Georgetown will receive a verdict from the National Park Service on the possibility of building its own boathouse on the Potomac River — an initiative that has been in flux since the 1980s — by the end of the calendar year.

According to university spokeswoman Stacy Kerr, Georgetown’s primary objective is to give its crew teams prime access to a boathouse on the Potomac.

The teams currently row out of Thompson Boat Center, which they share with crew teams from The George Washington University, area high schools and the surrounding community. The boathouse has been coping with overcrowding for several years.

The National Park Service recently began reconsidering a proposal to build a boathouse on the Potomac that would offer Georgetown crew teams a new home, but would be run by NPS and shared with crew teams at GWU and community members.

University spokeswoman Stacy Kerr stressed that there is no firm proposal for Georgetown to share a boathouse and that the university is still actively pursuing approval to construct a boathouse for its exclusive use.

“Our goal is to construct a boathouse of our own. … My understanding is that GW wants one as well, so they would presumably do the same,” Kerr said. “There is no proposal right now for GW and GU to share a boathouse.”

Associate Vice President for Federal Relations Scott Fleming said that the university has proposed to trade land currently in its possession for a tract on the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal, which it would use for the boathouse. This initiative was first proposed in 1998, and the university reached a preliminary agreement with NPS about the exchange. However, the approval process for a Georgetown boathouse eventually met resistance and was put on hold in 2008.

While Georgetown still intends to build its own boathouse on the Potomac River, Fleming said that collaborating to build a boathouse with other users would help to alleviate community concerns about the impacts of construction on the nearby area.