D.C. Mun. Regs. tit. 10-A, § 1103
1103.1 DGS is responsible for the management, care, and operation of many of Washington, DC's government facilities. As of 2018, these facilities include over 835 government-owned properties that include 650 buildings, dozens of triangle parks and slivers, approximately 34.5 million square feet of floor space (inclusive of District of Columbia Public Schools), 64 warehouses totaling approximately 882,700 square feet, and 75 leased buildings with 4.0 million square feet of floor space. Assets also include 26 parking lots and 71 antenna locations, seven of which contain communication towers. In addition, the total space leased out by DGS to private lessees is approximately 6.2 million square feet. DGS manages and implements a building improvement program for several of the largest District agencies, including District of Columbia Public Schools (DCPS), DACL, DOC, FEMS, DC Health, DHS, the Department of Parks and Recreation (DPR), MPD, and the Department of Public Works. The DGS portfolio also includes facilities of the University of the District of Columbia (UDC) and the District of Columbia Public Library (DCPL); however, building improvements as well as the management, care, and operation of these facilities are conducted by UDC and DCPL, respectively, rather than by DGS.
1103.2 The District consolidated the Department of Real Estate Services (DRES), the Office of Public Education Facilities Modernization (OPEFM), and the capital management functions for DOC, FEMS, DC Health, DHS, DPR, and MPD to create a single agency responsible for all vertical construction (with the exception of DCPL) for DC government in 2011. This single agency is today's DGS.
1103.3 Historically, planning for the facility needs of these agencies focused on addressing incremental, short-term capital needs, rather than capital needs tied to long-term forecasts based on land use, transportation, and demographic growth and change analyses. This was partially due to the advancing age of many facilities, their underused condition, and an overriding emphasis on near-term facility replacement and modernization to address basic life-safety issues such as structural integrity, rather than planning more systematically for 10- or 20-year needs.
1103.4 Through the Comprehensive Plan, the District has guided Washington, DC's growth, providing a long-term perspective on future needs. The District has identified gaps, redundancies, and functionally obsolete community facilities through a variety of place-based plans, systems plans, and facilities master plans covering a wide range of public facilities. This has produced more logical and equitable capital planning that presented opportunities for co-location, shared-use, and adaptive reuse strategies to help optimize the performance and policy outcomes of District-owned facilities.
1103.5 Since the 2006 Comprehensive Plan adoption, DGS and its predecessor agencies built over four million square feet of new public facilities and renovated or opened more than 15 police and fire stations. These figures are in addition to more than eight million square feet of school modernization projects, addressed in the Educational Facilities Element. These activities demonstrate significant strides made by the District in planning and delivering facilities that now provide better and more accessible services. As Washington, DC continues to grow and its needs evolve, opportunities to enhance cross-systems civic planning should be harnessed.
1103.6 Washington, DC has a land area of 61 square miles and, as of 2017, a population of 693,972. Within this compact footprint and using a finite number of public facilities and lands, the District must serve the health, education, recreation, safety, and security needs of residents. With the District's population anticipated to grow, District ownership and decision-making control over these public assets will grow more critical. Moving forward, the District should carefully consider the ownership, control, use, and disposition of these assets to ensure it can meet near-term and long-range needs of residents. A Public Facilities Plan can inventory civic assets against future needs to help inform decisions. The Public Facilities Plan would help ensure that an adequate supply of land and facilities is available for the dynamic needs of a growing residential population in the long-term future.
1103.7 In addition to financing and constructing facilities itself and co-locating compatible facilities together, the District uses joint development and public-private ventures to leverage its assets. An additional tool—and one of the most important used by the District—is the Capital Improvement Plan (CIP), a six-year, forward-looking plan that establishes the strategy for future public investment in capital assets, including District-owned facilities, equipment, and transportation infrastructure, and that prioritizes and allocates investments to specific projects based on a careful annual evaluation and assessment of needs. The Public Facilities Plan can serve as a repository of cross-agency information that can help inform the CIP.
1103.8 Co-location is the reuse of a publicly owned site in a manner that accommodates a combination of public and/or private uses. Co-location can help Washington, DC to achieve many of the goals described in the Comprehensive Plan, such as maximizing the public benefits that a given public property, asset, facility, or combination thereof can deliver.
1103.9 Co-location can help residents individually, by providing a one-stop shop with a variety of services typically needed by the same people in the same facility or by keeping facilities occupied and thus safer day and night, as when apartments sit atop libraries or schools are used for community meetings in the evening. Co-
location can be physical, when two or more uses occur on the same site, and/or temporal, where different uses take place at different times in the same room or same building on the site, as when religious congregations rent school auditoriums on weekends and private sports leagues use school athletic facilities. Thus, co-location includes, but is not limited to, the following potential combinations of uses on a single site:
A Public Facilities Plan can encourage the District to consider co-location of a wide range of municipal uses and assets that can help maximize the ability of any given facility to deliver services to District residents. This is especially critical when uses under consideration are under the auspices of separate agencies.
