Reporting
Dear Reporters:
Yesterday and today, the Washington Post published two good
editorials about the District government’s awarding of grass-cutting
contracts. The editorials were based on original reporting and clearly
implied — came close to directly accusing — the administration of
favoritism and contract steering, http://tinyurl.com/3mhbsuo and http://tinyurl.com/3vqgrxw.
But the editorials are marred by the Post’s bias, its
assumption not just that the Gray administration is riddled with
corruption but also that the Fenty administration was supernaturally
clean and had no serious failings. Several months ago, the Post
had a community meeting in Ward 8 at which Mayor Anthony Williams spoke.
Williams said that he had been unhappy with the Post when it
covered the failings of his administration, but that the Post had
not done Adrian Fenty any favor by treating his mayoralty with kid
gloves and neglecting to report in any depth on his many mistakes. The
overly favorable coverage and lack of critical reporting, Williams said,
gave Fenty an exaggerated sense of invincibility and an exaggerated
estimate of his popularity.
That bias continues to this day. On October 3, the city council held
a hearing on the DC Auditor’s report about Peaceoholics, the group
founded by Ronald Moten and Jauhar Abraham. The audit was a stunner.
Peaceoholics received $13.8 million from seven city agencies and the
semi-independent Children and Youth Investment Corporation between 2005
and 2010, the vast majority from the Fenty Administration. The audit
documented numerous contracts that Peaceoholics received and never
submitted the required reports for. It documented that Peaceoholics did
not file its required Form 990 federal tax returns for nonprofit
organizations. It documented that many of the records that would have
shown how Peaceoholics actually expended the money from its government
grants were missing and could not be located.
Councilmember Jim Graham, chairman of the Committee on Human
Services, did not try to hide his prejudice. Speaking to Ron Moten, he
said, “I’m speaking as your admirer.” He did not try to press
Moten or Abraham on their missing 990 reports, and let Moten claim that
Peaceoholics was up to date on its reports without contradiction or
questioning. He blamed city agencies and city bureaucrats for
Peaceoholics’ failure to file the required performance reports with
them, and said that the agencies should have given Peaceoholics more
help with their reports. He claimed that the many missing financial
records that Peaceoholics failed to produce simply showed that there was
no evidence that Peaceoholics misused any money. And then he let Moten
turn the hearing into a political rally against Gray. Moten claimed that
all the problems that Peaceoholics have had, and all the questions that
arose about the organization, came about because Vincent Gray hated him
personally. Moten spoke directly to Gray through the camera, saying, “God
is going to strike you down.” And though the hearing was reported by
the Washington Times and Washington Examiner (http://tinyurl.com/43mxkmx,
http://tinyurl.com/4y73r5o),
the Washington Post didn’t publish a word about it online or in
its print edition.
Nevertheless, the Gray administration hasn’t done itself any favors
with the grass cutting story, and instead has mishandled it with rank
amateurism. Although the Gray administration was aware of the story
several days in advance, the Mayor’s Chief of Staff, Christopher
Murphy, didn’t reach out to knowledgeable sources within the
administration for facts to try to explain or rebut the story. He didn’t
even inform the mayor’s communications office that the story was
coming. Instead, after the first editorial was published he scheduled a
conference call for himself with a number of reporters and bawled them
out angrily for their coverage about the Gray administration, singling
out the Post’s editorial board for special attention. He
continued scolding reporters with ever-increasing anger before catching
himself and trying to put everything he had said off the record
retroactively. Murphy, who was brought into the Gray administration
recently to provide it with a fresh start and to address its management
problems, has instead shown a talent only for alienating potential
allies.
Gary Imhoff
themail@dcwatch.com
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Mowing the Yawn
Jason Lee Bakke, jlbiad@gmail.com
That a small grass contract is consuming so much mindspace is what
turns people off about local politics. According to the Post
yesterday, October 5, “[Mary] Cheh said it did not appear that the
Gray administration did anything ‘illegal’ but worries there could
have been ‘undue’ influence exerted to cancel Lorenz’s contract.”
