Public Service
Dear Public Servants:
Last night, the DC Federation of Citizens Associations gave me an
undeserved, or at least under deserved, “extraordinary public service”
award. For that occasion I wrote brief remarks that I’ll repeat here.
“I don’t open a morning newspaper or turn on the evening
television news — I wish I could stop that sentence right there, but
let me start it again. I don’t open a newspaper or watch the news with
an eager anticipation that I’ll find out something good that the DC
city government will be doing for me. Instead, I approach the news
dreading what I’ll find out the government will be doing to me, or my
neighborhood, or the city as a whole. It will be pushing some developer’s
plan to screw up another neighborhood, and it will be devoting millions
or tens of millions of dollars of taxpayers’ money to fund those
plans. It will be diverting public property to somebody’s private
interests. It will be passing some bill to regulate our private lives so
that we’ll live them in line with councilmembers’ personal
preferences. That’s why news is so important; it’s citizens’ first
line of defense. If we don’t know what they’re up to, we can’t
defend ourselves against them.
“When Dorothy and I started DCWatch.com in the mid-1990’s, we
were looking for a better, more efficient way of distributing government
information, and the Internet provided it. I had tried for a couple
years to convince the DC government to start its own web site, and when
it didn’t Dorothy and I started DCWatch to post city council bills,
government reports, and so on. A few years later, DC.gov opened, and a
few years after that, with its large staff, it became a bigger
repository of government documents than anything we could hope to
maintain.
“We still post government documents that, for one reason or
another, the DC government doesn’t want to become too public. But the
more prominent mission of our web site became providing an outlet for
citizen-generated news and opinion in our biweekly E-mail forum, themail@dcwatch.com.
That mission has become even more important now that almost all print
news outlets are in financial trouble and are cutting back their local
coverage; and now that local television news is mostly lifestyle
reports, sports, and weather. How do we gather serious local political
and community news, and how do we get it to the people?
“I think the second part of that question is already answered. The
Internet is an inexpensive delivery method, almost free compared with
printing or broadcasting, and it doesn’t have the space limitations of
newspapers or the time limitations of television. In the future, news
about serious subjects will be delivered by the Internet first, and
papers and television stations will be supplements. But how will news be
gathered for Internet news services? Big newspapers, with big
advertising and subscription revenues, as well as big television
stations with big advertising revenues, could afford big news gathering
staffs, numerous reporters and several editors. But Internet sites have
limited to no advertising revenue and limited to no chance of charging
their readers subscription fees. (I’m very skeptical that newspapers’
dreams of walling off their web sites and charging fees to readers will
lead to anything.)
“So who will support these large staffs of reporters and editors? I’m
not sure that anyone will. Most travel agents have been replaced with
travel booking web sites, and the few remaining travel agents handle
only the most difficult itineraries. I suspect that in the future most
newspapers will have only two or three reporters and editors devoted to
gathering the local civic and political news that we are interested in,
and the days when a newspaper like The Washington Post had fifty
Metro reporters on staff are gone forever.
“If there are fewer professional reporters gathering and covering
the news that we find necessary, who will replace them? We will. We, the
people in this room and hundreds and thousands of people like us who are
interested in the well-being of our city and the operations of our city
government. We are already the sources for our local newspapers and
broadcast stations. We try to convince reporters and their editors that
they should cover the stories that are interesting and important to us.
Occasionally, we succeed; more often we don’t. But in our local
neighborhood listservs and in themail, we are able to act as reporters
ourselves. We escape the filters of ‘news judgment’ that keeps a lot
of important news out of our news outlets. We get to inform others
directly, and in the end we all end up better informed.
“I thank you for this award, but I’m not the one who earned it.
What you read in themail, the things you may have learned about from it,
are the work of many people cooperating to invent another way of keeping
each other in touch and informed. You deserve the credit. And if you don’t
deserve the credit, if you haven’t contributed to themail yet, go home
and write now. Send your messages about what’s going on in your
neighborhood or in your area of interest to themail@dcwatch.com,
and let the rest of us know about it.”
