Dear Voters:
When Mayor Gray gave his State of the District speech on March 11 at
Kelly Miller Middle School in Ward 7, one of the most telling events
didn’t happen inside, and never got reported. Several District police
officers were stationed outside to direct traffic. As they directed
traffic, they studiously ignored the activity at the busy drug house
down the street leading to the school.
Inside the auditorium, District government cabinet members,
contractors, lobbyists, and workers were all seated prominently in the
front rows, and responded on cue repeatedly to applaud every line in
which the mayor called for larger government programs and more
government spending, and to chant “four more years” at intervals
throughout the speech and at its conclusion. It was staging worthy of a
convocation of the Politburo.
#####
Megan McArdle writes, in Bloomberg View, “Do DC Voters Care if
Politicians Are Corrupt?,”
http://www.tinyurl.com/19cmzoz. Glenn Reynolds, linking to McArdle’s
article in his Instapundit blog, writes that, “by all appearances, the
answer is no.” We’ll know for sure in a couple weeks, won’t we?
#####
A press release from Phil Mendelson on March 12 was headlined, “City
Council Chair Phil Mendelson Says Tregoning’s Zoning Rewrite has Broken
the Public Trust; DC Residents Complain that the ZRR is Longer, More
Difficult to Use, and Eliminates Public Input.” The press release
reports on a public oversight hearing that Mendelson held on the Office
of Planning and the Office of Zoning, and concludes that, “Towards the
end of the hearing, Councilmember Mendelson said the public testimony
conveyed, ‘a rather profound unhappiness with the Office of Planning.’
Mendelson went on to say that he thinks the Office of Planning has,
‘created an enormous amount of public distrust and it’s going to make
everything OP does difficult.’” Take that as a confirmation of what Sue
Hemberger writes below.
Gary Imhoff
themail@dcwatch.com
###############
Muriel Bowser’s Record as Councilmember
Dorothy Brizill,
dorothy@dcwatch.com
When Washington Post columnist Robert McCartney was preparing
an article about Muriel Bowser, he asked me to give him my impression of
her. I wrote him a long E-mail and told him that he could quote anything
in it. In McCartney’s article,
http://www.tinyurl.com/m7vuznp,rr he wrote that I “was one of a
half-dozen people I interviewed who have observed Bowser’s work on the
council and described it as lackluster. The others spoke on condition of
anonymity to avoid offending a potential mayor.” Here’s an expanded
version of what I wrote him.
Muriel Bowser has been a member of the city council since 2007, when
she won a special election to succeed Adrian Fenty as the Ward 4
representative on the council. As a legislator, Muriel doesn’t have an
impressive record in the introduction of legislation or the use of the
council to solve important public policy issues. The ethics bill, the
Board of Ethics and Government Accountability Establishment and
Comprehensive Ethics Reform Amendment Act of 2011, is the one exception.
It is an important bill, and it is identified as her signature
legislation. But the public was clamoring for ethics reform, she was
running for reelection, and she touted her work on the bill as the one
example of her legislative accomplishments, The bill was largely pushed
through the council by Council Chairman Kwame Brown. In the wake of the
“fully loaded SUV” controversy that raised questions about Brown’s own
ethical lapses and poor judgment, Brown wanted to use the ethics bill to
redefine himself in the eyes of DC voters as an “ethics reformer,” and
he used his influence in the council to ensure passage of Bowser’s bill.
Because of the messy manner in which the bill was drafted, several
verbal amendments were made on the council dais, The final text of the
bill wasn’t ready for several months after council passage, and no draft
text was made available during that time for public comment. Neither
Muriel nor her staff consulted with experts or Washington citizens who
were most familiar with the ethics issues that have plagued the city
government over the years. It should also be noted that, as chair of the
Government Operations Committee, Muriel wasn’t able to draft a campaign
finance reform bill, although other councilmembers introduced multiple
bills on campaign finance in 2011 and 2012. It wasn’t until 2013, when
freshman councilmember Kenyon McDuffie became chair of the council’s
Government Operations Committee, that a comprehensive campaign finance
bill was drafted and adopted by the council.
Muriel doesn’t work well with her council colleagues. She is not well
liked or trusted by them, and many of them consider her a lightweight.
