DC Council clearing way for D.C. United stadium land acquisition

While it is no longer making the same level of news, the work towards the D.C. United stadium at Buzzard Point continues. The District of Columbia has allocated $106,579,712 towards the infrastructure improvements and cleanup required on the stadium site. Now that the money is there, the progress on those improvements can actually begin.

In a separate vote, the D.C. Council is in the process of making a number of technical amendments to the soccer stadium bill that they passed last year. Council Chairman Phil Mendelson said that the bill as passed then and the amended bill are "substantively the same," but that the Council wanted to add some oversight to such things as the horizontal and vertical development agreement and the ground lease between the District and D.C. United. The bill has passed its first reading, with final passage coming at the meeting on 5 May.

Also changed were some technical details related to the land acquisition process to make the bill in line with the District's Home Rule Act. Finally, due the slippage in time the Council also has extended the deadline for them to acquire the land on the stadium site to 30 September 2015, and extends all other deadlines by 6 months.

All of this together will allow the District to move forward on acquiring the land, whether through purchase in the case of Mark Ein, Super Salvage, and Pepco, or through eminent domain, which is seemingly more likely in the case of Akridge. I will only be happy when there are shovels in the ground, but it is good to see the process still moving forward.