Outrage
Dear Outraged:
Nikita Stewart has the latest Peter Nickles outrage story in Friday’s
Washington Post (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/05/22/AR2008052203734.html).
Just in the past month, Nickles involved himself in distributing to city
councilmembers free tickets to baseball games that the mayor had been
hoarding for himself, and he took the lead to push the lucrative lottery
contract that the mayor is supporting for his fraternity brothers and
friends. Nickles is continuing to beat down the low morale of the
Attorney General’s Office by running it with the same heavy hand and
bull headedness that made him so unpopular with his colleagues at his
former law firm of Covington and Burling. His latest innovations are a
dress code under which lawyers are required to wear jackets at all time
and a soon-to-be-instituted time clock that lawyers will be required to
punch. But Stewart’s story is mainly about Nickles’ firing of eleven
lawyers in the office, in his plan to “transform” the Attorney
General’s office into a “first-rate law firm” with “strong,
young, able stars.” Nickles claims that he fired those who are “not
up to that star capacity,” but the case for that is thin. “Steven J.
Anderson, president of the union that represents nine of the lawyers who
were fired, said the union plans to challenge the terminations. He said
he thinks all of the lawyers had received ‘satisfactory evaluations.’”
Nickles talks as though he has long-term plans to continue to
demoralize the AG’s Office, but it is questionable whether he will be
able to continue to act as AG — at least legally act as AG — for
much longer. Mayor Fenty appointed Nickles as Attorney General in a
temporary capacity on December 17, 2007, after Nickles’ continuing
interference with the office forced out Linda Singer. Fenty can’t
appoint Nickles to the position permanently because a requirement for
the job is that the Attorney General be a resident of the city of
Washington. However, mayoral acting appointments are valid for only one
hundred eighty days. After that half year, acting appointments are no
longer valid, and appointees can no longer exercise the authority of
their offices, be paid, or accept pay. That means that in about a month
Nickles can no longer legally act as Attorney General.
There are two problems with that, however. The first is that there
are two versions of the DC Code, the Code as it is published and the
Code as it is interpreted by Peter Nickles. Under Nickles’ version of
the Code, he and the mayor aren’t bound by any laws they don’t want
to follow. Nickles has already claimed that he’s not the “acting”
Attorney General, but the “interim” Attorney General, and that the
law limiting the term of acting appointments doesn’t apply to interim
appointments. He’s also claimed that the law limiting acting
appointments doesn’t apply to offices not mentioned in the Home Rule
Charter, and that since the Charter established the Office of
Corporation Counsel rather than the renamed Office of the Attorney
General, the limitation doesn’t apply to him. These are phony
arguments that rest on word games, of course, but they lead to the
second problem: who will enforce the law against Nickles when Nickles’
term expires? The city council won’t confront Nickles and the mayor,
and an ordinary citizen could probably not get standing in court to sue
Nickles to force him to stand down. But if Nickles is determined to
continue to fire more attorneys, that problem will be solved as soon as
Nickles takes more job actions after his term has expired. Lawyers who
are fired by Nickles when he has no legal authority to act as Attorney
General will have the standing to sue to enforce the law in order to
challenge their firings, and they will have the backing of their union.
It will be an interesting battle.
Gary Imhoff
themail@dcwatch.com
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DC Parks Department Wasted Money
Jonetta Rose Barras, Rosebook1@aol.com
An administrative assistant was allowed to sign off on more than one
million dollars of invoices submitted by contractors who built
recreation centers in the District of Columbia between 2002 and 2005.
Serious internal control deficiencies “resulted in the payment of
approximately $16 million in invoices, which were neither approved by a
[Department of Parks and Recreation] authorized official nor
sufficiently verified by the [Office of the Chief Financial Officer]
prior to payment,” according to a scathing audit released last week by
the Inspector General. Not surprisingly, the IG concluded that the
government also may have improperly paid as much as $2.1 million to
those contractors — Jair Lynch Consulting/Alpha Construction (JLC/A)
and The Temple Group, Inc. (TTGI).
Readers of The Barras Report may remember reports that appeared there
from 2004 through 2007 that detailed the shenanigans in the capital
projects at the DPR. Those reports raised questions not only about the
quality of the work being performed by the two contractors identified in
the IG’s audit but also the nature of the contracts and the overall
cost to District taxpayers.
The contracts with JLC/A and TTGI began during the Financial Control
Board era. Initially they were seen as way to improve the deplorable
conditions at recreation centers when the city had little or no funds
for capital projects. They were touted as cost-effective and
cost-efficient. But a monopoly is never efficient or effective; it
frequently results in customers being overcharged for a shoddy product.
That certainly was what happened between 2002 and 2007 in the DPR
capital projects, according to the findings in the IG’s audit dated
May 13, 2008. During this period, the agency spent $160 million on
capital projects. Read more at in The Barras Report at jrbarras.com, http://jrbarras.com/artman/publish/article_157.shtml.