Even before councilmembers all started running against each other to be
mayor, you couldn’t find another councilmember who would speak well of
her.
Muriel has not demonstrated good judgment in hiring her staff. She
has one of the worst staffs on the council. They are not informed,
knowledgeable, or even pleasant, and she micromanages them. She insists
that her legislative/committee director, Rob Hawkins, keep his office in
her suite of offices rather than in the committee office. Her staffers,
including her press director, claim never to know about legislative or
issue matters, and they must get Bowser’s or her chief of staff’s
permission to provide any information. All calls to her committee and
staffers must go through her main office receptionist.
As a Ward 4 councilmember, she provides very poor constituent
services, and there are numerous complaints by residents of the ward
about not being able to get service or assistance from her office. Her
director of constituent services, Brandon Todd, has been working on her
campaign full time for several months.
Regarding education, about three years ago Ward 4 residents were
outraged over conditions at Roosevelt and Coolidge High Schools and the
slow pace of renovation at the two schools. Coolidge, which should have
been the first on the list schools in the District to be renovated, was
dropped down to one of the last to be renovated. It was widely believed
that funds that were earmarked for Roosevelt and Coolidge were diverted
by Mayor Fenty to the renovation of Wilson and Woodson. Ward 4 residents
felt that Bowser didn’t fight for school funding in her ward, and more
generally that she wasn’t engaged in education issues. In an effort to
silence Ward 4 residents who were criticizing her on education, Bowser
tried to counter the Ward 4 Council on Education by creating her own
entity, which she called the Ward 4 Education Compact; it has not been
active or engaged since its creation.
Economic development in Ward 4, especially on Georgia Avenue, has
been a consistent promise by Bowser to Ward 4 residents, but for years
there was been little meaningful economic development on the Avenue.
Recently, Councilmember Jack Evans, campaigning against Bowser in the
mayor’s race, took advantage of this lack of economic development by
holding a rally on Georgia Avenue. The one exception has been the
building of the Georgia Avenue Walmart. Walmart, of course, has many
vocal opponents, especially in the labor movement, but one of Bowser’s
early and most prominent financial backers was David Wilmot, who served
as the finance chairman for Bowser’s 2011 reelection campaign. Wilmot is
a paid lobbyist and consultant to Walmart. After Walmart announced its
intention to open a store at the busy intersection of Georgia and
Missouri Avenues, Muriel refused to hear or respond to legitimate
community concerns about the store, including traffic and its potential
impact on other businesses in the area.
Most observers of District politics and the inner working of the
Wilson Building have had unpleasant encounters with Bowser. People
compare her personality to Adrian Fenty’s, and say that she is cool,
aloof, and mean. She will roll her eyes and openly display disgust at
citizens or colleagues with whom she disagrees even when she is on the
council dais or at community meetings. She is still working in Fenty’s
shadow; there are even rumors that Fenty will return to DC to campaign
for her in the final weeks of the campaign, and he is raising funds for
her in California. Many unpleasant people who worked for Fenty are now
working in Bowser’s council office and campaign.
A telling example that is often cited regarding Bowser’s personality
and how she has discharged her council duties is her treatment of Betty
Noel. Noel, a prominent Ward 4 resident, had served with distinction as
the District’s Peoples Counsel for eighteen years, representing
citizens’ interests with respect to public utilities. When her last
six-year term expired, Mayor Fenty refused to reappoint her, and
instead, with Bowser’s blessing, nominated Vicky Beasley, an attorney
with little experience, to the Peoples Counsel position. Beasley’s
nomination, however, was not approved by the council because of
opposition from citizens, the Consumer Utility Board, and civic
organizations. Bowser took the council’s rejection of Beasley
personally, blamed Noel for it, and retaliated against Noel. When in
2011, Mayor Gray nominated Noel to fill a vacant seat on the Public
Service Commission, which regulates utilities in the District, Bowser
immediately announced her opposition. Rather than champion the
appointment of a Ward 4 resident to such an important and prestigious
commission, Bowser worked tirelessly with PEPCO behind the scenes to
defeat Noel. Through procedural maneuvers, Noel’s nomination died in the
council’s Public Service and Consumer Affairs Committee on March 15,
2012, in a three to two vote, with Bowser, Alexander, and Mendelson
voting against her. To date, the seat to which Noel was appointed on the
three-member board has remained vacant.
