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May 6, 2007

Election Reform

Dear Electors:

After nearly every election in the District, there is another round of proposals for election reforms, and there are more proposals in today’s issue of themail. It’s not like election reforms haven’t been tried in the District before, but they have always been defeated. The chief impediment to election reform is, of course, incumbent politicians, who do not want anything done that would diminish their substantial advantage over challengers. District voters have passed two important, substantive election reforms by initiative: one limited elected officials to two consecutive terms in the same office, and the other substantially reduced the limits on campaign contributions. The city council overturned term limits before they ever went into effect on any incumbent, and councilmembers responded to the reduction in campaign contributions by challenging them in court (disingenuously claiming they were protecting the interests of challengers, who would need to raise more money than incumbents in order to be successful), and then, when those caps were overturned, by raising the caps on contributions to essentially double what they had been before the initiative cut them.

Public financing for District elections has been discussed for many years but, because it could lead to a somewhat more even playing field between incumbents and challengers, it has not had any serious political support. It also does not seem to have much actual public support; while public financing of elections usually gets overwhelming support in polls, in practice only a small minority of people use the voluntary tax check-off to finance presidential campaigns, and that percentage has been falling steadily for three decades.

One reform that hasn’t been taken to an initiative is to have run-off elections when no candidate gets a majority of the vote, so that no one would be elected without a majority. Incumbents are unlikely to support the idea of run-off elections because they have seen too many of their less popular colleagues saved by winning a bare plurality of the vote in a large field of challengers (and sometimes by encouraging more challengers to join in the race in order to split the opposition vote). However, councilmembers may hesitate to overturn a successful initiative that required run-off elections when no candidate gets a majority — majority vote is a hard principle to oppose. A variant of this proposal is “instant run-off voting,” which the Statehood-Green Party and others have often advocated.

What true election reforms can the citizens pass without having the politicians undermine and undo them? Anybody have an idea? Anybody want to volunteer to submit another initiative?

Gary Imhoff
themail@dcwatch.com

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The End of an Era
Ed T. Barron, edtb1@macdotcom

For American University Park and Spring Valley residents it is the end of a thirty-eight-year era. The kind “veggie” man who vended his wares from his roadside stand on the side road of Massachusetts Avenue right next to Crate and Barrel died on 27 April. He and his family members have been setting up their stand most days each week beginning in the early spring and wrapping up in the fall. It was like a sign of the real spring when he set up and sad when he left in the fall. His produce and fruits were always fresh and sumptuous. Lines formed each day, and especially on weekends. His whole family was a part of the scene in setting up and serving the customers. Children and grandchildren were put through school from the sales of the little stand. We watched those youngsters grow up over the years. We say goodbye to Jorge Zilvetti and can only hope that his offspring will reopen the stand again.

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Where Are the Public Schools’ Cheerleaders?
Sylvia Brown, Deanwood, Ward 7, sylviabrown1@verizon.net

DC public school teacher Angela Sims was honored this week as the Agnes Meyer Outstanding Teacher Award for the District (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/05/02/AR2007050200880.html). With all the hullabaloo about horrendous DC schools, teachers that don’t care, and the school takeover, where is the similar emotion surrounding the great accomplishments that are happening in our public school system? The public school system doesn’t have a patent on failing students, just as the public charter system and private schools don’t have patents on high-performing students. The mayor, the council, and DCPS must publicly champion, promote, pay, and celebrate teachers like Ms. Sims who chose to work in a challenging urban environment instead of cashing it in for the suburbs. Promoting the good and really dealing with the bad (i.e., higher expectations, outcomes, and experience-based learning, etc.) could begin to stem the tide on parent defections and the perception that everything is wrong with DCPS.

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Wilson High School Students Versus Pedestrians
Lyla Winter, mrscalabash@att.net

Thursday afternoon, I was on Wisconsin Avenue. I came out of American Valet Cleaners and was surrounded by a mob of Wilson High School students. They were having a water fight, using their plastic water bottles. I was soaked. The melee was scary. A younger woman took my arm and guided me to the nearest store.

There should be a police officer patrolling between Albemarle and Brandywine Streets, when Wilson High is dismissed. These young people are not bad kids, just rowdy and overwhelming in numbers. However, pedestrians need someone to see to it that they’re not injured while trying to walk on the sidewalk outside the many shops on Wisconsin. There are many of us who live in a nearby apartment building for seniors and disabled. We need protection, along with other able-bodied pedestrians, to ensure our safety while shopping in our neighborhood. We would appreciate the cooperation of both the Wilson High School principal and the DC Police Department.