Whether it’s legal or not, the mayor’s spending any time on a
tiny lawn-care contract reflects terrible judgment. Twitter will soon be
ablaze with live tweets from a council hearing on another scandal of
very little consequence. What changes? Not the major issues the city
faces.
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Recently while waiting with a client in a DCPS principal’s office,
I overheard a parent pleading with an assistant principal for help for
her child. The child was not learning. The assistant principal informed
the distraught parent that the child was not learning because the child
had an incompetent teacher last year. The parent was treated as though
she were to blame for the incompetent teacher, and thus for her child’s
lack of success.
After I had addressed my client’s concerns, I questioned the
principal whether my client’s child also had an incompetent teacher. I
was told the incompetent teacher referred to by the assistant principal
was in another jurisdiction. I do not know the veracity of that
statement. However, I do know that I heard no expression of concern nor
offer of assistance for the child or her distraught parent. I do know
that that assistant principal had a duty to help, no matter what
jurisdiction failed the child last year. That did not happen.
Is this Michelle Rhee’s real legacy to the District?
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DPW To Observe Columbus Day, Monday, October
10
Kevin B. Twine, kevin.twine@dc.gov
The DC Department of Public Works announced today how services will
be affected in observance of Columbus Day, Monday, October 10. There
will be no trash and recycling collections. Trash and recycling
collections will slide to the next day for the remainder of the week.
For example, Monday’s trash and recycling collections will be made
Tuesday, and Tuesday’s collections will be made Wednesday. In
neighborhoods with twice-weekly trash collections, Monday and Thursday
collections will be made Tuesday and Friday. Collections normally made
Tuesday and Friday will be made Wednesday and Saturday. Trash and
recycling containers should be placed out for collection no earlier than
6:30 p.m. the night before collection and removed from public space by
8:00 p.m. on the day(s) of collection.
Parking enforcement, including ticket writing for residential
parking, expired meters, street sweeping, and rush-hour violations, will
be suspended. DPW will enforce parking restrictions at bus stops near
Metro stations where WMATA is performing track work. DPW also will
suspend towing abandoned vehicles. Enforcement will resume Tuesday,
October 11. The Ft. Totten Transfer Station, 4900 John F. McCormack
Road, NE, will be closed Monday, October 11, to residential customers
and will reopen Tuesday, October 11. Except holidays, residents may
bring their trash and bulk items weekdays (1:00 p.m. to 5:00 p.m.) and
Saturdays (8:00 a.m. to 3:00 p.m.) to Ft. Totten for disposal. The next
monthly household hazardous waste/e-cycling/shredding drop-off day is
Saturday, November 5, from 8:00 a.m. to 3:00 p.m. This service is
provided the first Saturday of the month, except holidays. Residents may
bring unwanted toxic items, such as pesticides, batteries, and motor
oil. Electronics, including televisions, computers, and cell phones,
also will be accepted. Residents may bring up to five boxes of personal
paper documents and credit cards to be shredded for free. For a complete
list of items, go to http://www.dpw.dc.gov
and click on Household Hazardous Waste / E-Cycling / Shredding. Compost
also is available to residents on Saturdays only.
To accommodate residents whose religious beliefs prevent them from
bringing toxic and electronic items to the regularly scheduled drop-off
held the first Saturday of the month, DPW will accept these items at Ft.
Totten Transfer Station on Thursday, October 6, and Thursday, November
3, between 1:00 p.m. and 7:00 p.m. DPW cannot accept items for shredding
on Thursdays because the Department cannot protect these documents until
the shredding contractor arrives the first Saturday of the month.
Directions to Ft. Totten, 4900 John F. McCormack Road, NE: travel east
on Irving Street, NW, turn left on Michigan Avenue, turn left on John F.
McCormack Road, NE, and continue to the end of the street. Other
services suspended for Labor Day include scheduled street and alley
cleaning and nuisance abatement. All services will resume Tuesday,
October 11.