Most troubling when assessing her qualifications to be mayor of the
District is the fact that she has no meaningful work or management
experience. Prior to running for the council to fill Fenty’s Ward 4
seat, she was an employee at the Silver Spring downtown redevelopment
corporation, where she was not in management.
Finally, despite her public image as being “clean,” Bowser has
skirted campaign laws and regulations. When she ran for reelection to
her Ward 4 council seat in 2012, she initially ran the campaign out of
her council office. Joy Holland, her chief of staff, held campaign
strategy meetings in Bowser’s front office, and Bowser’s campaign
posters and literature were stored in the committee office of Ron
Austin, who was then her chief of constituent services. Over the years,
she received at least $18,600 in campaign contributions from Jeffrey
Thompson and his straw donors.
###############
Even More Convoluted and Substantially Less
User-Friendly
Sue Hemberger, Friendship Heights,
smithhemb@aol.com
The dialogue that surrounds the ZRR (zoning regulations review) has
been surprisingly nasty and polarizing. Lost in the name calling and the
focus on a few issues (parking, accessory apartments, and corner
stores), is the fact that the Zoning Commission is being asked to
replace our existing zoning code with a new 980-page document that
virtually no one has read and even fewer people have actually tried to
use. The Office of Planning (OP) was charged with streamlining,
simplifying, and updating the code and making it more user-friendly. Has
OP succeeded?
The proposed new code is almost three hundred pages longer than the
existing code. By contrast, when Philadelphia planners were given the
same task, the new code they proposed was two hundred pages shorter than
the old. An overlay that consists of six consecutive and coherent pages
in the current code has its provisions scattered over at least 37
different pages (and six different subtitles) in the proposed code. And
those pages now provide conflicting information about what can be done
within the affected area.
Under the current code, we have 35 zones and 26 neighborhood-specific
overlays; under the proposed new code, we’d have 142 different zones.
The naming/numbering of zones in the existing code is logical and
systematic. In the new code, not so much. Typically, a recodification
project of this nature — i.e., one that is cast primarily as a
clean-up of an old and much-amended existing code that has grown
convoluted and difficult to use — would attempt to codify and
incorporate settled case law and administrative interpretations. No such
attempt has been made here. The status of existing precedent under the
new code gets even murkier because the proposed code retains much of the
same vocabulary as the old code, but redefines a number of terms. It
would keep many existing zone definitions, but change the names
associated with them. Many passages in the new code have been cut and
pasted from the old code but, in this process, their context has
changed. So are we going to start from scratch and treat every
interpretive question that arises as a new one? Instead of revising the
code to make it easier to understand, OP has adopted an approach that
will make the process of interpreting the zoning regulations even more
opaque and unpredictable.
There are a host of other, smaller issues — e.g., endless
almost-but-not-quite-identical tables (that lack legends and whose
coding is counterintuitive), incomprehensible sentences, the absence of
cross-references or overviews — that suggest the drafters of this code
had little or no previous experience writing regulations and didn’t
spend much, if any, time thinking about how a reader would use the text
they were creating.
We do ourselves and our city a real disservice if we treat the ZRR as
just a referendum on whether corner stores are good or cars are bad.
This is high-stakes legislation — the zoning code controls the use and
development of land throughout the District, and the last code DC
adopted has stayed in place for over fifty years. The fact that it took
the Office of Planning seven years and countless meetings to produce
this 980-page nightmare of a draft isn’t sufficient reason to adopt it.
The Zoning Commission needs to make its decision based on whether the
new code represents a significant improvement over the old code. By any
of the criteria set forth at the beginning of this process, it does not.
Just to be clear, I’m not arguing against changing the existing code.
Through the ZRR process, the Office of Planning has continued to propose
(and the Zoning Commission has continued to adopt) text amendments to
the existing code. These have included the Green Area Ratio (GAR),
zoning for the development of Saint Elizabeth’s, and a variety of other
minor provisions. There’s no reason that parking minimums, accessory
apartments, and corner stores (or any other policy change OP wants to
initiate) can’t be handled in the same way.
