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September 26, 2007

Public Business

Dear Fellow Public:

I apologize for the unscheduled week-long break in themail. The electric line to our house failed last Wednesday afternoon. The line was seventy to eighty years old, and this has been the first electric outage we have had in twenty-five years, so it would be churlish of us to complain. It took PEPCO a few days to narrow down the cause of the failure, and when it did it refused to replace its line until we replaced our old fuse board, which was similarly antique, with a new breaker board. All the work is now proceeding, and in the meantime we’re on temporary power and back online.

On September 18, Post reporter Theola Labbe revealed that the city had entered into a severance agreement and settlement with former superintendent Clifford Janey, but that it refused to disclose its terms (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/09/17/AR2007091701676.html). Labbe further pressed the mayor’s general counsel, Peter Nickles, who had negotiated the agreement, and Dorothy sent him an E-mail saying, “I would be interested to learn the legal rationale under which the District government can escape legal requirements to disclose the terms of its financial dealings to the public simply by agreeing with a party to keep their business dealings secret.” In a couple days, the severance agreement was made public (http://www.dcpswatch.com/mayor/070829.htm). If only the city government’s business would be made public so quickly every time an official tried to keep it secret from the public.

WTOP reporter Mark Segraves has started a blog, the Malcontent Minute, at http://www.wtopnews.com/?nid=694&sid=1251065. Segrave’s current posting is certainly hot news: WTOP commentator and political activist Mark Plotkin, who’s still unhappy that ball points replaced quill pens, is now actually carrying a cell phone. If Plotkin were managing his own apartment house, it would still have a fuse board, that’s for sure.

Gary Imhoff
themail@dcwatch.com

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Bus-Free DC
Paul Penniman, paul@mathteachingtoday.com

I’m curious about others’ impressions of yesterday’s Car-Free DC. This is what I noticed along our upper Connecticut Avenue corridor between 8 and 8:15 a.m.: 1) many fewer cars -- possibly due to the Redskins’ fans’ hangovers, or were many of you deliberately leaving your car at home? 2) Pathetic bus service. During a fifteen-minute span, no L1’s but instead two L2’s, one right after the other. At that time of day, there is supposed to be a bus every six minutes, with the L1 alternating with the L2. It appears Metro blew a golden opportunity to impress people like me who don’t usually get on its buses.

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Tenleytown Metro Station
Carolyn Long, carolynlong@earthlink.net

While we’re on the topic of Metro: for twenty years I’ve been complaining about the shabby condition of the Tenleytown Metro station. The entrance on the west side of Wisconsin has improved considerably since Best Buy and the Container Store went into the old Sears building at Wisconsin and Albemarle, but the entrance on the east side still looks awful. While other stations has gotten attractive new canopies, Tenleytown has none, meaning that our escalator is exposed to the elements and frequently breaks down. The escalator and elevator entrance is surrounded by at least sixty tacky-looking newspaper boxes of every shape and color. Most aren’t even in use, and are filled with trash and the clothing and blankets of our resident street people. The sidewalk surrounding the Metro entrance is covered with chewing gum. The trash receptacles are often overflowing. The landscaping is pathetic. Out of four ornamental trees, three are dead, as are a lot of the bushes. Metro workers often store their equipment at the top of the escalator, behind the elevator entrance. For months there were two portable toilets there, supposedly because there were no facilities down below for Metro personnel to use. No shelter is provided for the American University students waiting for the shuttle, so groups of around thirty stand on the sidewalk or crouch on the curb in all kinds of weather.

This depressing view greets riders every day as they exit the Metro. Maybe most people are used to it and don’t notice anymore, but what will visitors to our neighborhood think? Will they be encouraged to linger and shop here? When is this going to improve?

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Mayor Fenty’s Car-Free Day
Malcolm L Wiseman, Jr., Washington Free DC, mal@wiseman.ws

Perhaps related to Mayor’s Car-Free Day: I regularly observe him with his bicycling training crew in my neighborhood. I frankly admire their regimen and example. Since his retirement (for the most part) of the security detail and their several vehicles from this assignment, our block has seen a lot less impact. Why, it’s synergistic! Fewer cars on the streets, more cycling, more trust, less fuss, better health, DC statehood!

