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October 21, 2012

Civic Sports

Dear Sports:

We haven’t discussed restaurants and eating out in themail for a long time, and we really should, since eating out is our main civic sport. Tom Sietsma’s 2012 Fall Dining Guide, http://tinyurl.com/9ze5ovg, appeared in today’s Washington Post Magazine, and it’s a good jumping off spot, since this year Sietsma lists his forty favorite restaurants, which leads to many good quarrels — how could he have not mentioned your favorite, and how could he have given such a high rating to that dump that you’ve never liked?

Okay, here are my quibbles: three of Dorothy’s and my favorite special occasion dining rooms, places that combine reliably good food with a warm, welcoming, atmosphere, don’t make the list at all: Ristorante Tosca, where Dorothy and I just celebrated her birthday, 1789, and the Prime Rib. L’Auberge Chez Francois does make the list, but gets only two stars and deserves more. The list does remind us to get around again to The Bombay Room, City Zen, The Oval Room, and Vidalia, which have never disappointed us, along with everyday favorites and cheap eats A & J Restaurant, which is always my first choice when we’re in Rockville, and La Limena, which is my second choice in Rockville. But where are the sandwich shops that often give us greater pleasure than fancy restaurants — Ray’s Hell Burger’s hamburger, Horace and Dickey’s fish sandwich, MGM’s roast beef sandwich, and Parkway Deli’s reuben?

How would you improve Sietsma’s list?

Gary Imhoff
themail@dcwatch.com 

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Ethics and Jim Graham
Dorothy Brizill, dorothy@dcwatch.com

The Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority (WMATA) released a comprehensive report by the law firm of Cadwalader, Wickerhsham, and Taft, LLP, into the conduct of Councilmember Jim Graham,http://tinyurl.com/8ruy2tk. What, if anything, will happen as a result of the report’s conclusion that Graham’s actions in 2008, while a member of WMATA’s Board of Directors, violated the Boards’ ethics rules governing standards of conduct and “resulted in a breach of his duty to place the public interest foremost in any dealings involving Metro”? Will any disciplinary or legal action be taken against Graham by WMATA, the city council, or the District government, via its new Board of Ethics and Government Accountability. Will federal law enforcement officials who are investigating government corruption and the awarding of the District’s lottery contract find that any law was broken?

With regards to Metro, while the Board was willing to spend $800,000 on the Cadwalader investigation, it now claims that it is powerless to act on the findings because Graham is no longer a WMATA board member. In his Loose Lips column on October 16, http://tinyurl.com/8b3khxq, Alan Suderman raised the question of whether the council will investigate Graham, and said that we shouldn’t count on it. He noted the council’s failure to censure Graham in 2011 after Graham failed to report an attempted cash bribe offered to him by Ted Loza, then his chief of staff. Indeed, immediately following the release of the Cadwalader report on October 11, Council Chair Phil Mendelson declined to say how the council would respond, saying that he first wanted to speak with Graham — despite the fact that the Cadwalader investigation clearly showed that Graham, while serving as the Ward 1 councilmember and the council’s nominee to the WMATA Board, violated the council’s “code of official conduct” (Section 202 of the council’s Rules of Organization and Procedure, Council Period 19). To date, Mendelson and his colleagues have been virtually silent on the subject, and seemed to breathe a sigh of relief when the Board of Ethics and Government Accountability voted last week to initiate an initial inquiry into Graham.

What can we expect from the BEGA’s initial inquiry? Last week, Councilmember Muriel Bowser held an oversight hearing of the Government Operations Committee into “The Implementation of Act 19-318, the Board of Ethics and Government Accountability [BEGA] Establishment and Comprehensive Ethics Reform Amendment Act.” The stated purpose of the hearing was to review and assess the implementation of the ethics legislation adopted by the council last fall. That legislation, which was written by Councilmember Bowser and then Council Chairman Kwame Brown, created the BEGA, and mandated that it be open and operational by October 1. At the hearing, Councilmember Bowser joined Robert Spagnoletti in proclaiming that “significant progress” has been made in implementing the act. She was very defensive and dismissive of specific concerns about the BEGA that I raised in my testimony. For example, I indicated that I had attempted to visit the BEGA office at Suite 830S at 441 4th Street, NW, on four separate occasions during working hours, and had always found the door locked and the lights turned off, despite pronouncement by Spagnoletti that BEGA had complied with “the mandate to open our doors by October 1st.” Moreover, despite claims that the telephones were operational, and despite the BEGA’s mandate to operate as a fully independent agency, calls to it were being answered by the mayor’s 311 telephone service. BEGA’s hotline, which mandated in the ethics bill to receive tips from the public, has not yet been established, and BEGA has hired only one employee, Dennis Sobin, who will serve as its staff director, but who continues to sit in and work out of the Office of the Attorney General (Room 409 in the Wilson Building), and who will continue to do so until at least November 5. In the meantime, BEGA has not hired even a temporary employee to man a desk and open the office’s front door. At the hearing, Spagnoletti indicated that the so-called independent office of the BEGA would rely on the Executive Office of the Mayor (EOM) to detail someone to staff the office and answer telephone calls. Perhaps the most troubling issue, however, that I tried to bring to Bowser’s attention is that the September 13 “public” meeting of the BEGA was held in the private offices of Spagnoletti’s law firm, and the public was not allowed to attend, although members of the public were allowed to dial into the offices and listen to the meeting over a “telephonic conference call.” Given concerns that were raised regarding potential conflicts of interest between Spagnoletti’s law practice and BEGA during his confirmation hearing, holding a BEGA board meeting at his law firm, which barred the public from attending would appear to be a clear violation of the District’s Administrative Procedures Act of 1968, as amended by the Open Meetings Act of 2010 (which Bowser herself drafted and shepherded through the council). Bottom line: currently I don’t hold out hope that the BEGA will be an effective and independent ethics office in the DC government.

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The Catania Conundrum
Larry Blesser, lblesser@aol.com

Concerning David Catania’s employment with M.C. Dean: I think it’s shocking and wrong that members of the DC council can be employees of companies that do major business with the DC government. Federal employees like me are required to keep their distance from any business where they can influence spending of public money to their own advantage. (I don’t think members of Congress apply that rule to themselves, but then they’re pretty special people not like the rest of us.) Don’t you think that by virtue of the fact that Mr. Catania’s employer is a bidder on a public contract that influences how the decision will go? Don’t you think the M.C. Dean company knew that when they hired him? It stinks.

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