What does it take to get a private meeting with one of Mayor Muriel Bowser’s agency heads? Loose Lips probably isn’t the best authority on this subject, considering most avoid him like the plague these days. But LL suspects that a obsequious relationship with the mayor herself couldn’t hurt.
The question has been at the heart of a debate roiling Petworth these past few weeks. Neighbors supporting traffic safety changes on Grant Circle NW were incensed to discover that District Department of Transportation officials, including Acting Director Sharon Kershbaum, held a private meeting on July 8 with a group of people who have spent years critiquing the project over familiar fears about the loss of parking and added traffic congestion. What’s more, LL hears that Kimberly Lockett, a consultant on Bowser’s 2018 campaign and a mayoral appointee, along with other older activists in the community group dubbed the “Petworth Get Wise Coalition,” were involved in organizing the gathering. Supporters who have spent years pressing for measures to make it safer to walk and bike on the circle were not afforded the same courtesy.
On its face, this development might not seem so sinister: City officials of all stripes hold meetings upon meetings if they want to so much as blow their noses. But Lockett and some of her allies in the Petworth Get Wise group have a long history of fighting change in the neighborhood. And those are exactly the sort of voices that Bowser has increasingly been listening to on traffic safety matters, as highlighted by her reversal on the Connecticut Avenue NW bike lane project. (Nick DelleDonne, a leading opponent of that project and pretty much every other effort to build bike lanes in the city, has been showing up to Grant Circle meetings, even though he lives nowhere near the area.) The question for supporters of the project is whether Bowser’s Ward 4 buddies and the city’s NIMBY community can succeed in delaying, shrinking, or killing this project, too.
“There’s a lot of distress that DDOT is going to just bow to political pressure again,” says Tara Varghese, who lives near Grant Circle and supports the traffic changes. “It’s just a massive waste of time and resources for DDOT to keep relitigating the same intersections over and over when they’ve already developed plans for them. It’s really demoralizing for neighbors and the community to have to keep going through this. And, in the meantime, how many people will have gotten hit by cars in crosswalks?”
DDOT has not given any indication so far that it plans to make any major changes to its Grant Circle plans, which are set to be finalized in the fall. A spokesperson told LL in an email that the agency plans to “stay within the project scope to avoid any delays” in order to “improve reliability and safety for all roadway users, including pedestrians and cyclists.” And advisory neighborhood commissioners and other neighbors say DDOT officials have repeatedly reassured them as much.
In fact, rumors are circulating that the July 8 meeting became so heated that there was some sort of physical confrontation between neighbors and DDOT staffers, suggesting the two sides are not entirely on the same page (though LL has only heard the details secondhand and there does not appear to be any police reports or charges filed related to the incident).
But DelleDonne and his allies are persistent, and they have many wrenches to throw into the works to derail the project (and he is no stranger to litigation). Plus, it remains to be seen whether Kershbaum will change her tune if she wins Council confirmation as official DDOT director this fall.
“It’s been delayed and delayed and delayed so many times already,” says Brittany Kademian, who serves on ANC 4C in Petworth, noting that DDOT first kicked off this process in 2017. “We just don’t want to see them throw it all in the trash again.”
It’s difficult to discount the influence of Lockett, who spoke against the Grant Circle changes at an ANC meeting that Bowser attended in April. (The mayor all but committed to sending out Kershbaum to chat with her after hearing those comments, saying “the department can come to a number of the community organizations to meet with them.”)
Lockett has a long history with Bowser, even before her high-dollar consulting fees on Bowser’s 2018 mayoral bid attracted the attention of campaign finance investigators. (They ultimately didn’t pursue any sanctions against the campaign.) Campaign finance records show she’s backed Bowser, and Herronor’s handpicked Ward 4 successor Brandon Todd, in various races for more than a decade. Bowser has repaid that loyalty with an appointment to D.C.’s Combat Sports Commission for the past nine years, as well as a handful of tickets to the mayor’s suite at Capital One Arena.