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Entropy Increases: Metrorail Continues to Get Worse
Larry Seftor, Ward 3, larry underscore seftor .them757 at zoemail.net

Richard Layman, in commenting on my post about Metrorail (and missing the fact that my reference to Omaha was tongue-in-cheek), pointed to a piece in the McKinsey Quarterly on transit systems [themail, September 16]. It is too bad that Mr. Layman didn’t tell us what the piece said, which is that “public-transit agencies could lower costs and raise the quality of service by emulating best practices from around the world.” This message is just a restatement of my point that "there is no lack of information for how to run an underground railroad."

The problem with public entities is that they are unconstrained systems. Rather than improving performance and productivity, it is easier to create PowerPoint that justifies increased fares and lowered service levels to a compliant Metro board. After all, the public increasingly has no viable alternatives. The Metro board should do their job and apply a few constraints (e.g., no immediate fare increase, no immediate service reductions) and force Metro management to improve the productivity of the system. How? As Mr. Layman points out, the McKinsey study offers some thoughts about places to start.

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DC Auto
Bob Levine, rilevine@cpcug.org

Does anyone know how and to whom to report a car with District plates that is driving in an unsafe manor? On September 19, at approximately 6:40 a.m. on 19th Street, SE, in the vicinity of 19th and East Capitol Streets, SE, a DC vehicle with the license plates DC 5379 was driving at excessive speed and making reckless lane changes. The car was so out of control that I had to note the time and location of the behavior.

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Never Thought This Would Happen
Ed T. Barron, edtb1@macdotcom

Whoda thunk that I’d ever be in agreement with former mayor Marion Barry. In the case of Greater Southeast Community Hospital and the proposed open ended bailout to the tune of $79 million by the D.C. taxpayers, I agree with Barry. That’s Too Much (as they say on the Price is Right). A far better alternative would be to establish three walk-in clinics in southeast DC that would provide first response emergency services and practice corrective and preventive medicine for the residents of that under served community. There are ample hospitals and beds in DC’s existing hospitals. There are ample emergency rooms, as well. What is needed is a place where ailing folks can get easily accessed treatment and education on preventive medicine. We don’t need a money pit that won’t do near as well as walk-in clinics.

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The Great DC Medicine Man Show
Jonathan R. Rees, jrrees2006@verizon.net

Mayor Adrian Fenty to give residents of the District of Columbia the impression that he is a proactive mayor is running up and down the streets of the District of Columbia attending on an average one public event a day. This activity on the part of Mayor Fenty is designed to make people think that he is doing things for the District of Columbia but, if you take a very close look at what he is doing, he is really doing nothing.

What Mayor Fenty is doing is attempting to deceive residents into believing that images of him in action are really actions when in reality, they are not. Detract people from matters he does not want them focusing on and gear himself up for 2010. We are now in the ninth month of the Fenty Administration and still, we are being feed one line promises. It is becoming painfully clear that Mayor Fenty still cannot offer us anything of real substance that we can point to as being the result of his actions. What little he can, is something he, Reinoso, Tangherlini, or someone else in his administration ripped off from the hard work of others and/or was already in the works long before he became mayor.

When is this fraud going to end? When are people of DC going to see that they were like the fools at a medicine man show who were sold this magic elixir that would cure all our ills by a con artist named Adrian M. Fenty?

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Keep Our Baby out of West End’s Bathwater
Bill Coe, bceedeec@aol.com

This responds to one of Robin Diener’s opinion pieces in themail of September. Diener, along with lots of other people, is unhappy with a proposal for redeveloping the library and police station in West End. I don’t live down there so don’t know precisely what that transaction entails. It seems that many objections to it revolve as much around process as substance. Even its loudest critics, such a Councilmember Mendelson, concede the bottom line result might be a good deal for the citizens of West End, but that the proposal is irreparably corrupted by bad administrative and legislative handling. Process, it appears, trumps everything else in West End. Be that as it may, I ask Diener and the other protesters not to link their controversy to the public-private partnership under discussion in Tenley, which would rebuild the local library and put desperately needed improvements into Janney Elementary School. No one in Tenley argues (as they do in West End) that such an agreement would amount to a giveaway of public property. There is a quid pro quo — the argument being over whether it’s sufficiently attractive or not. In exchange for a slice of real estate on Tenley’s library-school site, which would go to the construction of private housing (with a portion set aside for residents in the workforce), the developer proposes to finish rebuilding the library earlier than currently planned by the District — using DC’s architect, working to the community’s specifications. The developer would also complete improvements to Janney Elementary several years earlier than the target date now set under DCPS’s Master Facilities Plan.