1103.10
Washington, DC is facing deferred facilities maintenance. To balance limited resources and competing priorities, the District is creating a comprehensive asset management plan. This plan consolidates asset inventories from all District agencies and analyzes their maintenance and replacement schedules on a unified basis, delivering the following benefits:
This new approach will enable the District to better understand maintenance,
replacement, and related investment needs, helping ensure that related budget and capital funding priorities can be optimally aligned.
1103.11 As of 2017, public facilities data layers are publicly available through online tools provided by the District’s Geographic Information Systems (DCGIS) Program, including the http://opendata.dc.gov portal, which is developed and maintained by the Office of the Chief Technology Officer (OCTO). These tools enable agencies and the public to quickly access data, create maps, and conduct analyses. While a wide array of public facilities information is currently available through this portal, visualization of public facilities on a unified (i.e., cross-asset) basis could be improved as part of the Public Facilities Plan. By aggregating these data, relationships and dynamics within civic systems (e.g., the way schools, libraries, and parks interact) as well as alignment with other systems, such as housing and transportation, can be made more readily evident and help inform and enhance the CIP and other District efforts to help shape and manage growth.
District-owned buildings and lands should be effectively used to meet the needs of residents. Develop a District-wide Public Facilities Plan to understand the distribution, capacity, control, and occupancy of District facilities and lands across systems and agencies, taking into account service delivery and improved alignment with current needs and expected future growth.
Construct, rehabilitate, and maintain the facilities necessary for the efficient delivery of public services to current and future District residents.
Ensure that the District government owns a sufficient amount of land in appropriately distributed locations to accommodate needed public facilities and meet the long-term operational needs of the government.
See also the Land Use Element and Economic Development Element policies and actions to preserve and conserve adequate lands for public facilities.
Prioritize District-owned property for community facility uses. Wherever feasible, the District should use short- or long-term leases for lands not currently needed to preserve the District’s long-term supply of land for public use.
Develop reuse or disposition plans for public buildings or sites that are functionally obsolete, that cannot be rehabilitated cost-effectively, or that are no
longer needed. Before any disposition of property is made, consideration shall be given to potential future uses by, and needs of, the District.
All District public facilities shall accommodate the needs of persons with physical disabilities to the greatest extent possible. Comply with the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) in all new construction and renovations. Consider Universal Design solutions when opportunities present themselves and as funding allows.
Universal Design is defined by the National Park Service (NPS) and the National Center on Accessibility (NCA) as the design of products and environments to be usable by all people, to the greatest extent possible, without the need for adaptation or specialized design.
Ensure that the planning, siting, and design of new public facilities is consistent with Comprehensive Plan goals and policies, including the Future Land Use Map and the Policy Map.
Locate new public facilities to best serve all District residents and to support economic development and neighborhood revitalization efforts, with a focus on underserved areas and areas of growth.
See the Environmental Protection Element for policies on green building requirements for new public facilities and the Urban Design Element for policies on the design of public buildings.
Encourage the strategic co-location of public municipal uses on publicly-owned and controlled sites, provided that the uses are functionally compatible with each other and the site’s future land use designation. Consider co-location of private and public uses as a strategy that can help advance District-wide and neighborhood priorities, such as the creation of affordable housing and equitable access to services.
The Public Facilities Plan should include interagency coordination for co-location of public uses early in planning and project initiation processes so that critical input is captured and incorporated. Joint planning of District-operated facilities with other community facilities such as schools, older adult services, health clinics, community kitchens, healthy food growing or retail spaces, and nonprofit
service centers should also be supported through ongoing communication and collaboration among relevant District agencies and outside agencies and partners.
See the Land Use Element for policies related to the siting of community facilities and mitigation of potential impacts.
1103.21a
Text box: Food Hubs
The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) defines a food hub as “a business or organization that actively manages the aggregation, distribution, and marketing of course-identified food products primarily from local and regional producers to strengthen their ability to satisfy wholesale, retail, and institutional demand.” (Source: USDA 2012 Regional Food Hub Resource Guide).
1103.22
Support development of a system of food hub and processing centers where nutritious and local food can be aggregated, safely prepared, and efficiently distributed to District agencies, feeding sites, shelters for persons experiencing homelessness, schools, nonprofits, and local businesses for the District’s normal institutional meal operations as well as leveraged for emergency feeding efforts during disaster events.
1103.23
Encourage the shared use of District-owned facilities, such as recreation centers, as sites that can support a variety of programs and activities. These can include community education about nutrition, nutrition entrepreneurship, and small business development; urban agriculture; cultural performance, production, and exhibition; and child development and care.
