Thursday night Caitlin and I went to a community meeting with our editor, Garrett. The three of us had already had a busy week at work with deadline on Tuesday and paper delivery on Wednesday.

Garrett told us to expect high drama levels at the meeting. He actually said at the end that it was less exciting than he was expecting, but there was enough controversy to remind me of community meetings in my hometown.

The only item on the meeting’s agenda was the conversion of a historic house for the blind, the Hurt Home, into a 15-unit condominium. The element that surprised me the most was that the controversy was not so much about the use of the building as the number of people it would bring to the community. Audience members wanted to keep their territory from overpopulation, it seemed. (And for good reason. Georgetown has a horrible traffic problem, almost all day long.)

It was also very clear that the audience in attendance did not want the condos to be rented to Georgetown University students. Not since a special history lecture at Oxford  have I heard of such division between "town and gown." Garrett said tensions are also much higher during the school year. Baylor is very different. Although there is definitely a "Baylor Bubble" and not every Wacoan is a fan of the university, the influential community members in Waco are largely supportive of the university. This could be because they are mostly Baylor alumni and the university’s sports generate large amounts of revenue for the city, but still, it is a very different atmosphere than Georgetown, where there is a strong division.

Georgetown politics are still new to me, but so far I have found them highly entertaining.