Robin Diener is simply incorrect in asserting a “lack of public inclusion in plans for other libraries including the Tenley. . . .” DC’s Chief Librarian, Ginnie Cooper, has come to Tenley for at least two public meetings, both well run and heavily attended, at which she briefed neighbors on the city’s plans, collected extensive input on desired features for the library, and answered questions. Folks in Tenley know as much as she does about what the reconstructed library will include. The PPP would not affect the building of that library, other than to speed it up.

Neighbors in Tenley have waited years for the reconstruction of their library and have endured several delays just in getting the work started. DC’s improvements to Janney Elementary — so badly wanted by parents in a neighborhood jam-packed with toddlers — are now officially projected to be finished no earlier than 2014, which means that children set to enter first grade one year from now will never see them done. Just about any proposal which would do all this work faster, in a couple or three years, is worth considering. Doing it by means of emergency legislation only reflects the long-standing frustration of Tenley’s neighbors, as they wait year after year for the replacement of their library and endure the embarrassing structural shortcomings of their elementary school. (It is also worth noting that the additional housing, in a neighborhood served by Metro, is beneficial for the city as a whole, economically and environmentally. The pressure on DC’s housing market constitutes an ever growing emergency for those in the workforce seeking decent places to live.) Those protesting the proposed development in West End might have good arguments, but they should keep Tenley out of their fight. We in this part of town know what we need, and we’re looking at a creative offer from the private sector which might get it done for us, and done more timely to boot. What right-minded citizen would not at least consider accepting such a deal?

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Loopholes in Project Labor Agreement
Ed Delaney, profeddel@yahoo.com

From http://www.washingtoncitypaper.com/display.php?id=2528: “Although residents were promised a chunk of construction jobs at the stadium, the work hasn’t come through. By the end of June, District residents had worked only 23 percent of the highly paid journeyman hours at the site along the Anacostia River, according to a recent report. Much of the money fleeing with workers to the suburbs was supposed to stay in the city: In 2006, Mayor Williams fashioned a ‘project labor agreement’ (PLA) with trade unions, the construction giant Clark/Hunt/Smoot [a joint venture of three construction groups formed for the job], and the DCSEC. The agreement promised 50 percent of journeyman hours to local residents.” What, a ballpark promise of benefits to the city made by Williams and the baseball brigade that falls far short of the promise? Say it ain’t so!

“Hiring procedures for stadium jobs are spelled out in the agreement. When subcontractors need workers, they are required to ask the unions to dispatch a DC resident. If the unions cannot find one within 24 hours, they pass the query to the DC Department of Employment Services, which sends available workers to the site. If the department cannot fill the job within 48 hours, subcontractors are free to hire nonresidents.” One has to wonder how vigilant each level of bureaucracy has been on this front, given the pathetic percentage of DC workers that are reportedly being retained. Some of the developers carp about skill levels as the culprit in this story, but developers are notorious for setting up their own rules and hiring whoever’s cheapest regardless of residency and even legality to work in the country, so it’s incumbent upon the city to do the necessary oversight on a constant basis to ensure that benchmarks are met properly. Then again, this project is a monument to the lack of oversight and accountability that the city was supposed to have over the private business sector, so it’s hardly surprising to find more of the same shortcomings here.

“In addition to the low local journeyman hours, lower-paid apprentices are doing less work than promised. Unions and subcontractors have also fallen short of a pledge to hire DC residents for all new apprentice jobs. By the end of June, one of ten lived elsewhere.” Now that’s just ridiculous. All means all, doesn’t it? “Construction companies and the unions haven’t failed on all of the labor agreement’s targets. Among all new hires this year, 480 of 868 were from DC, which exceeds the 51 percent goal. Still, these new hires have had a paltry effect on the amount of hours worked by locals. Jerry Lozupone, executive secretary treasurer of the Washington DC Building and Construction Trades Council, says that’s because some subcontractors arrived with out-of-town crews and simply aren’t hiring. He seems to be correct. Among the 56 contractors listed on the June task force report, 18 of them did not hire workers this year.” That’s another loophole that the city could have closed to the benefit of District residents, had there been more interest in ensuring those benefits than greasing the skids to ensure construction didn’t slow due to the promises made by the Brigade to the city.

