With Opening Day 2008 inching closer, the cobbling together of parking at the new ballpark is apparently turning out to be a greater challenge than constructing an on-time on-budget stadium. So this week the city put in another zoning amendment request to allow more temporary surface parking lots, this time covering eight squares in Southwest, all between P, T, 2nd, and South Capitol streets. (See my Stadium Parking page for a map with the new lots highlighted.) You can read the Office of Planning's report on the new case (07-08A) for more detail.

I took advantage of great weather and an unplanned opening in my schedule to make a photo run through the Hood on Monday. The pictures that will probably be of most interest are of the east and south sides of the stadium exterior, which I've been unable to get shots of since First Street and Potomac Avenue were closed to traffic and pedestrians a number of weeks back. While the stadium itself doesn't look incredibly different on those sides (lots more window glass being installed, including in the areas along First Street slotted for retail), I did get a nice surprise when I found a new sidewalk already in place on the south side of Potomac Avenue east of South Capitol. But don't be expecting to get to "drive the ballpark circuit" again much before Opening Day--the infrastructure work on Potomac and on First (and eventually on I) is scheduled to continue through February. (I also want to plead my case that I've now lost a lot of my "guideposts" around the stadium that I used to line up my before and afters, so if you determine that new photos aren't 100 percent in the same location as the old ones--just remember, as usual, you get what you pay for here at JDLand.)

For those of you suffering from withdrawal thanks to the now-four-day outage of the Stadium Construction Camera on the southeast side, I can pass along the news that soon the cameras are going to be moved to two new vantage points: in the press box, way up above home plate, and on top of the north/west parking garage along N Street. No date for exactly when the moves will happen, but keep an eye out.

One more item on the issue from recent posts about the hiring of DC residents for construction jobs at the ballpark, mentioned in posts yesterday and last week. Council Member Kwame Brown's office has sent out a press release that details the exact numbers for resident participation, in terms of both the goals created for the stadium project and the actual participation percentages as of now. The journeyman hours have been discussed in the media (goal of 50 percent resident hiring, versus an actual percentage right now of just under 29 percent), but there's also the goal of 50 percent of all apprentice hours for DC residents, with an actual percentage of 78 percent; 91 percent of all apprentices hired are supposed to be DC residents, missing the goal of 100 percent. And overall DC hires for all jobs stand at 50 percent, just below the goal of 51 percent. And, in terms of local business participation, the requirement was that 50 percent of all contracts awarded for stadium construction work go to local, small, disadvantaged companies (LSDBEs), and as of now LSDBEs make up just under 54 percent of committed subcontracts, worth $203 million.