The Listening Post

Dear Good Listeners:

On Saturday I overheard the quintessential conversation between a married couple, wrapped up in three brief sentences. As I was leaving a grocery store, a man and women were entering; neither one brought in a grocery cart. The wife: “You didn't get a cart.” The husband: “I asked you if we needed a cart.” And the wife again, settling the matter, “You know I don't listen to you.”

I had to laugh. This was said matter-of-factly, even good humoredly, without anger or rancor. It was just a statement of the way things were. Then it occurred to me, single-minded and obsessed as I am, that this conversation was also the subtext for nearly every conversation that is held between a citizen of the District of Columbia and an official of the city government. The next time that you have a conversation with or raise a problem with or have to do business with the mayor or a councilmember or a bureaucrat at a city agency, imagine that there is a sign on the official's desk or hanging around his or her neck with the motto: “You know I don't listen to you.” Once you understand that, you can anticipate and understand the way the government will fail to react to you. There's a small, totally fenced, government-owned lot on our block; it's the remnant of a closed alley. The government's sole maintenance of the lot is limited to mowing it once every summer, after neighbors make numerous complaining calls. This year, we can't get even that done; we're being asked by the government to prove to the government that the government owns the lot. “You know I don't listen to you.” Read practically any message in this issue of themail with that motto in mind. It fits; it works as an explanation; it describes perfectly the relationship between the people who stubbornly continue live in this city and those who administer it.

Gary Imhoff
themail@dcwatch.com

###############

Voting Rights of Americans
Ralph Blessing, rblessin88@hotmail.com

Maybe it's time for DC to forego the piecemeal approach to voting rights and follow Jefferson's advice by declaring our own independence as a separate country. We could likely get admitted to the UN and, as a sovereign nation, we could impose commuter taxes (even require visas!) for those coming to work in our city from foreign lands like Maryland and Virginia. Sure, we'd have to contend with the US government, which would not take kindly to our declaring that we, too, have inalienable rights. They might even quash our independence movement and set up a colonial governing structure in our backyard, with Congress controlling most aspects of our lives. Oh, wait, that's what we already have.

###############

High DC Officials/Non-Investors
Ted Gest, tgest@sas.upenn.edu

Back to the long-running saga of Mayor Williams' not owning a house in DC. He was asked about it in a Washington Post interview published July 17. The answer: “Don't ask me that question. I don't have a satisfactory answer [ http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A56486-2003Jul14.html ].”  Huh? Tens of thousands of us have taken time out of our busy lives to buy property in the District. I can't imagine why District loyalists are putting up with a mayor in his fifth year in office who apparently can't find a satisfactory place to buy. What is the message to potential DC homeowners?

Now we have another case in point: the United States Attorney for DC, a former Kansan named Roscoe Howard, tells the Washington City Paper that he lives in Fairfax. His reason? He doesn't want his children in the DC schools, “in classes whose uncles I may be charging . . . I don't want to put my kids through that [ http://www.washingtoncitypaper.com/lips/lips.html ].” What does this say about his attitude about DC? (We sent our son to DC schools for fourteen years and don't recall his friends' uncles being charged with crimes.)

###############

Property Tax Legislation
Zinnia, cmszinnia@earthlink.net

Currently there are two bills before the City Council that address how much citizens are taxed for the privilege of owning a house in DC. There is a third bill which deals with the technicality of how real estate is assessed. The first, Bill 15-188, the “Homestead Exemption Amendment Act of 2003,” proposes that the homestead exemption be raised to $100,000. This has the effect of lowering your property taxes by $686 a year.

The second, Bill 15-303 “Owner-Occupant Residential Tax Credit Act of 2003,” would limit the rate of increase in your tax payments. Currently the rate of increase is capped at 25 percent, which is almost meaningless since your tax burden could nearly double in three years. This bill would limit the rate of increase to 10 percent per year, slowing the rate of increase considerably. For a more thorough discussion of this matter consult the Northwest Current dated July 16. Write or E-mail the City Council. Your letters will make a difference. The Council needs to hear from you if they are to overcome opposition from the Mayor, who thinks he has discovered the goose that lays the golden egg in the real estate tax system. You have until July 24 to make your wishes known.

###############

The Office of (Impeding) Local Business Development
Ed Johnson, edward@wdcnet.net

I have a dilemma. But first, I need to recount my experience with the Office of (Impeding) Local Business Development (OLBD) for a little context. I don’t feel emotionally stable enough to go into all the gruesome details of my company’s application for the LSDBE program last year, but here are a few highlights to give you a feel for it. It took quite a few staff hours to prepare and submit the six pound application package, not to mention the attorney fees for having it reviewed. They ask for a lot of stuff, and you just can’t walk into the Office of Tax and Revenue and get a Certificate of Good Standing, you have to fill out a request, pay for it, and come back in a week to get it. If you’re really unlucky, the man working on it will die at his desk and you’ll have to start all over. Once you submit your package to OLBD, they send you parts of it back thanking you, and send you a letter the next week telling you your application is incomplete because it's missing the document they mailed back to you the week before.