Gary Imhoff
themail@dcwatch.com
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Last week (themail, May 6), I wrote that Omar Nour’s nomination to
a seat on the DC Board of Elections and Ethics had been withdrawn by
Mayor Fenty. That was accurate at the time, but it wasn’t complete. On
April 30, the mayor did withdraw Nour’s original nomination, PR
18-118, which had been forwarded to the council on February 5. But on
May 1, Fenty submitted a new nomination for Nour, PR 18-259, in order to
restart the ninety-day time frame for the council’s approval of BOEE
nominations. (Under the DC Code, if the council fails to approve a BOEE
nominee within ninety days of the nomination’s being forwarded to the
council, then the nomination is deemed disapproved.) That new nomination
didn’t actually reach the council until sometime after May 6, and by
yesterday, May 13, even the council’s Legislative Services Office wasn’t
aware that it had been made and didn’t initially have a copy of it.
Councilmember Mary Cheh, chair of the Government Operations
Committee, had scheduled a hearing on Nour’s original nomination for
today, May 13. However, today’s hearing was removed from the council’s
printed and online schedule because that nomination had been withdrawn,
and was no longer before the council for consideration. Despite that,
Councilmember Cheh decided to go ahead with today’s hearing as though
it were a hearing on the new nomination. Because the original nomination
had been withdrawn, the hearing had been withdrawn from the schedule,
and the new nomination was kept quiet, only one of the scheduled
witnesses, aside from Nour himself, actually appeared to testify. Nour
presented his management of a telephone answering service company as a
technology background that qualified him to resolve the BOEE’s
problems, and he testified that he would advocate a significant staff
restructuring of BOEE — showing that he shares the Fenty
administration’s policy of blaming line staffers for management’s
problems. Cheh did recess today’s hearing in order to give the public
some advance notice of the confirmation hearing on the new nomination;
it will resume on June 1.
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Fun With DC Parking Tickets (continued)
Ralph Blessing, rblessin88@hotmail.com
Gabe Goldberg is not alone in getting shafted by overzealous DC
parking enforcement ticket writers. Below is a message I had posted on
themail a few months ago [December 31, 2008] describing the Orwellian
experience that they had visited upon me last fall. Subsequently, about
six months after my original appeal, I received a ludicrous letter from
Adjudication Services claiming that I had not responded to the citation
in a timely manner, even though I had done so not once but twice,
initially appealing the citation itself and later in reaction to the
bogus “statement of fact” mentioned below. I never received a
response to my second appeal and, interestingly, I was not prevented
from having my car inspected in the interim because of an outstanding
ticket. But after six months they had worn me down; like Mr. Goldberg, I
got tired of trying to use logic with an irrational bureaucracy and paid
the frigging $25.
“I received the same B.S. explanation about special software as
Paul Penniman did (Dec. 25 themail) when a recent mail appeal of mine
was rejected by Adjudication Services. I was ticketed for ‘expired
meter’ about 10 minutes after I had deposited 75 cents for 45 minutes
worth of parking. I returned to the car a few minutes later and spotted
the ticket even though there were still 22 minutes showing on the meter.
In rejecting my appeal, DMV spouted out some boilerplate language
claiming that I had cited a broken meter as the cause of my denying the
violation; I hadn’t claimed that but did allude to the possibility of
an overzealous, quota-seeking ticket writer. (Maybe that was my
mistake.) I also suggested that if their “special software” does all
it’s cranked up to do, they should be able to verify that the meter
wasn’t expired when my ticket was written. In any case, I wrote a
follow-up appeal pointing out the fallacy of their so-called Statement
of Fact, but so far haven’t heard back.”