Over that time, Lockett has tried to position herself as a defender of the neighborhood’s old guard, framing her “Petworth Action Committee” as a group that protects the interests of the area’s older Black residents from the influence of the White gentrifiers who have increasingly flooded into Petworth. This stance has often aligned her with the Petworth Get Wise Coalition, a group with similar aims that includes Paul Johnson, the former ANC who challenged Ward 4 Councilmember Janeese Lewis George in the June primary on grounds she wasn’t listening to the community. (Lockett initially agreed to an interview for this story, but ultimately declined to comment, as did James Williams, one of the leaders of Petworth Get Wise.)
“I have never seen the amount of selfishness, privilege, entitlement, and lack of concern for others as I have with some city leaders and some of our current residents” during the Grant Circle process, Lockett testified at a June Council hearing on Kershbaum’s nomination as DDOT director. “Many of us plan on staying here. We’re not just here to get the equity out of our houses and move to the suburbs. We’ve been here and we plan to be here.”
These are depressingly familiar arguments for people in the neighborhood concerned about traffic safety. Many of them emerged over (what else?) the push to bring a bike lane to 5th Street NW, one of the roads that feeds into the circle. Even the effort to install a Capital Bikeshare station on the circle that same year invited this “gentrifiers vs. longtime residents” framing, prompting Todd’s intervention in the dispute at the behest of some of these same voices. Any change that would remove parking spaces (as the Grant Circle improvements would) or simply make the neighborhood feel a little different are viewed with great suspicion by some longtime residents.
“A lot of the time it’s just about the symbolism, about who these older residents believe the government now listens to,” says Jeremiah Lowery, a Petworth resident who (up until very recently) ran advocacy efforts for the Washington Area Bicyclist Association. “Grant Circle is just a perfect storm of this, with the older Black residents on one side and the younger, mostly White residents on the other.”
The irony is that Bowser tends to listen to such complaints when adjudicating such disputes, even if their tactics will simply leave the the safety concerns around the circle unaddressed. ANC 4C voted in February to support many of DDOT’s proposed changes, such as a new protected bike lane on the circle and improvements to its intersections, citing its long history of crashes. DDOT’s data suggest there were 51 major crashes on the circle between 2017 and 2022, and neighbors suspect many more are simply not reported. A woman was killed in a Grant Circle crash two years ago; another woman and her daughter were hospitalized after being struck by a driver while in a crosswalk back in March.
“This woman had to throw her body in front of her stroller to protect her kid, which is basically every parent’s worst nightmare,” Varghese says. “There’s just a lot more little people in the neighborhood right now who are toddling around. There’s a playground right off the circle, there are schools right off the circle. And there’s a huge increase in the number of people who are using bicycles as transportation. That’s a good thing, but the city also needs to accommodate those users.”
These are the arguments that tend to inspire anger rather than empathy when presented to opponents of bike lanes and other traffic safety measures. But perhaps the best indication that DDOT isn’t caving on Grant Circle are the whispers that the July 8 meeting with Lockett and company got a bit out of hand. LL has heard several different secondhand descriptions of what occurred (no one who actually attended has spoken up), but there are some strong suggestions that these rumors have legs. For instance, Lisa Williams, who worked with the groups to organize the closed-door meeting at the Center City Public Charter School on Webster Street NW, speaks about the gathering very cryptically. (DDOT’s spokesperson did not answer LL’s specific questions about the meeting.)
“Nobody likes kindness anymore,” Williams laments, repeatedly declining to discuss what happened at the meeting in a recent conversation with LL. “I don’t know why everybody is so bent out of shape when people voted on this. They had an ANC vote. … Let it go. I’m like, ‘grow up, people.’”
LL is not holding his breath that opponents of these changes might listen to those admonitions.
DDOT says that it hopes to have a preliminary design of the project ready by the summer, so everyone involved will soon know how the agency has handled the pushback. The project’s supporters hope that Lewis George, who has championed the Grant Circle changes in the past, can help push it over the finish line. (She declined to comment for this article.) But there might not be much that anyone can do if Bowser or her top aides decide to press pause.