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Last Updated: 2000 December 17th! Want to jump to the most recent entry?
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Welcome to Washington. You've always wanted to come here, and now here you are! Or maybe you're here.
SECTION 8 The Congress shall have Power .... (17)To exercise exclusive Legislation in all Cases whatsoever, over such District (not exceeding ten Miles square) as may, by Cession of particular States, and the Acceptance of Congress, become the Seat of the Government of the United States, and to exercise like Authority over all Places purchased by the Consent of the Legislature of the State in which the Same shall be, for the Erection of Forts, Magazines, Arsenals, dock-Yards, and other needful Buildings;
-And;
(18) To make all Laws which shall be necessary and proper for carrying into Execution the foregoing Powers, and all other Powers vested by this Constitution in the Government of the United States, or in any Department or Officer thereof.
- Constitution of the United States, Article I
First, we wish everyone a Happy New Year, and New Century, and wish first to note that we are now compliant with HTML 4.0 Transitional, and all dates will be in ANSI standard, year, month, and day.
We are also going to the "bigger text" format to make this page even easier to read, and if you came here from our Earth Operations Central Portal Page, you're seeing it in the "big book" format, also to improve your reading experience. Major use will be made of linking to pop-up windows so that you may continue to read and research here while the linked pages load into the popups in the background. We are not responsible for the content nor for any advertising at any pages off of this site. We have also tried to make this site amenable to all browsers of all levels, although we prefer to use the latest Netscape.
Our New Years Resolution is to try to be a bit more diligent about reporting breaking news as well as maintaining this ongoing history, and to try to dig a little more deeply into matters which appear to be tangential to this history and the breaking news, yet which will be seen after time as less tangential, and more fundamental.
1999 was originally expected to be a year of massive change, of a grave new spirit of unity and dedicated undertakings, and as a general rule, it just didn't happen.
There have in fact been marked improvements since Mayor Anthony A. Williams was sworn into his first term of office one year ago. As per his campaign pledges, he did in fact create "one-stop shops" for many of the District Government's agencies. As advertised, the city did not grind to a stop at midnight 2000 January 1. Many of the services delivered to the residents by the government have in fact improved. Where once there was attached to any dealings with the District a certain je ne sais quoi generally summarized as "bleak", "dismal", "byzantine" or more-commonly "surreal in the disorganization and general third-worldliness", one can now call a central number and have your telephone inquiries directed to the appropriate agency by competent and helpful computer-equipped operators. Webpages for various city agencies came online, some of them actually with decent infosystem rationale and architecture. Earth Operations Central remains, however, the only search-engine which indexes all of them weekly and permits you to search the content of all known DC Government sites from one location; that is the search-engine in the little pop-up window to the right of your screen. If you don't have that little window, get a new web-browser, or to search, go here. If you have the window, please leave it there, many links from this page will cause search-results to appear in that window.
Some things have still not changed. And Washington -- despite the best efforts of a fine accounting and fiscal planning team, and despite massive infusions of Federal assistance either handed over on a silver platter, or waiting in the wings should anyone bother to apply for a grant -- still sucks.
To be sure, Washington does not suck like dracula. Since the DCFRA Control Board and the suddenly-sane voters saw the exit door slam shut on the departing backside of former Mayor Marion Barry and his pack of tramps, Washington has not sucked like dracula. Washington does however suck like a cheap tart at the docks on payday... mostly harmless, could be fun, and making lots of money... but still sucking. Why, you will ask, does Washington still suck! I'm not paying my taxes so that my nation's capital sucks! Tell me why Washington sucks and I'll get on the phone to my congressperson and raise hell about it, you say, and you are well to do so. But at this point in time, there's just not much more that Congress can do. It is up to the people of Washington, and the surrounding region which is very much a part of any problems or solutions, to do something about that damned sucking sound that you can hear all of the way outside the Beltway.
And now for the last year in summary. While Washington may in fact suck like a cheap tart, she's actually getting to be a fairly cute cheap tart these days, and shows erratic fits of something like responsibility. Saves some of her money now and then, but she's still rude to the homeless and kicks the mentally-deficient and seems to just plain hate kids...
Regionally, things couldn't be much better.
Continued unprecedented prosperity continued throughout 1999, with major construction starts commonplace in Northern Virginia, especially near Dulles Airport and in the rest of Loudon County. Also, new construction has been occurring in neighboring Maryland, although a wise policy of "Smart Growth" has in fact been the rule and much of the construction going on in Maryland amounts to filling in the gaps within urban and suburban bounds, and recycling and revitalization, such as the project to revitalize the decrepit former urban core of Silver Spring Maryland, at present mostly a crossroads that most people are anxious to drive through while headed elsewhere.
Northern Virginia's astounding growth is largely fueled by the burgeoning InterNet industries, making the Dulles Airport region "Silicon Valley East". In Montgomery County Maryland, there is astounding growth in research and development of hightech medical and especally bioengineering technology.