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DC Neighborhood Libraries
Phil Shapiro, pshapiro@his.com
Would you like to be more involved in your neighborhood library in
DC? Some libraries are developing their own Wikipedia presences (http://tinyurl.com/qxkgnr)
and some libraries have fan groups on Facebook. Search for Fans of (Your
Neighborhood Library Name Here). And naturally, the Friends of the
Library group is a very good way to be more involved in your local
neighborhood library.
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This is to advise that the May 2009 online edition has been uploaded
and may be accessed at http://www.intowner.com. Included are the lead
stories, community news items and crime reports, editorials (including
prior months’ archived), restaurant reviews (prior months’ also
archived), and the text from the ever-popular “Scenes from the Past”
feature (the accompanying images can be seen in the archived PDF
version). The complete issue (along with prior issues back to January
2002) also is available in PDF file format directly from our home page
at no charge simply by clicking the link in the Current and Back Issues
Archive. Here you will be able to view the entire issue as it appears in
print, including all photos and advertisements.
Special Note: We have now introduced a new way for visitors to our
web site to share their comments about our lead stories, the Scenes from
the Past feature, and the Publisher’s Desk commentary simply by
clicking the link at the bottom of each of those pages. The next issue
will publish on June 12 (the second Friday of the month, as always). The
complete PDF version will be posted by the preceding night or early that
Friday morning at the latest, following which the text of the lead
stories, community news, and selected features will be uploaded shortly
thereafter.
To read this month’s lead stories, simply click the link on the
home page to the following headlines: 1) “18th and Columbia Road Plaza
to Get Major Art Installed Next Winter — Finalist Selection Soon”;
2) “ABC Board Loosens Liquor Restrictions; Cuts Back Moratorium
Renewal Period”; 3) “Mt. Vernon Triangle House Tour Features New
Buildings.” See also, “Citizens Association Contested Election
Leaves Leadership Uncertain Due to Tie,” posted in the Community News
section.
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CLASSIFIEDS — EVENTS
Protest Fenty and His Developer Friends, May
14
Roger Newell, rnewell@teamster.org
City officials and developers are going to meet to celebrate the
success of turning public buildings, including closed schools, over to
for-profits firms! This Thursday, The DC Building Industry Association
will present Mayor Adrian Fenty and other key officials with awards to
honor their policies that favor rich developers but do little to serve
the needs of low to moderate income District residents.
Join the People’s Property Campaign to confront Mayor Adrian Fenty
and his cronies this Thursday! Thursday, May 14, 6:00 p.m., at
Connecticut Avenue and T Street, NW. Award recipients will include
Adrian Fenty, Mayor; Leila Edmonds, Director Department of Housing and
Community Development; Neil Albert, Deputy Mayor of Planning and
Economic Development, Harriet Tregoning, Director of the Office of
Planning. Members of the DC Building Industry Association include Lowe
Enterprises, joint recipient of nine acres of land located by the Fort
Totten Metro, valued at $6 million, given away for only $500,000; The
Argos Group, proposed recipient of two properties valued at $2 million,
for only $260,000; Donatelli Development, the same company that received
two parcels of land located on Georgia Avenue that are valued at over $1
million, for only $1; PN Hoffman, the recipient of sixteen acres of land
on the SW Waterfront, for $1 a year for 99 years; and several more
developers who are trying to turn DC public schools into condominiums.
Send Fenty and his developer friends the message that public property
is not for sale; DC public schools are not for sale! RSVP to Empower DC,
234-9119; Kim@empowerdc.org
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Department of Parks and Recreation Events, May
16-18
John Stokes, john.astokes@dc.gov
May 16, 23, 30, June 6, 9:00 a.m.-5:00 p.m., Takoma Aquatic Center,
300 Van Buren Street, NW. Lifeguard Training Class, ages fifteen and up.
Prepares the lifeguard candidate with the skills and knowledge necessary
to respond to aquatics emergencies, including First Aid and CPR.