###############
Urban Institute Survey Supports CWAB’s Alert
Karen Settles, Samuel Jordan,
samuel.jordan@msn.com
We are President and Special Advisor, respectively, of the Citywide
Advisory Board (CWAB), the jurisdiction-wide representative of the
District’s public housing residents. Due to our concerns regarding the
enrollment of public housing residents in qualified health plans
offering essential health benefits as required by the individual mandate
of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010 (ACA), on
November 26, 2013, we proposed to the District of Columbia Housing
Authority (DCHA) a comprehensive, coordinated program of ACA
informational and enrollment services that would help to maximize the
number of eligible residents enrolled in compliant health insurance
plans by the ACA’s March 31, 2014, enrollment deadline.
In December of 2013, we were advised by the Deputy General Counsel of
DC Health Link (DCHL), the District’s health insurance marketplace, that
“the law does not permit us to serve that population,” an assertion
repeated by DCHL’s Senior Deputy Director, although neither official
offered citations to the provisions of the ACA supporting their
declarations. Nevertheless, having made our proposal to DCHA in the
course of a series of continuing negotiations on programs impacting
public housing residents, we have been sorely disappointed in the lack
of a reasoned response to our initiative. Instead, we learned that DCHA
will not discuss the proposal further because the agency is reluctant to
publicly recognize Ms. Settles as President of CWAB. Yet DCHA seeks Ms.
Settles’ signature on documents required by US Department of Housing and
Urban Development (HUD) when proof of resident leadership review or
approval is needed. The basis for DCHA’s decision is a matter having no
significance whatever to residents’ need for ACA informational and
enrollment services.
In subsequent communication with DCHL, DCHA, the Office of the Mayor,
and HUD we have noted with urgency that public housing residents are
“among the least ‘Internet connected’ and least informed by public
policy makers’ outreach efforts.” Corroborating our characterization of
the need for the proposed services is the following paragraph in a study
published by the Urban Institute on March 5, 2014:
“While these ACA target subgroups were more likely to have looked for
or have planned to look for information in the Marketplaces than their
respective reference groups, they were also more likely not to have
heard at all about the Marketplaces. For example, 23.4 percent of
uninsured respondents, 27.0 percent of adults in low-income families,
and 22.6 percent of those age 18–34 had not heard about the Marketplaces
— significantly higher than the full population average (17.1 percent)
and the averages for the respective reference groups.” (“Who Has
Been Looking for Information in the ACA Marketplaces? Why? And How?,” F.
Blavin, S. Zuckerman, and M. Karpman March 5, 2014 Urban Institute
Health Reform Monitoring Survey)
The District’s low income adults include residents of public housing,
a disproportionate number of whom have not heard of the Marketplaces.
This is a phenomenon we also expect to be found elsewhere across the
nation and have urged HUD to take appropriate measures. Further, we note
with emphasis that the enrollment deadline will have passed in three
weeks and DCHA must yet account for its disregard for the number of
residents within its jurisdiction who will not have enrolled in health
plans by March 31. The intent of the ACA will have been frustrated by
official disengagement. CWAB seeks a resumption of negotiations with the
DC Housing Authority that will also treat the matter of residents’
health and insurance with the gravity these concerns merit.
###############
CLASSIFIEDS — EVENTS
Ward One Democratic Council Candidates Forum,
March 13
P.L. Wolff,
intowner@intowner.com
Ward 1 City Council Candidates incumbent Jim Graham and challenger
Brianne Nadeau are to square off Thursday evening, March 13, at King
Emmanuel Baptist Church, 2324 Ontario Road, NW, starting at 7:00 p.m.
The session will be moderated by Anthony L. Harvey, this publication’s
Associate Editor, who is himself a longtime neighborhood resident as
well as a longtime reporter of Ward 1 news. For information about the
expected issues to be put to the candidates, visit
http://tinyurl.com/mjvqphg to
read the Special Report posted at the top of the home page.
###############
themail@dcwatch is an E-mail discussion forum that is published every
Wednesday and Sunday. To change the E-mail address for your subscription
to themail, use the Update Profile/Email address link below in the
E-mail edition. To unsubscribe, use the Safe Unsubscribe link in the
E-mail edition. An archive of all past issues is available at
