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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