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Loosening the Purse Strings Again
P. Walters, konetidy@gmail.com

On the heels of the bloated spending estimates for Eastern Market renovations, we have the $20 million estimate to restore the Georgetown branch library (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/05/03/AR2007050301536.html?hpid=topnews). If, according to the mayor’s proposed 2007 capital plan, it would cost $16 million to build a new library at, say, Tenleytown, then why would it cost $20 million to restore Georgetown’s library? This, on top of the $3 million already budgeted for renovations that were in progress when, allegedly, a worker accidentally started the fire. (Will the District recover those costs by claiming contractor negligence?)

How can we explain these highly inflated estimates? Fenty says he will use “budget surpluses” to pay for the Eastern Market and Georgetown library fire-recovery projects. By laying claim to over $50 million of these surpluses, Fenty would control yet another large bucket of funds. Will the council continue to fill the mayor’s wallet? Will the council and local press start asking questions about where all this money is going and how it is being managed before large chunks of it are spent?

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They Don’t Hear You at the Hearings
Dennis Moore, dennis@dcindependents.org

Anyone watching the DC council on TV or online in the last six years knows one thing for sure by now: most officials at the DC council hearings don’t really hear us. The three or five minutes most of us are allowed to speak amount to nothing more than a rushed moment to vent our frustration — or beg for resources, respect, and rights already entitled to us. We manage, despite some council members who purposely patronize, talk over, badger, or speak to us with condescension. Do we really need to have hearings to remind the same District officials we elect and pay that they are doing a lousy job? How much more citizen control will we give up or forget for a watered-down teaspoon of good governance and real results?

How many more voters will quit the election process because they know it is rigged against genuine accountability, truly open government, and actual citizen control of our public officials and resources? Despite the efforts of some DC news media to hype the actual low voter turnouts with phony headlines, any District citizen with an ounce of brains knows the real deal. The charade of widespread support for repackaged business as usual, and the special interests that benefit from it, only stokes the fires of disgust smoldering in diverse District citizens. So what’s the bottom line solution? Citizen control, a term and power that strikes genuine fear in bureaucrats with their own agenda and special interest financing, is the solution. Ask DC officials how they truly feel about citizens in control of the government we elect and finance — not citizen “involvement.” Their response will speak volumes. Watch their reaction when reminded this is the foundation and intent of our Bill of Rights and US Constitution.

Why citizen control? Simply, if you hired and paid a staff of people to repair your house or clean up your neighborhood, you want to see effective and accountable results. Excuses, self-serving speeches, and feel-good media events are not substitutes for competent governance, real action and measurable outcomes. Once we see through all the smoke, mirrors, and pretense of power, we as District citizens will realize that the true authority over our officials and government actually rests with us. Our hoping, pleading and waiting for DC officials to simply do the right thing -- before the next election cycle — will end when we enforce citizen control on and before election day, and through effective community activism. Currently, District officials are asking US Representatives to give us a Congressional vote, while trying to bamboozle Capitol Hill into blocking our right to citizen referendums. Where are the headlines about DC autocrats rearranging and redefining democracy? Perhaps our local autocrats hear the hum for citizen control. Next time you testify at a hearing, remember your hard-earned tax dollars paid for their salaries, budgets, the building and dais they sit up high upon during those many pretentious proceedings. At the end of their day, they sense and know what’s coming. Taxation without expectation will end when we enforce citizen control over the power our elected and publicly paid DC officials choose to abuse. R-E-S-P-E-C-T. I know what it means to me.

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Like a Ripe Watermelon
Ed T Barron, edtb1@macdotcom

John Kelly, in a recent Post column, was extolling the virtues of the replacement curbs, which are made of marble and last much longer than the poured concrete curbs. He noted that the edges are so sharp you can cut paper on them. I’ve never tried to cut paper on them, but I warned DC via a note to Bill Rice that these curbs, with their sharp edges, were a real hazard to young folks and old folks who fall a lot. Those managing to hit their heads in a fall against one of those curbs would split their head open like a ripe watermelon. That note, with a follow-up from Bill Rice, was almost two years ago, and the District is still installing curbs without rounded edges. Watch out, Mayor Fenty, when running the streets of DC.

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Run-Off Elections
Tom Whitley, tom9754@verizon.net

I think your election piece [themail, May 2] would be a sound starting point to fight for automatic run-off elections among the top two or three vote getters.

