Rethink College Park

For starters, you may have noticed less posting on RCP lately. With one co-founder already away from College Park for a year and the other preparing to graduate, RCP is in need of fresh blood. We’ll be organizing a strategic meeting to bring together our supporters to plan for the future of the site soon, if you are interested in contributing please drop us a line. Recently a community member wrote to ask why we hadn’t written more, but demurred from contributing saying he wasn’t a “writer.” Before blogging, neither were many of our contributors!

What’s new around town? Councilmember Catlin was kind enough to post a short summary as a comment recently. To add to his comments, although rumors have been circulating about the Mazza Grandmarc Graduate Apartments, the developer personally (and vigorously) assured us construction was moving forward and they planned to break ground this year, hopefully late summer or fall.

Today’s Diamondback has two stories of note: a short summary of changes to the 517-bed addition to the University View being planned, and an article describing the over $620 million backlog of on-campus maintenance.

While we have a few posts planned, expect fewer stories until the future of the site is planned in more detail.

After sewing the seeds of dissent for nearly a year, RTCP’s Purple Line legwork appears to be paying some serious dividends. The Diamondback reports today that next week the SGA will give their near unanimous (if not unanimous) support of the Campus Drive alignment (purple on image), thus handing another serious blow to an intransigent university administration. They will join the Graduate Student Government (who voted four months ago) and the Residence Hall Association, which both have passed strong resolutions in favor of the most common sense alignment for the transitway.

Let’s not mistake the SGA’s long wait for this vote as indication of careful consideration. While we’re happy the SGA as a whole has finally come around, their four months of resistence to this vote was unnceccessary. The “Preinkert Drive alignment” (in red on the image) is more symptomatic of the university administration’s anything but strategy rather than an indication of the on-the-ground existence of serious prudent and feasible alternatives to Campus Drive. We commend those within the SGA who had the courage and conviction to stand for everything that an academic community is supposed be - a community of reasoned and informed individuals.

(see larger interactive map)