Photo by Phil Romans on Flickr.

If you want to express an opinion to your councilmember, you can send an email. But if you want to tell the DC Zoning Commission what you think of a development proposal, you have to print out a letter on paper, sign it, then scan it back in, or send them a physical letter.

This makes it hard for many residents to participate in the forum where the city’s land use decisions get made. Not everyone has a scanner handy. It takes a fair amount of time and materials to mail a letter. There seems to be little reason not to let people send an email, with comments in the text, their name and address at the bottom.

I raised this issue this morning at an oversight hearing for the Office of Zoning. DC Council chairman Phil Mendelson asked Office of Zoning director Sara Bardin for the reason. This rule came about, she said, because in one case about 10 years ago, someone sent an email which falsified the name.

Therefore, she said, they decided to require a signature on all letters. Otherwise, “we can’t authenticate it should somebody come back later” and say the testimony is false.

Mendelson seemed skeptical. “It might be worth looking at that some more,” he said. He pointed out that if someone brings a petition signed by a number of residents, OZ doesn’t necessarily authenticate them either.

Bardin never explained why it is so important to authenticate each piece of testimony. The Zoning Commission can read letters from people with and without a wiggly line at the bottom, and give each the weight members think it deserves. If they want to give more credit to letters with an ink design at the bottom, fine, but what’s the harm in accepting the letters? For that matter, did this one email 10 years ago cause great harm in a zoning case? It seems unlikely.

Mendelson asked me whether allowing emailed comments would encourage people to create online petitions. He pointed out that he had received over 500 emails on an issue last year (he didn’t specify, but it could have been Uber). It’s easier, he said, to just click on a petition, and does that mean as much?

I replied that while getting a lot of form emails might not show as strong a depth of passion as when people write individual letters or even come to testify at a hearing, it’s important information. Councilmembers could know that a lot of people cared enough about Uber, or yoga taxes, or other issues like those to send an email.

Perhaps making it hard for people to give their input might have an upside from the staff’s point of view; they have to deal with fewer documents, and the commissioners have to read a shorter record. But it also deprives many residents of a voice in this process.

Hopefully Bardin will heed Mendelson’s gentle suggestion and reevalute this policy. In the meantime, please support this effort by writing your comments in cuneiform on a clay tablet, firing the tablet, plating it in bronze, and shipping the resulting plaque to Zoning Commission for the District of Columbia, 441 4th Street, NW, Room 200-South, Washington, DC 20001.

David Alpert created Greater Greater Washington in 2008 and was its executive director until 2020. He formerly worked in tech and has lived in the Boston, San Francisco Bay, and New York metro areas in addition to Washington, DC. He lives with his wife and two children in Dupont Circle.