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Wards 4 and 7
William Haskett, williamhaskett@hotmail.com

It ought to be clear now that council seats are valuable in a rather peculiar way, not “peculiar” peculiar, but straightforwardly “normal” in the ways in which important public assets and interests are sold to the highest bidder, and actual involvement of citizens and voters is bypassed. If we are to have elections, then their cost would be cheaper in the long run if we all paid for them through taxes, and did not leave their outcomes to the accidents of voting totals (very, very low) and access to funding sources (now frequently very high) -- which is merely a way of corrupting the outcome (at $74.00 per vote) before the vote is taken. Time was, elections were bought at a price per head and a chicken, with voting of the cemeteries as a useful sideline. But we move with the times.

If we are condemned to free-enterprise fundraising, then we must install real limits. I would be ashamed myself to owe my election to spending which is so disproportionate. What is the weight of ethics against this kind of expenditure? It used to be a simple measure -- candidates were running on their own steam, and their own incomes. They took modest salaries as legislators, and the whole thing was a genuine responsibility undertaken by public-spirited persons for the sake of what they could do for that strange entity, the public. If we are to pay legislators as though they were, in truth, simply another form of businessmen, and paid accordingly, then we certainly deserve school superintendents who demand returns in the hundreds of thousands.

Simplify, simplify, simplify, but make sure that you get the actual incentives correct, otherwise we all end up sadder and only wiser in retrospect.

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Money
Sylvia C. Brown, Deanwood, Ward 7, sylviabrown1@verizon.net

It takes money to run a campaign and to win an election. However, money doesn’t translate into a win. Certainly, turnout is key. More important is the message of the candidate and the trust voters put in the candidate’s supporters, specifically your neighbors. We all expected turnout to be low in a special election. We lament about low turnout even during the “major” elections. Instead of complaining about “money in politics,” how about asking ourselves, whether we would support public campaign financing in DC elections; have we registered at least three people to vote, engaged them in the civic life of the neighborhood and city, and pledged to take them to the poll next Election Day?

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Money, Money
Harold Foster; Petworth, incanato@earthlink.net

Is anyone else tired of re-ploughing the same old rhetorical ground about how campaign contributions, and those with enough money to corrupt the process, are adulterating both our electoral process and the candidates who can find the money to participate in it? I know I am. We need to get real about money and electoral politics. If the residents of this city really want to reduce (I would hope, eliminate) the undue influence of campaign donations and donors on local elections, then we need to do a couple of no-brainer things. (And they’re no-brainers only because of the institutionally unitary nature of DC electoral politics and the fact that there is little genuine citizen opposition to electoral reform.)

First, reinstitute the campaign contribution limit. We did this once through an initiative, and the council overrode the results. We need to make it clear that any council or councilmember who does that again is electoral toast in the next election. These people work for us, not the other way ’round. If they don’t do what we expect, we fire them. As I said, a no-brainer. A $100 limit, period. I became a “person of interest” by marching and lobbying for one-man (sic)/one-vote in Rhodesia and South Africa. How about having a one-person/one-check rule in our local campaigns? Like democracy in general, it hasn’t been tried yet, especially here in Colony Central, so let’s give her a whirl, shall we?

Second, we strengthen and simplify the campaign contribution disclosure laws. Once you formally declare your candidacy for elective office in this town, you report every single red cent anyone has contributed to you either individually or via some organizational device such as a PAC, exploratory committee, or outright campaign committee. End of line. No exceptions, no grandfather clauses, no large, open windows next to the legal back door. Third, we establish a public campaign fund for independent candidates who want to run for mayor or city council. We — well, the council — have been extraordinarily imaginative in devising revenue-raising devices to pay for things that are a lot less consequential than making it possible for promising, talented, but underfunded or downright poor, citizens to stand a fair chance of getting their messages out to us voters.

I mean, if we really, truly, honest-to-Jefferson want a level playing field, then we, the taxpayers, have to rent the bulldozer. I, for example, have no problem with an income tax check-off of, say, $10 or so to start such a fund. We could raise every single license and professional fee in the city by $1 each and generate roughly $855,000 for such a fund. And, here’s an idea: let’s require that this fund must match the total amount of money contributed directly to the individual candidates’ campaign. This probably would provoke a court test. But so what? The proposal to “give” (sic) DC a vote in the House is almost certain to go to the Supreme Court (assuming Bush doesn’t veto it), and no one is quailing at the idea of taking that one before the Big Nine, right? Again, another no-brainer here.