“The local hiring issue has come up before, most recently during the 1990s construction of the Washington Convention Center and MCI Center. It’s likely to be an issue again with other city projects near the stadium, task force and construction sources say. There is much hand-wringing over the stadium labor numbers, but some question whether the city ever took the agreement seriously. ‘I really think they knew it couldn’t get met,’ Lozupone says about the resident worker goals. The bigger issue is getting the stadium built before Opening Day, he says. ‘Come April next year, nobody is going to give a rat’s ass. Everybody forgets it. It goes away.’” What other promises were made that the Brigade might not have taken seriously? Well, we know about the land acquisition, infrastructure, and parking cap that should’ve forced the city to move the project to the RFK Stadium site, which a local developer (Herb Miller) close to certain baseball boosters on the council (Jack Evans) reportedly was able to convince a majority of councilmembers not to follow through on. We also know about the promise of a supposedly rock hard, “we really mean it this time,” ballpark cap that was exceeded but circumvented (thus eliminating it as a hard cap) by moving escalating costs outside the budget. This includes the latest outrage of Mayor Fenty abandoning his previous sensible approach of opposing ballpark cost excesses by shifting around $770,000 of public money from the budget of one department to another for something as frivolous as stadium art which the private sector could’ve easily covered but instead had an apparently brow-beaten Fenty into jumping through hoops to deliver.

When the local media essentially gave them a pass on each and every circumvention, the council didn’t bother with the pretense of a cap when it came to their ever-escalating legal services tab with Venable LLP. They simply used emergency legislation to ignore the joke of a rock-hard cost cap, with Vincent Gray offering the weakest of excuses, “The city is in too deep to back out of the Venable deal now” (Examiner, June 7), and no doubt hoping that Lozupone was right that everyone will forget it and it’ll just go away. (Of course, Gray and many of the new councilmembers are in office thanks to the overwhelming ouster of pro-stadium council members, so one can only hope that accountability will keep coming in that form.)

Next of the city’s sunny promises to be tested are those on stadium revenue over the next thirty years, for which any shortfall will have to be covered by the city directly regardless of any promises made that the stadium would not cost DC residential or business taxpayers one cent. We’ve already seen projections fall short at the current stadium (see the last two editions of themail from March 2006 for the gruesome details), only to have the CFO dubiously forecast 2.8 percent increases in stadium revenue starting in 2011 and continuing annually despite the fact that aging stadiums lose appeal and therefore revenue over time. By then, I fully expect the usual suspects to be promising all sorts of pots of gold for the city associated with a new DC United stadium and making even more promises connected with a new Redskins stadium (as Jack Evans has already started to do). One would hope that city officials will remember the empty promises that have marked the current ballpark boondoggle and not go chasing blindly after such promises again.

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Draft Obituary in the Making
Len Sullivan, lsnarpac@bellatlantic.net

National Capital Metro Area Dies of Protracted, Self-Induced Suicide by Traffic: arguably the world’s most important capital metro area was declared dead today, suffocated by its own indifference to change for more than a decade. Head in sand, thumb in mouth, eyes fixed on its own backyard, the corpse was found petrified in traffic gridlock. Its various body parts appeared grotesquely dissociated, splayed in contradictory directions. Swarms of single-purpose activists were seen dancing about the remains, seemingly undisturbed by the economic disaster visited on future generations. Gradual strangulation was caused by a combination of well-known diseases for which cures are readily available. They can be lethal, however, if not rigorously applied by responsible public and private authorities.