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Advisory Neighborhood Commission Redistricting
(Continued)
Jack McKay, jack.mckay@verizon.net
The ward task forces are finishing up their recommendations for ANC
redistricting, to be delivered next week to the District Council. This
was an agonizing job in Ward One, due to an extraordinarily poorly
written law and Office of Planning guidance that failed to recognize the
arithmetic consequences of its extreme interpretation of that law.
The DC Code says, awkwardly, this: “Each single member district
shall have a population of approximately 2,000 people, and shall be as
nearly equal as possible.” This doesn’t say that the populations
must be equal to two thousand, but that’s the interpretation made by
the Office of Planning, calling for all SMDs to be within one hundred
residents of that two thousand target. Furthermore, does “as nearly
equal as possible” mean within an ANC, or within a ward, or everywhere
in the District? The OP again takes the most extreme interpretation:
every single-member district (SMD), everywhere in DC, from Congress
Heights to Chevy Chase, is to hit this 1900-2100 target, albeit with
some provision for exceptions.
Nobody thought, it seems, about the arithmetic consequences of this
SMD population decree. An ANC must be composed of a certain number of
these two thousand-population SMDs, meaning that the population of an
ANC had better be an integral multiple of two thousand, or this won’t
come out even. If the ANC population isn’t a neat multiple of two
thousand, as is commonly the case, then residents have to be acquired
from, or sent away to, an adjacent ANC to make the numbers come out
even. As one correspondent wrote, “Those [ANC] boundaries will need to
change so that the given rules will work. This is what has been done by
every ward task force every ten years.” Very well, but that’s why
our task force spent virtually all of its time debating ANC boundaries,
and very little on where to put SMD lines. As for the residents so
rudely bumped from one ANC to another, well, yes, they do mind, and they
frequently refuse to go. Then what? This redistricting process doesn’t
work because its priorities are backwards. What should matter for an ANC
is not the precise population of the SMDs, but the neighborhood. (Yes,
that’s what the “N” stands for.) Suppose we take “approximately
2000” to be as flexible as the word “approximately” implies.
Consider Mount Pleasant, for example, population 10,459, or five and
one-quarter two thousand-population SMDs, a problem that could be solved
the OP way only by hijacking a few thousand residents from adjacent
Adams Morgan. (They refused to go.) Instead, just divvy it up into five
SMDs, average population 2092, which fits my definition of “approximately
two thousand.” Parcel out the census blocks to create SMDs with
populations within the range 1990-2196, meeting the 5 percent equality
criterion within the ANC. Job done, wrap it up and go home, no need to
try to steal residents from adjacent ANCs to get the populations to come
out even. Maybe the District Council could take a moment to rewrite the
redistricting law so that it actually makes sense. Before the 2020
census, please.
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CLASSIFIEDS — EVENTS
Spotlight on Design Lecture with Moshe Safdie,
October 11
Stacy Adamson, sadamson@nbm.org
The National Building Museum presents Moshe Safdie in a Spotlight on
Design presentation, “Moshe Safdie: Symbols in the Public Realm.” In
this exclusive appearance, Moshe Safdie speaks about his work, the ideas
behind it, how it fits into the contemporary practice of architecture,
and its implications beyond the field. The acclaimed architect explores
creating vital public spaces, capturing the essence of place, and
building with a purpose through recent and upcoming projects, including
the United States Institute of Peace in Washington, DC; the Kauffman
Center for the Performing Arts in Kansas City, Missouri; and Marina Bay
Sands Integrated Resort in Singapore, among others.
Tuesday, October 11, 6:30-8:00 p.m., at the National Building Museum,
401 F Street, NW (Judiciary Square Metro, Red Line). $12 members, $10
students, $20 nonmembers. Prepaid registration required. Walk-in
registration based on availability.
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CLASSIFIEDS — DONATIONS
Donations for Earthquake Repairs to DC
Affordable Housing Co-Op for Activists
Parisa Norouzi, parisa@empowerdc.org
Many thanks to those who alerted us about problems with the online
giving site last week [themail, September 25]. Everything is fixed now.
Donations of any amount are appreciated at http://www.gofundme.com/7rvoo?r=3696
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