May 16, 10:00 a.m.-1:00 p.m., Turkey Thicket Recreation Center, 1100
Michigan Avenue, NE. Kickoff for Turkey Thicket Obesity/Cardiovascular
Health Initiative. Ages 21 and up. Ward 5 has the highest incidence of
diabetes in the District. Over 12 percent of Ward 5 residents are known
to have the disease, and as many as another 25 percent may be stricken
and unaware. This kickoff is an individual introduction to the variety
of physical activities designed to reduce the risk of diabetes and
increase overall health awareness. For more information, contact Mark
Williams, Site Manager, 576-9237.
May 16, 11:00 a.m.-3:30 p.m., Stead Recreation Center, 1625 P Street,
NW. Sports day for ages thirteen and under. Youth will participate in
basketball, soccer, golf, lacrosse, and rugby. The youth will also enjoy
arts, crafts, and music. For more information, call Vincent E. Hill at
673-4465.
May 18, 5:00 p.m.-7:00 p.m., Kennedy Recreation Center, 1401 7th
Street, NW. Mini-book Fair for Adults aged eighteen and up will include
a variety of free books for giveaway. Books cover a variety of genres
and are new and used. For more information, call Pamela Pugh, Site
Manager, at 671-4794.
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National Building Museum Events, May 16, 18
Jazmine Zick, jzick@nbm.org
May 16, 2:00-4:00 p.m., Spring into Green. Explore the ideas in Green
Community with fun, hands-on activities the whole family can enjoy!
Experiment with the elements of land, energy, and water as you make your
own water filtration system, build a green roof, and more. $10 per
child, members; $15 per child, nonmembers. Ages six and up. All children
must be accompanied by an adult.
May 18, 12:30-1:30 p.m., Smart Growth: Healing Spaces: The Science of
Place and Well-Being. Dr. Esther Sternberg, physician and author,
discusses how our place in nature is of critical importance to our
personal health and the environment. Book signing to follow. Free. No
registration required.
May 18, 7:00-8:30 p.m., Spotlight on Design: Adrian Smith + Gordon
Gill Architecture. Adrian Smith, FAIA, RIBA, Gordon Gill, AIA, and
Robert Forest, AIA, RIBA, OAA, LEED AP of Adrian Smith + Gordon Gill
Architecture present some of the firm’s sustainable projects,
including the positive energy Masdar Headquarters. This program
complements Green Community, which will be open prior to the lecture.
$12 members; $12 students; $20 nonmembers. Prepaid registration
required. Walk-in registration based on availability. All events at the
National Building Museum, 401 F Street, NW, Judiciary Square stop, Metro
Red Line. Register for events at http://www.nbm.org.
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District to Hold Hearings on Aging Services,
May 19, 27, June 5
Darlene Nowlin, darlene.nowlin@dc.gov
The Office on Aging will hold four public hearings to provide the
public with an opportunity to express their views on the priority
community needs for aging programs to be included in the proposed State
Plan on Aging for 2010-2012. The District is required to submit a plan
to the US Administration on Aging in order to receive federal funds
under the Older Americans Act. Federal dollars fund crucial and
essential services for District residents aged sixty and older.
May 19, 10:00 a.m.-12:00 p.m., Ward 2 and 3, Guy Mason Recreation
Center, 3600 Calvert Street, NW; May 27, 10:00 a.m.-12:00 p.m., Wards 5
and 6, Greenleaf Recreation Center, 201 N Street, NW; June 5, 10:00
a.m.-12:00 p.m., Wards 7 and 8, Washington Seniors Wellness Center, 3001
Alabama Avenue, SE.
Persons who are unable to attend the meetings will also have the
opportunity to submit their comments through an online survey on the web
site, http://www.dcoa.dc.gov. A
copy of the survey can also be obtained by calling the office, completed
surveys may be returned by mail or in person. A draft of the proposed
state plan will be available for review by Friday, May 22, on the web
site, at the Martin Luther King Jr. Library, 901 G Street, NW, and at
the Office on Aging Headquarters located at 441 Fourth Street, NW, Suite
900 South. A copy of the plan can also be requested by calling 727-8370.
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