It’s Debatable

Dear Debaters:

So everybody watched the presidential debate, but who has been watching the local debates among city council candidates? If you’ve attended any local debates, send your reports to themail, and let everyone know what you observed. We’re not getting enough coverage; let’s provide it ourselves.

Gary Imhoff
themail@dcwatch.com

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BEGA Developments
Dorothy Brizill, dorothy@dcwatch.com

Last fall, in an effort to address corruption in the District government, the council enacted the Board of Ethics and Government Accountability Establishment and Comprehensive Ethics Reform Amendment Act of 2011. The single most important aspect of the legislation was the transfer of authority for the enforcement of the District’s Code of Conduct from the Office of Campaign Finance, under the Board of Elections, to a new Board of Ethics and Government Accountability (BEGA). While it had initially been hoped that the BEGA would have been operational by this past spring, the Gray administration did not nominate individuals (Robert Spagnoletti, Laura Richards, and Deborah Lathan) to fill the three board seats until June 5. As a result, the council was forced to adopt emergency legislation in May to delay the transfer of authority from OCF to BEGA and to provide that the “Board of Elections maintains jurisdiction to receive, investigate, and adjudicate violations of the Code of Conduct until October 1, 2012” when, it was hoped the BEGA would be fully operational.

Now that we are into October we can assess the extent to which the new Board of Ethics and Government Accountability is operational. Has it established an office, hired a staff, promulgated rules and regulations to direct and guide its operations? This past summer, the BEGA, with assistance from the Office of the Chief Technology Officer, established a web site, http://bega.dc.gov, which in recent weeks has posted a telephone number (727-6300) and an address (441 4th Street, NW) for the board. Unfortunately, the listed telephone number doesn’t go to a board office, but is redirected to the Mayor’s Call Center (the 311 number), and the address doesn’t list a specific office or room at the District’s mammoth office building a 1 Judiciary Square. With regard to staff, the BEGA has made at least one hire. On September 28, the board issued a press release announcing the selection of Darrin Sobin to head the board staff as Director of Government Ethics (http://bega.dcgov/release/darrin-sobin-selected-serve-director-government-ethics). Sobin’s appointment was not a total surprise. The job announcement for the position was issued by the board over the summer on July 31; at the last public meeting of the BEGA that I attended, on August 21, two of the board members complained that there were only two applicants for this important position, and that the DC Department of Human Resources (Personnel) and BEGA Chair Spagnoletti were doing a poor job of getting the word out regarding the vacancy. Sobin, who was appointed the District government’s ethics counselor by Attorney General Irv Nathan in April, has worked very closely with Spagnoletti and other board members since June. Sobin, however, has an interesting as well as controversial history that I detailed in themail on July 29. The future of the BEGA rests largely on Sobin’s shoulders, since he will oversee the day-to-day operations and direction of the board. I am particularly concerned because he has largely been a bureaucratic attorney working in the DC office of the attorney general, and is not known in the larger community and has not been familiar with the “dark underbelly” of the District government.

Finally, no district agency or board can function without rules and regulations. On September 25, the BEGA adoptrd emergency and proposed regulations, without a public meeting. These regulations cover investigations, hearings, and advisory opinions, as well as rules of procedure and ethical conduct for the BEGA. They were published in the DC Register (Volume 59, No. 39) on September 28 for a thirty-day comment period (http://www.dcregs.dc.gov/Gateway/NoticeHome.aspx?noticeid=3563700 and http://www.dcregs.dc.gov/Gateway/NoticeHome.aspx?noticeid=3563506). Commenting on the proposed rulemaking will be difficult, however, since there are substantial errors in the text of the published regulations, and since the only way to comment on them is by an E-mail to Mr. Spagnoletti.

