Mandates
Dear Mandaters:
Mayor-elect Adrian Fenty has a mandate; there’s no question about
that. In the primary and general elections, he won every precinct in the
city, and that’s his answer to a serious challenge to any of his
proposals or decisions: “One hundred forty-two precincts.” But what
he won wasn’t a mandate for any particular policy, program, or
platform. He didn’t run on a platform. Instead, he won a personal
mandate, a vote of confidence in him as a person. He ran as a breath of
fresh air, as someone whose term wouldn’t be Williams III. More
importantly, he won because he gave the impression that he would listen
to the citizens of the city and be responsive our interests.
That’s a vague promise, one that every person interprets
differently. A politician’s promise to deliver on specific platform
planks is one thing. The voters know what to expect, and can measure the
success or failure of the candidate by whether the candidate delivers on
that plank. But a promise to listen to the people and do what we want is
quite another matter — particularly because Fenty doesn’t really
think he has to consult with the people, or even with his close
advisors. Every time Fenty makes a decision on his own (say, when he
appoints a new police chief without asking the opinion of his major
public safety advisors, and even without informing them beforehand),
people will think, “Well, he certainly didn’t listen to me on
that”; and every time he makes a decision, the people who don’t
agree with that decision will think, "He certainly wasn’t
response to my interests on that."
The personal mandate, the mandate based on carrying out the will of
the people, is the most fleeting and fragile of mandates. That’s why
the most politically dangerous thing that Fenty can do is to think that
he is so popular, so well thought of, that he has a mandate to do
whatever he wants, and that the citizens will follow him wherever he
wants to go. On the contrary, now he has to explain his programs and all
of his major priorities to us, and convince us to follow him. He didn’t
use the primary or general election campaigns to lay out his platform
and to get the public’s support for it. Instead, he used the campaigns
to convince us that his platform was to support whatever the public
desired. Because of that, he has to campaign now and after he becomes
mayor. He has to convince us to support his major initiatives in order
to convince us that he is following our lead.
Gary Imhoff
themail@dcwatch.com
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Winter Holiday Trash and Recycling Collection
Schedule
Mary Myers, mary.myers@dc.gov
Following is the holiday schedule for Department of Public Works
services through the beginning of 2007. Christmas Day, Monday, December
25: District government offices will be closed and most services
suspended, including DPW trash and recyclables collection, street
cleaning, parking enforcement and towing. All services will resume on
Tuesday, December 26. Trash and recyclables collection will slide one
day for the remainder of the week citywide.
New Year’s Day, Monday, January 1, 2007: likewise, on New Year’s
Day, District government offices will be closed and most services
suspended, including DPW trash and recyclables collection, street
cleaning, parking enforcement and towing. All services will resume on
Tuesday, January 2, 2007. Trash and recyclables collection will slide
one day for the remainder of the week citywide.
Additionally, residents should mark their calendars for the annual
Christmas tree collection. Holiday tree collection, January 2-13, 2007.
Residents who receive DC trash collection service are encouraged to put
holiday trees and other greenery — without ornaments or tinsel — in
curbside tree boxes by January 2, 2007. Trees will be picked up during a
special two-week collection from January 2-13. Residents who wish to
keep their trees longer should put them out at their normal point of
trash collection (curbside or alley) after January 13. DPW will then
collect the trees along with the regular trash, as truck space permits
over the following weeks.
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Williams’s Legacy: Enriching the Rich
Mary C. Williams, mslaw1121@aol.com
Anthony Williams has done a few good things for the entire city.