Forensics show the presence of ten untreated ailments: unwillingness to plan far enough ahead (intracranial myopia); paralysis caused by inability to harness change (chronic metamorphobia);

inability to visualize, embrace new technologies (endemic retrotechnetricism); trying to turn the transportation clock centuries back (retropathic moronism); mistaking regional transportation needs for decorative local entertainment venues (morbid tangherliniphilia); dread of assimilation into a larger unified jurisdiction (extra-insular paranoia); ignorance of mobilization/emergency response needs (gross whatmeworriatrics); refusal to set regional infrastructure management outside political expediency (multiple polipanderemia); intent on creating national infrastructure on the cheap (bipolar econofatuity); and paying mediocre government managers way beyond their competence (bux-inflamed duhism).

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CLASSIFIEDS — EVENTS

Health Event, September 29
Anthony Carter, jazzyhealth@im4radio.com

There will be a health, nutrition and fitness expo at the Masonic Temple on 1000 U Street, NW, on Saturday, September 29, from 10:00 a.m. to 2:00 p.m.

I have an Internet radio program called “The Jazzy Health Program,” at http://www.Im4radio.com, broadcast on Mondays from 8:00 p.m. to 10:00 p.m.

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DC Public Library Events, September 27-30
Randi Blank, randi.blank@dc.gov

Thursday-Sunday, September 27-September 30, Martin Luther King, Jr., Memorial Library, Great Hall, outside under the G St. Overhang, and Auditorium A-5. The thirteenth annual DC International Improvisation Festival will take place along G Street, NW, between 7th and 12th Streets, NW, throughout the weekend. Free performances by dancers, improvisational theater groups, performance artists, and musicians. For more specific information, please see the festival’s web site at http://www.improvfestival.com or call the Music and Recreation Division of the DC Public Library at 727-1245.

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Cleveland Park Library Book Sale, September 29-30
Jill Bogard, jill_bogard@ace.nche.edu

The Friends of the Cleveland Park Library will hold its annual fall book sale on Saturday and Sunday, September 29 and 30, from noon to 4:00 p.m. at the Cleveland Park Library, 3310 Connecticut Avenue at Macomb Street, NW. Take the Metro Red Line to Cleveland Park, walk south one long block to Macomb Street. We have a great selection of donated books, many in pristine condition, in every subject. Most books are $1.00 for hardcover, 50 cents for soft. Mass market paperback mysteries, romances, and science fiction are 10 cents each. First editions and art books are individually priced. For this sale we’ll have boxes of free books (mostly fiction and biography) on the sidewalk in front of the library (weather permitting). Please don’t donate books during the week before the sale (September 22-29). We just don’t have time to sort them — we’re too busy getting everything ready for the sale! Questions? Contact Nathalie Black at 362-3599 or nvblack@earthlink.net.

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Miss Navajo, October 3
Michon Boston, mboston_tv@yahoo.com

Miss Navajo: This Is No Ordinary Beauty Pageant, will have a sneak preview on Wednesday, October 3, at 7 p.m. at National Geographic Headquarters, 1600 M Street, NW, Grosvenor Auditorium. There will be a reception following program (with real Navajo fry bread). Miss Navajo will be broadcast on the Emmy Award-Winning PBS series “Independent Lens” on November 13. No admission fee; RSVP required to missnavajo.oct3@communitycinema-dc.org or telephone to 939-0794. For more information, see http://www.communitycinema-dc.org.

No ordinary beauty pageant, the Miss Navajo Nation competition is an opportunity for young women to honor and strengthen Navajo culture. Filmmaker Billy Luther, whose mother was crowned Miss Navajo in 1966, follows a determined tomboy through her own quest for the unique title, which celebrates cultural history and traditional skills. Billy Luther and Crystal Frazier will discuss the film following a sneak preview screening October 3 to kick off National Geographic’s All Roads Film Festival. This screening of Miss Navajo is presented by ITVS Community Cinema in partnership with the National Geographic All Roads Film Project.

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CLASSIFIEDS — SERVICES

Bookkeeper Available Part-Time
Laurie England, LEng20007@aol.com

Carol Samson has done comprehensive bookkeeping services for my mother for nearly two years and has always been honest, punctual, loyal, and discreet. She organizes, handles insurance, personal finances, writes checks, and keeps track of all incoming and outgoing bills, investment related matters. You can reach Carol at 703-508-4586 (cell) or via E-mail at kcsamson@aol.com.

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