1103.24
Continue to develop and refine the District’s multilayered approach to facilities master planning) so that adequate community facilities are provided for existing residents and can be provided for new neighborhoods in Washington, DC, including by providing guidance for the long-term (six-year) CIP and the annual capital budget. The approach should include an assessment of all District-owned or -maintained community facilities and property and should identify what improvements are needed to correct deficiencies and address planned growth and change in the District. The facilities plan should be continuously maintained and updated regularly with new priorities and timelines. As needed, the Comprehensive Plan should be amended to incorporate master facilities planning findings. As part of this work, the appropriate agency shall continue to annually collect and publish data on public school capacity and enrollments, recreation facilities, libraries, emergency medical service response time, sewers, green space, and public transit capacity, including bus routes and ridership statistics for Metrorail stations and lines as well as parking availability and traffic volumes on
roads and at key intersections. These data should be used, as appropriate, when evaluating the need for facility and infrastructure improvements.
1103.25 Action CSF-1.1.B: Guidelines For Public Uses of Public Facilities Develop unified District inventory of public facilities and establish guidelines that can help the District understand the adequacy of District-owned space for use by District agencies.1103.26 Action CSF-1.1.C: Site Planning Procedures Public facility planning shall include site planning and management procedures to mitigate adverse impacts on surrounding areas.1103.27 Action CSF-1.1.D: Public Facilities Planning Develop a Public Facilities Plan that helps to inventory, consolidate, and coordinate facility information across District agencies.1103.28 Action CSF-1.1.E: Opportunities to Promote Local Food Businesses Identify best practices and potential locations for food hubs, food business incubators, and community kitchens to expand healthy food access and food-based economic opportunity in underserved areas through co-location with job training, business incubation, and entrepreneurial assistance programs.1103.29 Action CSF-1.1.F: Co-Location of Housing with Public Facilities As part of facilities master planning and the CIP, conduct a review of and maximize any opportunities to co-locate mixed-income multi-family housing when there is a proposal for a new or substantially upgraded local public facility, particularly in high-cost areas.1103.30 Action CSF-1.1.G: Universal Design Create a working group comprised of relevant District agencies to explore the use of Universal Design standards in new and existing District facilities.1103.31 Action CSF-1.1.H: Central Kitchen Facility Explore the potential for establishment of a central kitchen facility, as required by the Healthy Students Act and subject to funding availability, which could function as a meal preparation site for the District's institutional meal programs (e.g., schools, shelters for persons experiencing homelessness), an aggregation center for fresh food to be distributed to local businesses, and a job training facility, among other potential functions including emergency feeding.
SOURCE: District of Columbia Comprehensive Plan Act of 1984, effective April 10, 1984 (D.C. Law 5-76; 31 DCR 1049 (March 9, 1984)); as amended by District of Columbia Comprehensive Plan Act of 1984 Land Use Element Amendment Act of 1984, effective March 16, 1985 (D.C. Law 5-187; 32 DCR 873 (February 15, 1985)); as amended by District of Columbia Comprehensive Plan Amendments Act of 1989, effective May 23, 1990 (D.C. Law
8-129; 37 DCR 55 (January 5, 1990)); as amended by District of Columbia Comprehensive Plan Amendments Act of 1989 NCPC-Recommended Amendments, and Closing of Public Alleys in Square 669, S.O. 88-452, Act of 1990, effective May 23, 1990 (D.C. Law 8-132; 37 DCR 2213 (April 6, 1990)); as amended by District Government Land Use Temporary Amendment Act of 1994, effective October 1, 1994 (D.C. Law 10-190; 41 DCR 5360 (August 12, 1994)); as amended by Comprehensive Plan Amendments Act of 1994, effective October 6, 1994 (D.C. Law 10-193; 41 DCR 5536 (August 19, 1994)); as amended by District of Columbia Comprehensive Plan Act of 1984 Land Use Amendment Act of 1994, effective March 21, 1995 (D.C. Law 10-235; 42 DCR 30 (January 6, 1995)); as amended by Technical Amendments Act of 1996, effective April 18, 1996 (D.C. Law 11-110; 43 DCR 530 (February 9, 1996)); as amended by Second Technical Amendments Act of 1996, effective April 9, 1997 (D.C. Law 11-255; 44 DCR 1271 (March 7, 1997)); as amended by Comprehensive Plan Amendment Act of 1998, effective April 27, 1999 (D.C. Law 12-275; 46 DCR 1441 (February 19, 1999)); as amended by Technical Amendments Act of 1999, effective April 12, 2000 (D.C. Law 13-91; 47 DCR 520 (January 28, 2000)); as amended by Comprehensive Plan Amendment Act of 2006, effective March 8, 2007 (D.C. Law 16-300; 54 DCR 924 (February 2, 2007)); as amended by Technical Amendments Act of 2008, effective March 25, 2009 (D.C. Law 17-353; 56 DCR 1117 (February 6, 2009)); as amended by Comprehensive Plan Amendment Act of 2010, effective April 8, 2011 (D.C. Law 18-361; 58 DCR 908 (February 4, 2011)); as amended by Comprehensive Plan Amendment Act of 2021, effective August 21, 2021 (D.C. Law 24-20; 68 DCR 006918 (July 16, 2021)).