On and on it goes, until I lose patience and send the City Council a letter detailing the incompetence I’ve been subjected to. Thanks to Mr. Fenty in particular, I get a call from the OLBD Director in July of 2002 promising a temporary letter of certification, which actually arrived in late September. That was the last I ever heard until this week. I don’t give up on many things, but even activist pit bulls get worn down eventually. This week, OLBD called me to renew. Since I never got certified, I told them I had no intention of sending them a postcard, let alone any more documents. They called back and asked for about forty pages of tax returns, since the ones I had on file were over a year old by now. They got a little huffy when I said no. I could order a hair shirt to wear for less time and money and get the same joy out of it as dealing with the OLBD, and I wasn’t about to start this all over again, so I asked for my application to be withdrawn. With any luck, they might lose the whole thing.

So, as an ANC Commissioner, I want to support the inclusion of LSDBE hiring in projects that come to us, but as a local small business owner, I wouldn't wish the application process on even the most community unfriendly of land-use attorneys I’ve met. And if it weren't my tax dollars I would find this funny: The Office of Local Business Development Certification Division has a $93,666/year position open (for agency employees only since you must need special training for this) for a Supervisory Business Certification Specialist whose duties include “increas[ing] the number of contractors participating in the Local, Small and Disadvantaged Business Enterprises (LSDBE) programs.”

###############

DC Teachers’ Raise is Axed
Toby Doloboff, toby1414@aol.com

The School Board just voted, in a budget cutting measure, to ax the previously negotiated 9 percent teachers' pay raise slated to go into effect on October of this year. This news is very disheartening to DC teachers. Many of us work in appalling conditions yet continue to stay in DC and not defect to the suburbs where pay and working conditions are so much better.

I've been working summer school, where it took us weeks into the six-week program to get supplies and instructional materials. I've made numerous trips to Kinko's to get copies so that my students would have worksheets in lieu of texts. No matter what the press may lead the public to believe, we are dedicated; and now we will be stabbed in the back with our promised raise struck down.

###############

Finding Funding for DC Public Schools by Biting Bullets
Len Sullivan, lsnarpac@bellatlantic.net

The current fracas over funding levels for DC public schools is an embarrassing demonstration of DC's inability to develop sensible solutions to its own problems by looking at national, or better yet, urban norms and trends. The same GAO report that purports to justify a billion-dollar structural imbalance largely because we are spending $700 million a year too little on the DC police department also asserts we are paying just about the right amount on public education. This report and the methodology behind it, so lavishly praised by DC's CFO, do not deal at all with performance measures or with particular jurisdictional inefficiencies. My organization, NARPAC, thinks DC needs a more analytical approach to financial responsibility than begging to get hooked on federal subsidies.

It does not take a rocket scientist (as I once was) to find other useful data in readily available statistics: 1) DCPS is currently holding somewhere between 25 and 40 old school properties not now used by the school system, according to DCPS facilities documents. With an average of 5 acres each, those properties could be sold for perhaps $300 million and subsequently developed at moderate density to generate $150-$200 million annually in city revenues. 2) DCPS currently operates roughly 30 percent more separate schools per kid than the average of twenty urban school districts in cities of comparable size and better scores, according to NCES. By raising school size (not class size), another forty or so school properties also become available for sale and private development (as above). 3) On average, schools with more than 600 kids rather than more than 400 kids achieve $1000-2000 lower annual operating costs per kid, equating to some $100 million more to spend on maintenance or salaries (which incidentally, are not now out of line with those other urban jurisdictions, according to the Bureau of Labor Standards). 4) New schools now cost about $40,000 per kid, according to DCPS facilities planners. Planning for a future school enrollment of 55,000 rather than an unrealistic 75,000 could reduce capital expenditure demands by $800 million. And, 5) whether concerned people want to hear it or not, the (lousy) reading performance of DC's average public school kid is right on trend line when compared to the average educational level of the average urban parent(s). Marginal dollars spent to rectify the scandalous educational shortfalls of functionally illiterate moms (or dads, if around) will go much further over a lifetime than pumping those dollars into the classroom. DC can solve its own public school problems, as well as its self-perpetuating "cycle of poverty," with enlightened and disciplined local leadership.

###############

Thief: Nicely Dressed Middle-Aged White Female with Flower Vase
Phil Carney, Dupont Circle, philandscoop@yahoo.com

Steve and I had another of our urban gardening misadventures with the triangle park just east of Dupont Circle. Last year we never knew how our lilies looked because someone stole all of them when they first bloomed. This year our neighborhood enjoyed the spectacular lilies for a week before an unknown someone stole many of them. Then a friend told us that he was in the Circle and, “Saturday morning, I saw a nicely dressed youngish middle aged white woman carrying a vase. She walked into the flowers and picked the lilies till her vase was full and then she walked off with her new bouquet.” Unfortunately, the friend did not have a cell phone or follow the woman. So now, we have one white lily and two buds left; guess she did not like white.