The Greater Washington Metropolitan Region leads the nation in traffic congestion. It's not the number one offender, but it's in the top four, with traffic getting worse every day. At long last the final go-ahead has been received for the long-overdue Woodrow Wilson Bridge replacement span, which will be ten lanes of traffic with two additional lanes for pedestrians and cyclists. It will be several years, probably no sooner than 2004, before this opens, probably just in time as the present crossing is literally falling apart before our very eyes.
The Region desperately needs new major arteries, particularly to the west of the District. The economic twin giants of Maryland and Virginia -- centered around Dulles Airport VA and the Rockville-Germantown MedTech corridor along I-270 in Maryland -- stand back to back, facing away from each other and unable to work cooperatively, with interstate trade strangling on the traffic congestion engendered by the sole trans-Potomac link suitable for heavy shipping, at Cabin John, the American Legion Bridge. Once, the entire region was essentially shut down for a day when a tractor-trailer jacknifed on that bridge, underscoring the need for a farther-western crossing, but a decade later nothing has been done to even plan for, although at least the subject has been raised regarding, a Rockville to Reston "Techway". Also, within Maryland, the long-planned "Intercounty Connector ("ICC")" between I-270 and I-95 aligned roughly from Rockville to Laurel was scotched by Maryland Governor Parris Glendenning, ensuring him of a resounding defeat in the next elections, although it remains possible that the citizens of Maryland will in fact publicly at last demonstrate to the rest of the nation that they are as completely insane as I have long alleged, by returning him to office.
Glendenning's support for quashing new major arterials comes largely from extremists in the environmentalist activist leagues, with which Liberal Democratic Montgomery County Maryland seethes. Yet despite their best efforts to transform the jurisdiction into the People's Republic of Montgomery, there are yet forces of common sense which have learned to work with Conservative Conservationists who, while committed to making the rivers and streams safe for trout and trout-fishermen, are also committed to ensuring that you can drive your car down to the lake and get a hook into the water. Regional cooperation on the environment has had some major success stories within the last year, most notably the record catches and marine populations in the lower Potomac River and the continued improvement of the Chesapeake Bay. There have been fairly spectacular near-failures as well, notably in the area of water-conservation. A long-term drought forced water-conservation measures regionally last year, and though the weather has again dampened somewhat, still we are expecting a repeat of last year's crop-withering droughts, and agreements are not yet finalized regarding a regional water authority. Presumably they'll have gotten together before the summer's drought begins.
Mayor Anthony A. Williams, formerly that nice young man with the bow-tie in accounting, was drafted to run for Mayor in 1998 by a citizens' committee hastily assembled after a clandestine 1997 pizza-parlor meeting of the recipients of a political e-mail discussion list. Soundly defeating his rivals (some of whom were and are on the DC Council), Mr Williams rode into office on his reputation of tightening budgets, cutting out deadwood, and a promise of reform reform reform.
Mayor Williams has in fact done wonders with reorganizing the top layers of the District government. Yet he has been dogged every step of the way by many factors, not the least of which has been the fact that he was an accountant, and not a politician. There has been constant conflict with the DC Council, which is in fact comprised of career politicians, some of whom are very astute and who may still be a bit miffed at not being Mayor.
There were astounding fits of backbiting and ankle-gnawing throughout all of 1999, which began with some wag in the DC government attempting to resurrect the favorite gem of the Barry Administration, playing the race card by asking the question in the Washington Post's editorial section as to whether or not the Mayor was "black enough". This was further compounded by a January flap in which one of the Mayor's aides was "insensitive" enough, within the context of budget discussions, to use "niggardly" instead of "penurious" and thus insulted the entirety of the District's (majority) black populace. This was of course rapidly exploited by the forces of division, insulting the intelligence of every non-racist who knew how to use a dictionary and graduated from a highschool without social-promotion policies.
Further troubles developed when, shortly after clearing out a lot of weeds and footdraggers from within the middle layers of the top-heavy District bureaucracy, the Mayor's office was accused of being "insular" and "nonresponsive to public access requests". The Mayor responded by getting out of the office more frequently, and by year's end had arranged a " Citizen's Summit for Neighborhood Action" which invited 3000 of the city's residents and employees to sit down and work things out for 8 hours, regarding what they wanted the Mayor to do. That turned out to be the best organized, orchestrated, technologized (and catered -- yum) exercise in electronic democracy of which I've ever heard, much less attended. The results will soon be released publically. The Mayor was in fact rather shocked to discover that "government that works" came in last on the list of concerns and desires. Our explanation is that for so long so many of the District's residents had received such lousy service from the local Government that they have no idea that such improvements as have been made (astounding, really) are nowhere near the level possible.
The Mayor has also come under fire, heavy at times, from the DC Council, which has occasionally dug its claws into the rug and has had to be dragged out backwards, hissing all of the way. Also, after his proposals to require most management in the city government to re-apply for their jobs and compete against outsource private-industry competition for their tasks, almost the entire government bureaucracy has begun to sharpen their figurative daggers for his back. He was able to convince some of the Union employees to accept his proposal -- one of the keynotes of his campaign and an excellent one -- by offering bonuses amounting to back-pay for all of the non-raises and even pay-cuts they've had to take in the recent years of budgetary collapse. The DC Council led the Mayor on a merry chase after the final funding to deliver the bonuses, proposed in 1999 January, by Christmastime.