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Opportunity Calls
Timothy Cooper, worldrights2008@gmail.com

According to DCist, DC Council Chair Phil Mendelson is introducing legislation to permit the city to hold a referendum on amending the DC Home Rule Charter on the question of budget autonomy. Congress would then be put in a position of having to either accept or reject the amendment within 35 days of the vote. It’s unlikely that opponents of DC autonomy will be able to muster the votes against it. This fresh idea was laudably developed by DC Appleseed and DCVote. It should be supported. But so too should another idea: holding a concurrent referendum on DC statehood.

It’s been thirty-two years since the last DC statehood referendum was passed by the city, and it’s high time its residents had the opportunity to vote on it again. Only with its endorsement can the crippling divide between incrementalists and DC statehood supporters be closed and the strategic objective of the city’s leadership be clarified. The DC statehood referendum should ask the simple question: should the objective of the political leadership of the District of Columbia be to obtain equal political rights for its residents through DC statehood?

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Comments on the Referendum on Budget Autonomy
Ann Loikow, aloikow@verizon.net

[An open letter to councilmembers] I just read in the Washington Post and Washington Times today that you were going to introduce a charter referendum bill to amend the charter to give the District government budget autonomy. What I can’t understand is why the council continues to act like a colonial legislature and nibble around the edges of the Congressional constraints that deny us the right to govern ourselves, and not demand what would really make the people of the District of Columbia full and equal citizens of these United States — Statehood. A charter amendment, much like an act passed by Congress granting us budget autonomy, is just a temporary measure that Congress would still have the authority to amend or revoke at any time for any reason. Please don’t delude yourselves to think that Congress wouldn’t continue to insert itself into our budget. During the District of Columbia’s first seventy-four years, there was considerable and varying degrees of local autonomy, but in 1874 we lost everything for almost a century. In the 1990’s, Congress again took away many of our post home rule local powers and gave them to a Federal control board, the statutory power for which still exists. It could easily happen again. Mere budget autonomy would not make us full American citizens with the same rights as other Americans. Only statehood would do that. In addition, as DC Attorney General Irvin Nathan and George Washington University law professor Jonathan Turley have indicated, a charter referendum on budget autonomy, like so many of the “interim” measures pursued in recent decades, is of doubtful legality and could easily end up in court.

Why won’t you, our elected officials, actively support statehood, the one measure that would give the people of the District their full right to govern themselves, permanently and without qualification? Statehood is the only solution to our lack of the right to self-government that the voters have ever endorsed. Why should we have a referendum on something that will just further cement our colonial status and still leave us without the fundamental human right to self-government? Over the past several decades, we have wasted so much time, money, and effort on partial, but ultimately legally questionable and ineffective measures that would still leave us a colony of the rest of the United States.

I am amazed that the council does not understand that one can only be free when you have all your rights and, most particularly, the right to self-government from which everything else flows. As Thomas Jefferson wrote in the Declaration of Independence: “We hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness — That to secure these Rights, Government are instituted among Men, deriving their just Powers from the Consent of the governed. . . .“ District voters have not given our “consent” to our colonial status. We have only consented to statehood, the one thing that would give us all our rights and put us on an equal footing with other Americans. The bottom line is that people can only be completely free and independent, not a little. It is an all or nothing proposition. It is like pregnancy, you are either pregnant or you’re not. You can’t be half pregnant. Similarly, you can’t be half free. If you just remove the shackle from one leg and leave the other, you are still enslaved. In our case, all the partial measures just mean that we are still colonists and not full American citizens. It is a trap to think we can be a “little free” and it is OK. We are either free people with the right to self-government in all its aspects or we are not. It is just that simple.

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The DC Housing Market and the Global Market for Housing
Richard Layman, rlaymandc@yahoo.com

The problem with McArdle’s analysis of the DC housing market [themail, September 30] is that it isn’t a market limited to just people living in DC, but people working here, to people with higher incomes, and is also open to nonresidents from the US and abroad who have the money and inclination to own housing units in multiple cities. As DC becomes a global city, there will be greater demand for housing by itinerants, which will push prices up. We won’t be like London (wealthy Russians and Middle Easterners make up a big proportion of the market), but there is an impact on the “local” housing market from global buyers. Certainly most people remember the “first” condo units downtown earlier last decade and looking up at night at the buildings and seeing very few lighted units.