Improving some city services is one of them. But in my Southwest
neighborhood, he leaves a legacy of some really questionable development
deals that have only served to further enrich the rich while adding to
the burden of the poor and middle-class. What’s worse is that many of
these deals are long term and designed to extend beyond terms of seven
mayors, critically undermining Mayor-elect Fenty’s ability to manage
and shape this city’s future over the next four years. Can we forget
the perpetual money-pit called the Nationals’ new baseball stadium? We’re
only in the first year of this unconscionable contract and can expect
this deal to haunt us for the next thirty years — that is if it doesn’t
push the city to the brink of bankruptcy before opening day and then
force us to give it to the Lerner just to be rid of it. Oh, I forgot, to
give it to the owners may well be the objective. So why wait? Just give
it to them now before taxpayers spend a billion dollars building it and
another half billion paying the Lerners for all of the minor breaches of
contract issues. There are so many things about this stadium contract
that gets my blood boiling, but one little thing in particular strikes
me as so ironic that just the thought sends me into a tizzy. It is the
Williams’ administration, and possibly some councilmembers’
insistence that Major League Baseball include minorities in the deal. I’m
a civil rights lawyer and advocate, but something is not right about
this. So the Lerners begrudgingly round up a few prominent and wealthy
African-Americans — not all DC residents — to secure the deal. I’m
an African-American woman who can’t afford to buy season tickets to
any athletic event, let alone come up with the financing to become a
part owner in a major team. Yet I have to pay $2 more each month to
Comcast to finance baseball. I am a just a bit put out that people who
have money are considered and the middle-class and poor foot the bill. I
understand the inclusion of minorities, but these are fairly well off
minorities. How about making MLB pay for its own stadium and stop taxing
the poor people, of all races, to enrich the rich? But I digress. I have
another deal to rant about this time.
As if we didn’t have enough with the stadium deal, our
soon-to-be-ex mayor and our Ward 6 compassion-challenged Councilmember,
Sharon Ambrose, who single-handedly engineered the demise of
rent-control and affordable housing in this city so that friendly
developers could put up high-end condos, have come up with another deal
that might rival the stadium in terms of giveaways to the rich. Last
month Williams proudly announced that the city not only will give to
developers the entire 13-acre site on the Waterfront metro that is now
Waterside Mall, valued at over $100 million, but the city will sweeten
this already unbelievably saccharin deal by actually signing a
fifteen-year lease to rent 500,000 sq. ft. of office space on the
newly-developed site at $14.9 million a year. I don’t know what office
space is going for these days but that sounds like a very high rent for
land that the city already owned. But what a deal for those lucky
developers! Bresler Reiner, who has held a 99-year-lease on the
Waterside site for the past 49 years, paying less than $10,000 a year to
the city for the privilege, now gets to own the land outright and then
gets to gouge the city, sorry, I mean collect rent from the city. For
this too-good-to-be-true deal, Bresler Reiner partnered with Forest
City, and Kaempher, now called just Waterfront. I don’t have the time
or space to recount the history of Bresler, but the community has long
been overlooked. This time around, the developers had help from RLA/NCRC,
the quasi-government agency that is supposed to manage our city’s
land. The NCRC shopped and lauded this deal like its life depended on
it, telling Southwest residents for nearly the past year that the
thirteen-acre land was worth only about $5 to $6 million over 75 years
of rent. The NCRC employee/promoter, a resident of Southwest, repeatedly
told us economically-challenged residents that the land was actually
worth more to taxpayers after we give it to developers than if we just
collected rent on the land for the next fifty years. Some of it was
true. But when that didn’t seem to sit well with me and some of my
more stubborn supporters, who recommended that the best plan was for the
city to eminent domain the site and bid it out developers who were able
and! willing to redevelop the site with their own monies, the NCRC
promoter’s husband, acting as vice president of our local civic
organization, jumped on the giveaway bandwagon, announcing that if the
community didn’t support this sweetheart deal they were shoving down
our throats, then the developers would not build the huge office complex
inside the residential community and leave us with our decrepit space.
No more upscale Safeway or a Starbucks.
