An article in Friday's WashPost about when (oh, when) a new owner for the Nats will be named says that the city expects "Major League Baseball to name a new owner of the Washington Nationals in time for Thursday's groundbreaking for a $611 million stadium project" (emphasis mine). That would be Thursday, May 4 for those of you counting along. No mention of a time or anything, I'll keep digging. It also says (and this makes sense) that the groundbreaking is the day after the financing bonds are to be sold on Wall Street. UPDATE: I hear through the grapevine that this will be at 10 am.

Another long-planned development project is now moving forward--a correspondent tipped me to a newly posted sign announcing that 250 M Street will be arriving in 2008. This is a 212,500-sq-ft office building by the William C. Smith company, to be built right across the street from the DOT HQ (currently there's a parking lot on that site). It will take up all of the M Street frontage on that block, but won't cover the entire block--there will be an apartment building associated with Capper/Carrollsburg on the rear of the lot, facing L. See the Jones Lang LaSalle database for more information, and check out my tossed-together new page for the project.

Clark/Hunt/Smoot has posted an updated Bid/Purchasing Schedule for the ballpark--even if you're not a construction company looking to get in on the action, it's oddly fascinating to see how specific it all is, as well as seeing the timeline of what's bidded on when.

I've made some changes to navigation on the site, which I hope might help on some of the pages that are really much too full of information. I've created "tabs" with topic areas that you can click on to see specific portions of info on a page--for instance, the Capitol Hill Tower page now has "tabs" for Overview, Courtyard by Marriott, Capitol Hill Tower, and News Items. (Just go see and do some clicking, it's hard to explain; I've added some photos to each section to make it worth your while.) Another example is on the right side of the home page, below the map--I've had for a while a huge "Directory of Current/Future Projects," which gave all the basics on every project in the 'Hood, but which was hard to grasp because the table ran so deep. So I've now used tabs to separate the Projects Directory into Residential, Office, Recreation/Retail/Hotel, and Mixed-Use. So check it out. (I've tested these updates in IE 6.x and Firefox 1.07--if you're using anything older than that, it's time for you to upgrade!) Oh, and I've made the construction slideshows I've done much more prominent on each project's page, which I should have done a long time ago!

(This is WAAAY over my head, but I provide it as a public service to the three of you who do understand it.) Fitch has rated the bonds that will be sold next week to finance the new baseball stadium: "Fitch has assigned ratings to the following series of ballpark revenue bonds to be issued by the District of Columbia: $81.34 million taxable series 2006A-1 'BBB'; $108.88 million taxable series 2006A-2 'BBB'; $320.39 million tax-exempt series 2006B-1 'BBB+'; $25 million tax-exempt series 2006B-2 (auction rate securities) 'BBB+'. The bonds are scheduled to be sold the week of May 2. The series 2006A-1 bonds will be a limited offering with UBS Investment Bank as placement agent. The series 2006A-2 and 2006B bonds will be sold through negotiation with a syndicate led by UBS Investment Bank. The Rating Outlook on all four series is Stable. Proceeds will be used for construction of a new baseball stadium along the Anacostia River."

More posts: Nationals Park