So what happens is that the people crowded out of the submarkets that are increasingly global in turn relocate and bid up prices in outlying neighborhoods that aren’t part of the global market. (A kind of extension of the center-periphery argument from development studies, with an added middle category.) It’s not exactly the same dynamic, but Loretta Lees’ writings on “super-gentrification” are extendable to the issue, such as her paper on Brooklyn Heights (http://www.kcl.ac.uk/sspp/departments/geography/people/academic/lees/supergentrificationbrooklynheights.pdf). Also relevant is this article from the New York Times about NYC, http://tinyurl.com/94qhf7n, although there is another on Charleston, http://tinyurl.com/9s6ex75, on the same issue.

For what it’s worth, a similar process of nationalization/globalization of the commercial property market in the Central Business District in turn has similar pricing effects on commercial property throughout the city, with overpricing of real estate in “neighborhood” commercial districts specifically. DC’s commercial districts have asking prices for rents 50 percent to 150 percent higher than comparable districts in other cities such as Philadelphia, Richmond, and Frederick, which is why those places tend to have more interesting and successful “neighborhood” commercial districts than DC.

[Does anyone have any statistics supporting or contradicting this theory? Are an unusually high number of Washington houses being bought, or apartments rented, by high-income out-of-towners as secondary residences? Is that a major contributor to driving DC housing prices higher?

[Richard prefaced his message with, “my posts don’t tend to show up in themail.” I haven’t deliberately skipped any messages intended for themail, so if a message that you send doesn’t show up in the next issue, send it again. — Gary Imhoff]

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Ward 5 Heartbeat
Abigail Padou, editor@ward5heartbeat.org

Articles in the fall issue are online at http://www.ward5heartbeat.org. Articles include “DPW Relocates Heavy Vehicles to Ward 5: Major Gain for Ward 6,” “At-Large Candidates to Square Off at October 20th Debate in Ward 5,” “Solution to Sewer Overflows Will Come Last to Bloomingdale,” “Did DC Water Break the Law?” “Charter Bus Parking Lot Raises Ire in Ivy City,” “Ward 5 Residents Speculate about Harry Thomas Jr.’s Return,” and much more. Ward 5 Heartbeat is a nonprofit community newspaper. Comments and feedback are welcome.

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CLASSIFIEDS — EVENTS

DC Council Candidate Forum on Public Education, October 25, 29
Jeff Smith, jsmith@dcvoice.org

We’re at a fork in the road because it’s not OK as it is. At-large city council candidates will debate the future of public education in the District of Columbia on October 25, 6:00-8:00 p.m. Confirmed candidates: Mary Brooks Beatty, Michael A. Brown, A.J. Cooper, David Grosso, Vincent Orange, and Ann C. Wilcox. City council chairman candidates will debate on October 29, 6:00-8:00 p.m. Confirmed candidates: Calvin Gurley, Phil Mendelson. Both forums at Metropolitan Community Church of Washington, DC, 474 Ridge Street, NW, near 5th and N Streets, NW, three blocks from the Mount Vernon Metro (yellow/green); street parking generally available plus parking in church lot.

These “Fork in the Road” Candidate Forums are sponsored by a consortium of public education advocacy groups including Empower DC, We Act Radio, DC VOICE, SHAPPE, Parents and Teachers for Real Education Reform, the Ward 8 Education Council, and the Ward Five Council on Education.

Questions to the candidates will include a focus on the five concerns outlined here: “A ‘Fork in the Road’ for Public Education in the District of Columbia, https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B2pfKfbSOG7bOXdHNEZEczA0SHc/edit.