Still, I argued that the city should give the Waterfront developers
the so-called $6 million lease value and shop the site to other
developers if Waterfront didn’t act by the deadline for complying with
a clause in their current lease that required redevelopment of at least
300,000 sq. ft. of space by 2007. As poorly written as it was, I read
the lease amendment signed in 2003. I also called on NCRC to abandon its
shameless and questionable promotion of this deal and return to its
mission of managing the public’s land. But then I was hit by the
reason that NCRC had abandon the taxpayers who paid their salaries in
favor of these newfound friends called the developers. NCRC stood to
benefit from this deal, too. In exchange for “extinguishing the
long-term lease,” (that’s the term NCRC used), NCRC would get its
own little parcel, about 58,000 sq. ft. of land, in the northeast corner
of the property, on which NCRC planned to construct a residential/condo
complex. NCRC officials claims that profits will be used to finance
other projects. However, my instinct tells me that the funds from this
little development project would go toward keeping them in their fancy
downtown offices a few more years and pay already overrated and inflated
salaries and bonuses. Whatever the reason for the funds, there is
something wrong, possibly even criminal, when the entity charged with
managing the property of others, promotes and benefits from a deal that
is not in the best interest of the owner. There are several names for
this. It’s called self-dealing, and in any other city in America, this
would be prohibited. The stadium deals stink. This development deal
stinks even more. How many more deals like this can this city afford?
And will someone please tell me where are our councilmembers when it
comes to oversight of these deals? Elected officials were caught napping
on the baseball stadium. What excuse will they use on these other
late-night deals? If Mayor-elect Fenty hopes to have some hand in
shaping this city’s future, he will first have to wrestle much of it
back from the friends and cronies of the last administration.
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Right Turns Around Busses
Gabe Goldberg, gabe at gabegold dot com
Russell Cramer suggested [themail, December 17] the “more
sensible” solution of not having bus stops at intersections, but at
least fifty yards before them. But that consumes more parking spaces:
since parking is already prohibited near intersections, near-corner bus
stops don’t create/enlarge no-parking areas as much as mid-block stops
likely would. And mid-block stops wouldn’t be as handy for
transferring between crossing bus lines.
Regarding more efficient use of no-parking areas: I’ve wondered why
fire hydrants aren’t placed near driveways/alley curb cuts. Since
parking is prohibited too close to them, the full access distance wouldn’t
have to be reserved just for the hydrants. Of course, simple solutions
don’t always work — so someone may have equally good reasons why
that would be a bad idea.
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Save Martin Luther King, Jr., Library
Loretta Carter Hanes, lchanes@msn.com
We must find a lawyer to petition the courts on behalf of the
citizens of the District of Columbia and also get signed petitions to
the mayor and the city council to stop all actions on the closing of
Martin Luther King, Jr., Library . "Those who believe in freedom
cannot rest." We must respect Martin Luther King, Jr., by restoring
and renovating the Martin Luther King, Jr., Library.
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Yet another land grab! It would be very interesting to know who is in
line to redevelop that space. That would tell us who it is we have to
contend with when Williams is no longer on the scene. What "public
interest" excuse is being touted for this maneuver?
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CLASSIFIEDS — EVENTS
DC Public Library Events, December 26
India Young, india.young@dc.gov
Tuesday, December 26, 1:00 p.m., Martin Luther King, Jr., Memorial
Library, 901 G Street, NW, Room A-5. Kwanzaa city celebration. Learn
about Kwanzaa and how it is celebrated. For more information, call
727-1211.
December 26-29, library hours, Martin Luther King, Jr., Memorial
Library, 901 G Street, NW. Games for teens. Teens are invited to drop-in
and play XBox, cards and board games. For more information, call
727-5535.
Monday-Friday, December 26, 2006-January 5, 2007 (except December
27), 1:00 p.m., Martin Luther King, Jr., Memorial Library, 901 G Street,
NW. Movies for teens aged 12-19. For more information, call 727-5535.
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CLASSIFIEDS — RECOMMENDATIONS
I recently had some work done around the house — talk about
contractor hell. After a few bad apples, I finally stumbled upon one who
turned out to be the real deal. His name is David Smith, and he’s
literally an artist with wood and tile. His number is 270-1322. Now that’s
my present to all you guys. Happy Holidays!
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