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A Coming Home Heating Oil Crisis
Jack McKay, jack.mckay@verizon.net
While all attention is focused on the rising prices of gasoline and
diesel fuel, the price of home heating oil has quietly gone up just as
much. Heating season is over, so people may not notice that heating oil,
like diesel fuel, now costs over $4 a gallon here, compared to $2.75 a
year ago. Natural gas, in contrast, is unchanged, and now costs less
than half as much, per unit heat output, as oil. This promises to be a
terrible crisis next winter, when low-income households discover that
their already-burdensome heating costs have doubled.
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DCPS School Reform: The Other Side of the
Story
Candi Peterson, kepmclp@msn.com
The more I learn about the Fenty/Rhee administration, the more I
detest their fly-by-the-seat-of-their-pants method of governing. I now
realize that the takeover of school governance in DC was a terrible
mistake. I wonder if Mayor Fenty makes up the rules as he goes along.
Little wonder that Chancellor Michelle Rhee stated in the Government
Accounting Office (GAO) report that it is not important for her to
reveal an educational strategic plan .
Just this week Marta Guzman, the fired DCPS principal of Oyster/Adams
bilingual school, appeared on Jerry Phillips’ community radio show
(1500 AM/107.7 FM), in an episode titled: The Other Side of the Story.
It seems odd that Rhee did not renew Guzman’s contract, given that
Oyster school was just bestowed the No Child Left Behind Blue Ribbon
award in 2007. Twenty-four plus principals whose contracts were not
renewed by Rhee, according to Guzman, weren’t given appropriate notice
and were not given a reason for being let go as required by their school
officers’ union contract. Oddly enough, these principals purport that
they had been given good evaluations. It appears that DCPS procedures
were not adhered to by Chancellor Rhee. This sounds similar to the DC
Metropolitan Police Department debacle. After firing seventeen DC police
officers, the MPD had to reinstate officers to their positions with back
pay because it failed to comply with critical agency deadlines. These
soon-to-be terminated DCPS principals will be like their police
counterparts. They will file agency grievances as well as a class-action
lawsuit to address the agency’s failure to comply with required
procedures and the due process of law.
The Washington Post reported last week that an anonymous
Washington Teachers’ Union member revealed that members of the WTU
contract negotiating team feel that they have no choice but to give in
to Chancellor Rhee’s demand to get rid of seniority in the upcoming
teachers contract. After this article appeared , many teachers called
the WTU office to complain. Twenty DCPS teachers stormed the WTU office
last Thursday during an evening board meeting to make a passionate
appeal to the WTU President Parker to insist that the WTU fight to keep
seniority in DCPS teachers contract no matter the financial incentives
being proposed by the Rhee team. Glance at the http://www.k12.dc.us
web site, and you will find that Chancellor Rhee has reopened the
Teacher Transition Award program for one more week, from May 21-28. This
program encourages DCPS teachers and providers in closing and
restructured schools to accept meager financial awards of $1,000 to
$20,000 in exchange for resigning their jobs. If they take this award,
teachers must agree to sign a contract that states that they cannot
return to DCPS for five years. Teachers cannot rescind their decision to
resign. No credible school system encourages their certified and
experienced mid-level and senior-level employees to resign their jobs in
exchange for recruiting inexperienced and uncertified educators.
The current DCPS administration has a new proposal that seeks to
waive the requirements for those entering as new principals, assistant
principals, and school officers under Section 1667, Title 5 of the DCMR.
The research supports that there is a correlation between experience and
higher student performance; Fenty and Rhee and their supporters believe
that no experience is necessary to teach or run schools. They are
traveling down a very slippery slope. It makes me think that Fenty and
Rhee are conspiring to make DCPS schools look even worse than they are
so that charter schools will seem better than they actually are.
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Metro Almost Has It Right
Ed T. Barron, edtb1@macdotcom
Boarding the Green Line at Navy Yard Station at the end of a
Nationals’ game is pretty smooth these days. Trains arrive about every
three minutes and load quickly. About half the folks who board at the
Navy Yard leave at L’Enfant Plaza to get the Blue and Orange Lines to
Virginia. The problem arises at Gallery Place, where a lot of folks
transfer to the Red Line toward Shady Grove. As many as three Green line
trains unload their transferring passengers before the first Red Line
rain comes in. This makes for a very crowded platform at Gallery Place
and a real donnybrook (a la the Tokyo Metro) getting aboard the Red Line
toward Shady Grove. The solution would be to run a few additional Red
Line trains timed to be at Gallery Place near the end of the Nationals’
games.
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DC Mayor Adrian M. Fenty has asked local businesses to invest in our
children’s education by contributing to a program that will spruce up
the looks of our schools, et cetera, but his request has not been well
received by the business community [http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/05/24/AR2008052401682.html].
I normally do not agree with most things Fenty does, but on this issue I
do.
Businesses are corporate citizens, and they have an obligation to
contribute from their surpluses by reinvesting in the community that has
allowed them to make money. Far more than that, what they are being
asked to give might benefit them down the road. The failure of the
business community to kick in is pure stinginess and nothing else.