Finally, we need to institute instant run-off (or so-called preferential) voting to give independent and third and fourth party candidates an electoral (as opposed to financial) incentive to run for office in the first place, but that is another story for another post. And, anyway, I am sure you will crop me somewhere above this line, so I will stop here. Like Christianity, the only problem with true electoral democracy is that is has never been tried.

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Mail Boxes
Chris Kelly, dcreardon@aol.com

Yea, all the street mail boxes have disappeared around the New York Avenue/North Capitol Street corridor, too. I was told it was because of “homeland security.”

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CLASSIFIEDS — EVENTS

DC Public Library Events, May 7-9
Randi Blank, randi.blank@dc.gov

Monday, May 7, 1:00 p.m., Capitol View Neighborhood Library, 5001 Central Avenue, SE. Book discussion and Video Presentation, Their Eyes Were Watching God. For more information, call 645-0755.

Monday, May 7, 3:00 p.m., Petworth Neighborhood Library, 4200 Kansas Avenue, NW. Book discussion, Their Eyes Were Watching God. For more information, call 541-6300.

Monday, May 7, 6;30 p.m., Mount Pleasant Neighborhood Library, 3160 16th Street, NW. “Why We Love Their Eyes Were Watching God” Jennifer James and Gayle Wald, George Washington University professors and authors, explain their Hurston devotion. The discussion is hosted by the Literary Friends Group. For more information, call 671-0200.

Monday, May 7, 6:30 p.m., Northeast Neighborhood Library, 330 7th Street, NE. Capitol Hill Mystery Book Club. We will discuss Skinwalker by Nunzio Defilippis, Christina Weir, Brian Hurtt, and Arthur Dela Cruz. Call 698-3320 for more information.

Tuesday, May 8, 12:00 p.m., West End Neighborhood Library, 1101 24th Street, NW. West End Library Film Club. Bring your lunch and enjoy watching The Joy Luck Club. For more information, call 724-8707.

Tuesday, May 8, 7:00 p.m., Cleveland Park Neighborhood Library, 3310 Connecticut Avenue, NW. Cleveland Park Book Club. We will discuss The Good Earth by Pearl S. Buck. For more information, call 282-3080.

Wednesday, May 9, 1:00 p.m., Juanita E. Thornton/Shepherd Park Neighborhood Library, 7420 Georgia Avenue, NW. Shepherd Park Wednesday Afternoon Book Club. Enjoy a lively book discussion of The Beach House, by James Patterson and Peter DeJonge. For more information, call 541-6100.

Wednesday, May 9, 11:00 a.m., Washington Highlands Neighborhood Library, 115 Atlantic Avenue, SW. Book discussion, Their Eyes Were Watching God. Young adults and seniors discuss the novel. For more information, call 645-5880.

Wednesday, May 9, 6:00 p.m., Martin Luther King, Jr., Memorial Library, 901 G Street, NW, Enhanced Business Information Center (e-BIC), A-level, e-BIC Conference Center. Get Business Credit Fast. Join us for a practical how-to session on obtaining business credit. Topics include an introduction to business credit, getting your Dun and Bradstreet number and establishing trade accounts. For more information, call 727-2241.

Wednesday, May 9, 7:00 p.m., Francis A. Gregory Neighborhood Library, 3660 Alabama Avenue, SE. American Red Cross CPR. Certified instructor Officer Arthur Lawson will teach beginners to administer CPR. This program is supported by the Elizabeth Holden Bequest. For more information, call 645-4297.

Wednesday, May 9, 7:30 p.m., Georgetown Neighborhood Library, 3260 R Street, NW. “Why We Love Their Eyes Were Watching God.” Jennifer James and Gayle Wald, George Washington University professors and authors, explain their Hurston devotion. They will also give tips on starting and sustaining reading groups. For more information, call 282-0220.

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Shakespeare Family Day, May 12
Lauren Searl, lsearl@nbm.org

Saturday, May 12, 1:00-4:00 p.m. Shakespeare Family Day with the Folger Shakespeare Library. Have Shakespearean fun with mini-performances of the Bard’s works by kids, for kids! Enjoy performances by Folger Theater students on sets designed by the Museum’s spring 2007 Design Apprenticeship Program (DAP) participants. DAP students will also talk about their design processes. Be a part of the stage action with impromptu Shakespeare scenes, juggling, and “swordplay,” and create your own “shoebox set design” to take home. Free. All ages. Drop-in program. At the National Building Museum, 401 F Street, NW, Judiciary Square stop, Metro Red Line. Visit http://www.nbm.org or http://www.folger.edu for more details.

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