously, the development team offered to preserve one underground "cell," which was part of the original sand filtration plant. After a call for more historic preservation, the site will now preserve portions of three cells. "One of them could tell the history of the site, another could be a children's-focused museum. Another could tell the story of how the waterworks evolved from sand filtration to what's across the street," Aakash Thakkar, a representative of EYA, stated on Saturday.
• New townhouses on Channing Street will be built at a slightly lower grade than imagined in previous plans, so they will be at the same level as the homes across the street.

That was the first part of the meeting. The second part got testy. I'll do a write-up this afternoon.

*Sorry. Hopefully, I'll be able to get a clearer image by later this afternoon.