We expect some urban problems like earlier this week when someone defecated on the edge of the park (dogs do not use toilet paper) and one evening I yelled at a guy to not urinate in the park. However, we do not expect neighbors to steal flowers meant for everyone to enjoy.

###############

Using the District’s Services
Ed T. Barron, edtb@aoldotcom

On a warm summer day you can count on Turtle Park (on Van Ness Street, NW) being thronged with kids and either their moms or their nannies. On summer Saturdays it the daddies' turn with the kids. And on special occasions, like last Tuesday's annual ice cream social, there was a big crowd of about 300 folks, almost half of them kids below six years old. Entertainment was provided by the popular Oh Susannah folks singers, and there was enough ice cream for the Third Infantry Battalion. Lots of the nannies and moms walk to the park, since AU Park has a ton of little folks living in that community. There are enough strollers there these days to warrant valet parking.

But lots of folks drive to the park, too. It's kind of interesting on any of these summer days to take a look at the license plates of the many cars parked all along the streets adjacent to Turtle Park. Almost half of these cars bear license plates from Maryland, with an occasional Virginia plate. I am sure that if the DC public school system could ever figure out how many students are really in the schools, and where they really live, we'd find that many of the students in Pre-K and K classes and those using special ed monies don't really live in DC.

###############

Another Problem, Another Solution
Tolu Tolu, tolu2books@aol.com

Problem: the DC Council and Mayor Williams continuously screw the citizens who give them their jobs. Solution: stop voting for them.

###############

New Ward 7 List Serv
P. Chittams, pchittams@yahoo.com

There is a now a Ward 7 List Serv. To subscribe, send an E-mail to Ward7-subscribe@yahoogroups.com. To unsubscribe, send an E-mail to Ward7-unsubscribe@yahoogroups.com. To post messages, you have to be a member of the list serv. Send messages to Ward7@yahoogroups.com.

###############

Mind Your Own Business
Ed T. Barron, edtb@aoldotcom

That's my advice to Senator Hatch from Utah, who wants the gun control law repealed in DC. Why, in God's name, does Hatch think he can override what the DC voters have enacted here in the District? I think it is time for retaliation. Eleanor Holmes Norton should propose legislation in Congress that would ban the use of privies in Utah. Now that should raise quite a stink in Utah.

###############

Bars on Windows
Alan Heymann, Columbia Heights, alan@alanheymann.com

I had an similar experience [to P. Chittams, themail, July 17] when my wife and I refinanced our loan with E-Loan. We got all the way through the process before the underwriter put the brakes on, saying their policy was that bars on windows without a way to release them from the inside could be a fire hazard, so they would not underwrite the loan until the bars were removed or quick-releases were installed. Needless to say, this was about a week before the loan was supposed to be funded, and such a thing would have cost a lot of money. My house had been recently remodeled, and my original mortgage on it was an FHA-backed loan. These are the people who inspect every corner of your house to make sure it will still be standing when you pay off your loan. Much stricter than E-Loan. Anyway, after going through a couple of rounds with a supervisor (based in California) and convincing her that no, the District of Columbia was not part of Maryland, I got her to agree to underwrite the loan if my window bars were allowable under the city building code.

Off I went to the Washingtoniana collection at the MLK library, and I copied the relevant sections from the building code (which is actually a uniform building code). The code states that quick releases have to be installed on any windows that have bars in a sleeping room on the ground level. Bingo. All of our bedrooms are upstairs; none has bars. The loan was refinanced.

Perhaps if Ms. Chittams pressed Chase for a little more information, they could explain why bars are no good. She could present them with the same argument I used, if their reasons are the same as E-Loan's were.

###############

Junked Car on Capitol Hill
Paul K. Williams, pkelseyw@aol.com

Mark Eckenwiler wrote about his frustrations in getting a junked car removed from near his house. Back in the Barry days, when we had a few abandoned cars a month show up on a vacant former gas station lot at 11th and T Street, NW, somebody in the neighborhood spray painted "Barry's DC" on the sides of the cars. They were gone within a few hours.

###############

Loved the Riff on Being an Expert
Star Lawrence, jkellaw@aol.com

Gary's discussion of his “expert” title handed me a smile. As an employee of a trade association in DC, I was eventually promoted to “assistant legislative counsel.” Since I was not a lawyer, people would ever so politely comment on that from time to time. My answer was, “Yes, it took me six years to get this title. If I had gone to law school it would have taken three.”

###############

themail@dcwatch is an E-mail discussion forum that is published every Wednesday and Sunday. To subscribe, to change E-mail addresses, or to switch between HTML and plain text versions of themail, use the subscription form at http://www.dcwatch.com/themail/subscribe.htm. To unsubscribe, send an E-mail message to themail@dcwatch.com with “unsubscribe” in the subject line. Archives of past messages are available at http://www.dcwatch.com/themail.