It's a Capitol Riverfront kind of day here, as I now see that the bill to create the Capitol Riverfront Business Improvement District was introduced to the DC city council last week by Tommy Wells and Jack Evans; it's B17-0208, "Capitol Riverfront Business Improvement District Amendment Act of 2007." The text of the bill is online; it describes the boundaries as being all of Near Southeast and most of Buzzards Point (from 2nd Street SW eastward, with a few jogs along Q and P), and it sets out the taxes it will assess on commercial properties within the BID. No word yet on when hearings will be. You can visit the Capitol Riverfront BID web site to read their executive summary, bylaws, and operating plan, and also take a look at some of my previous entries on the creation of the BID. And what exactly is a Business Improvement District? It's an area where the majority of property owners agree to an "self-tax" that pays for services that aren't provided by the city, like security, public space maintenance and cleanup, marketing, promotion, development, parking, transportation, etc. Here's the Wikipedia entry, if you want more general background on BIDs, and RestoreDC also has a page on DC's BIDs.

Hat tip to reader K. for the news that the Capitol Riverfront promotional video commissioned by the Washington DC Economic Partnership I mentioned last week is now available online (it's not streaming, you have to wait for the 4 MB or so Quicktime file to download before watching it). Quoting again from the press release: "The five-minute video fuses massing models, renderings, map graphics, fly-by animations, copy writing and narration into a montage of the current and planned development of this highly sought-after area of Washington, DC." Definitely watch it, it's very well done as these things go, although anyone who spends time at JDLand won't see any great surprises. Keep in mind that it's a video geared toward investors and commercial entities, with plenty of statistics and enticing images (millions of square feet of office space! thousands of new residential units! stadiums! riverwalks! happy patrons strolling past shiny new chain establishments!) but there are some neat animated snippets of some of the buildings in progress in Near Southeast, and renderings maps of the plans for the Southwest Waterfront and Poplar Point. One thing I did learn--the map in the video shows the possible DC United stadium at Poplar Point as being located more to east, across from the Navy Yard, and not on the little peninsula directly across the river from the Nationals ballpark.