A proposed design for the Ward 7 site, which has remained unchanged from the original plan.

The D.C. Council’s revisions to Mayor Muriel Bowser’s homeless shelter will likely push the full closure of D.C. General into 2019 and the administration will now evaluate the possibility of closing the dilapidated shelter in stages, according to the director of D.C.’s Department of General Services.

“The entire process will last into calendar year 2019. The original plan would have had us completed by about September of 2018,” Christopher Weaver tells DCist. “I don’t want to minimize that’s a little bit of a disappointment, but that is outweighed by coming to a consensus and very good common ground.”

The timing of the closure was the subject of some controversy—and hurled expletives—in the John A. Wilson Building.

In introducing the changes at a Council meeting last month, Chairman Phil Mendelson said that the new plan—which relocates three of the original sites to city-owned land and requires the purchase of two—would make the administration’s “ambitious goal” of closing the shelter by 2018 “more likely.” Mayor Muriel Bowser called him a liar in colorful language, according to accounts by several local reporters.

Two weeks later, though, the administration and the Council had worked out revisions to the plan (most notably changing the Ward 6 site for a third time) and passed it without friction. “With the debate now behind us, I look forward to working with neighbors across the District to build replacement facilities that we can all be proud of,” Bowser said in a statement.

Still, a revised plan on the mayor’s Homeward DC site pointedly pins a delay in the projected timeline on the Council. “The changes that Council made to the original plan … extend the timeline for closing DC General by more than a year, to January 2020,” a Q&A reads. “Factors that contribute to the extended timeline include now [needing] to start over on architectural designs for the new sites and preparing and submitting new BZA applications.”

Via the Executive Office of the Mayor

“I find the rhetoric suggesting that the council has delayed things as counterproductive and needlessly antagonistic—and it overlooks their own delays,” Mendelson tells DCist, citing the long stretch between when the council voted in favor of closing the shelter in November and when all seven sites were announced in February, among others. “The fact is there’s quite a bit of evidence if we had adopted the proposal as introduced, the shelters would not have been completed on that timeline.”

By changing the three sites in Wards 3, 5, and 6 to city-owned land, the zoning process will be easier and less likely to get delayed by “endless litigation” (and the Ward 6 site would no longer require approval from the historic preservation review board), Mendelson said. Should the city need to file for eminent domain to acquire private land in Wards 1 and 4, he added, they could use the same “quick take” process (in which the city takes possession of the land while the case is worked out in the courts) used to acquire the land for Nationals Park and the new D.C. United stadium.

Despite the switch from leasing much of the land, Weaver said DGS is “very comfortable with the approach of purchasing and owning … Had we had all those resources [from the beginning] we would have probably gone with it.” To make up the immediate cost difference in the plans, the D.C. Council shifted funds from the Coolidge Senior High School school modernization project (Education Committee Chair David Grosso said the project wasn’t far enough along to use the money next year anyway).

And now that the outlines of the plan are in place, DGS can forge ahead on the details at full speed. That includes starting from scratch on the design for the three sites that were relocated on to city-owned land. The department has already done preliminary “test fits” and is in the process of evaluating them. More detailed designs will be likely be released later this year.

The sense of urgency won’t come at the expense of keeping neighbors involved, according to Weaver. “There’s not going to be any steps skipped in terms of reaching out to the community. We’re working very hard on an engagement plan, just as we did last time.”

The timeline for completion is still very much up in the air, he says, but it seems likely that the Ward 7 and 8 sites will be finished the earliest. They remain unchanged from Bowser’s original plan, where they were already on city-owned land.

As the debate over the sites raged, the administration was steadfast in insisting they all move together as a package and close D.C. General at once. But the administration will now consider staggering the notorious shelter’s closure.

The mayor “is laser focused on closing D.C. General as efficiently and quickly as we can … really what it comes down to is how many units can we deliver in the shortest amount of time in order to justify closing all or part of it,” Weaver says. Once they have a better idea of construction and delivery dates, DGS will present the mayor with a set of options. “We might be able to get to a situation where we can close it down in parts, or maybe not. All of that is being evaluated.”