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Mayor Fenty Shrugs off Campaign Finance Form
Paul D. Craney, press@dcgop.org
Mayor Adrian Fenty and several councilmembers want you to believe
they either did not attend a single event that had an admission price or
paid full price for every event they attended in 2007. The DC Office of
Campaign Finance has copies of the financial disclosure forms for each
councilmember and the mayor that were due on May 15. The first question
of the financial disclosure form requires each elected official to state
if they have financial interests (do they own stocks or property) that
do business with the District that exceeds $1,000. Question 7 asks them
to list all the gifts that they receives with an aggregated value of
$100 or more. If they attended events for civic organizations,
fundraisers, or meals with influential individuals for free, they are
required to indicate the dollar amount of the benefits they received.
“Mayor Fenty’s latest attempt to dodge transparency brings
complete disrespect for the office he holds and does a disservice to the
people he represents. There is no excuse for a mayor who has made it his
hallmark to be at all places all the time to completely ignore the law’s
requirement that promotes transparency from their elected officials. DC
residents deserve to know if the mayor paid for every single event he
went to in 2007, or if he is falsifying his financial disclosure forms,”
stated DC Republican Committee Chair Robert Kabel.
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Accountability, Democracy, and Statehood
Richard Layman, rlaymandc@yahoo.com
Re: Accountability [themail, May 21]. It certainly argues against
statehood. If the chief executive (the mayor) and the city council, not
to mention the local newspaper, neither favor nor practice democratic
processes themselves, how can the polity (DC, the District of Columbia)
truly ever make the moral, policy, and practice arguments in favor of
statehood?
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Knock, Knock
Malcolm Wiseman, Washington Free DC!, mal@wiseman.ws
Knock, knock, knock. Nobody is at the door. It’s a broken record.
Over and over, the same $#&* thing, nothing new. You need to stop
harping and whining about the school took-over and get on to something
else, or soon your only contributors will be you, Rees, and Dorothy.
Have you noticed the drop-off in the number of articles lately? I have.
Get back on track and cover the whole city-state!
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CLASSIFIEDS — EVENTS
DPW Announces Area’s First Free Weekly
Shredding, May 24
Nancee Lorn, nanceelorn@yahoo.com
The Department of Public Works (DPW) will offer the metropolitan area’s
first permanent, weekly document shredding service, for District
residents only, at the Benning Road Trash Transfer Station, 3200 Benning
Road, NE. Two shredding trucks will be on site each Saturday, beginning
May 24, from 8:00 a.m. to 3:00 p.m. District residents may bring up to
five medium-size boxes (no larger than the standard District recycling
bin, which is approximately 20” x 14” x 14”) of personal documents
to be shredded. Only paper (staples, paper clips, and binder clips on
the paper are okay) and credit cards will be accepted. No business or
commercial material will be accepted. District residents also may bring
household hazardous waste and unwanted electronics between 8:00 a.m. and
3:00 p.m. to the transfer station for proper disposal.
To prevent identity theft, shred confidential information, such as
bills, old credit cards, and even junk mail; order a credit report on an
annual basis; do not carry your Social Security card or have your Social
Security number on your driver’s license or personal checks; do not
leave mail in your mailbox overnight or on weekends; carry only the
credit cards you need; consider signing credit cards “Ask for ID”
instead of with your signature.
Benning Road, NE, is under construction, so there may be traffic
delays as well. For more information, visit DPW’s web site at http://www.dpw.dc.gov
or call 311.
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CityVision Final Presentation, May 30
Jazmine Zick, jzick@nbm.org
Friday, May 30, 6:00-8:00 p.m., Outreach Program: CityVision: Final
Presentation. The spring 2008 CityVision program, in partnership with
the National Capital Planning Commission, challenged students from
Charles Hart Middle School and Hardy Middle School to develop plans for
the future of DC’s North Capitol Street Corridor. Join us for the
presentation of the students’ final designs. Free. Registration not
required. Refreshments will be served following the presentation. At the
National Building Museum, 401 F Street, NW, Judiciary Square stop, Metro
Red Line.
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The Uprising,
June 4
Kesh Ladduwahetty, DC for Democracy, keshinil@yahoo.com
David Sirota, best-selling author and journalist, is coming to town
to talk about The Uprising, his latest book about the populist
revolt against politics as usual, which is transforming the political
scene. Sirota will talk about his book at Borders bookstore, 1800 L
Street, NW, 18th and L Street, NW, on Wednesday, June 4, at 6:30 p.m. DC
for Democracy, DC Drinking Liberally, and Firedoglake blog are very
pleased to cosponsor this event. Afterwards, we hope you join us for
food and drinks at Porter’s Dining Saloon (1207 19th Street, NW) until
9:00 p.m. If you can’t make it to the book event, you can still meet
David Sirota at Porter’s later that night. Sign up for the event at http://salsa.wiredforchange.com/o/807/t/2845/event/index.jsp?event_KEY=12079.
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