Also with a bone to pick with Mister Mayor has been the University of the District of Columbia. This once (unjustifiably) proud institution, located in NorthWest Washington, is the District's only public four-year university. However, it has for years been plagued by declining enrollment, declining funding, mismanagement, infrastructure degradation, and poor ratings of the quality of its graduates. Among other proposals, and as part of an effort to revitalize moribund Anacostia, Mayor Williams proposed relocating UDC east of the Anacostia River to become a major element in a core of city offices and educational campi. Mayor Williams was then hit with accusation that he was not-only not black enough, but was essentially a patsy for The Man and The Man's Plan to make NorthWest Washington "whites-only". The Mayor, who probably doesn't have a racist bone in his body, was apparently so flustered by this astounding accusation that he has done essentially nothing to address any issues pertaining to UDC since that time, allowing his mandate to appoint new members of the Board for UDC to slip until the last minute. Then, in a move commonly -- and generally privately and confidentially -- described as "quite mad", aside from nominating the reputable and excellent Reginald E. Gilliams Jr, Charles J. Ogletree Jr, and Mark Palmer to the board, the Mayor apparently either forgot or remembered-all-too-well the treatment he'd received from UDC earlier in the year and in the final days of 1999 nominated the Reverend Willie Wilson to the UDC board. The DC Council was mightily displeased.
The Reverend Willie Wilson of the Union Temple Baptist Church in SouthEast Washington, is pastor over a flock some 6500 strong, and is in fact a strong community leader, organizing outreach to drug-addicts, homeless and working-poor, and a tireless worker in trying to bring more structure to the lives of at-risk youth. However, in a city famous for racially-divisive politicking, Rev. Wilson is something of a legend. If I recall correctly, this is the man who once called former DCFRA Control Board Chairman Andrew F. Brimmer a "hankie head", thus alluding that he was a favor-currying house negro lackeying for The Man and "that foolish negro at the top" when the Control Board took over from the doomed Barry Administration Regime. However, in modern and enlightened Washington, several years after that nearly-revolutionary highly charged moment, it has been observed from many quarters that, in the words of Ward 8 Democrat Party Chairman Phil Pannell, "... it seems as if anyone who is black makes pronouncements that are very beneficial for black people in a passionate manner gets construed as being divisive... I just hope it's not coming from a prejudicial point of view". In 1986 Reverend Wilson noted his Christian forgiveness of an Asian store owner who had brandished a gun at a black customer, by stating "...[i]f we didn't forgive him, we would have cut his head off and rolled it down the street."
Calling Wilson's nomination to the board "racially divisive, in and of itself, Ward 3 Democrat Kathy Patterson joined at-large Republican Carol Schwartz in the only DC Council votes against Wilson's nomination to the board on 2000 January 4. The new board members filling vacancies on the 15-member panel are:
Mayor Williams has also been having less than perfect success in the District Schools. The School Board itself has had some difficulties, with some fairly astounding catfights midyear resulting in a Board that essentially cannot agree on whether or not the air is breathable and the sun rises in the east or for that matter if gravity works. Certainly gravity is a bit beyond them, as is decorum and functionality. They did however elect a new president, Robert G. Childs (at-large), who is also president of Berean Baptist church, and elected as vice-president was William Lockridge, of Ward 8.
Mayor Williams has proposed that he should have the power to hire and fire the Supervisor, or at least have the School Board placed under his authority to appoint or dismiss (with or without a check and balance from the DC Council) and largely the Council is having none of it.
It is understandable that the Mayor would like to have more direct control of what is happening in the schools, but by all reports, Supervisor Arlene Ackerman is moving heaven and earth to reform the District Schools, which had fallen to such a state that the courts had to order them shut for weeks as a physical danger to the students due to the degree of physical disrepair. Some progress does seem to be being made with bringing academics up to something resembling actual education. Although District students' standardized-test scores remain tied with those of Baltimore City students, for last place nationally, there was a sufficient rise in the raw numbers this last year to give reason to state that progress has been made. However, Special-Education remains the bloated tick on the dog that you just can't yank right off without killing the hound. Things are far from allright as it was only recently discovered that the contractor providing bussing services for special education was less than diligent in ferreting out criminals and dopers from the bus-driver pool. Some 1800 students are being sent to expensive private schools because the District cannot provide the services they need, and some 450 students enrolled in those school are being asked to provide proof of District residency before January 19.
Furthermore, the new automation and financial system for the schools has been doing fairly mad things such as refusing to generate or mail paychecks for most of the teachers.
Moving right along, we note that of the four city agencies under court-ordered receiverships, three appear to be continuing to sink rather than thrive back to health as has the Department of Public Housing under David Gilmore who took it over back in 1995. Gilmore, who came to Washington after working wonders in Seattle, has done wonders with an immensely impressive approach which involves and empowers residents of public housing to restruture and rebuild and manage their own complexes. The DC Council has voted to create a new agency, the DC Housing Authority, which will prepare to assume control of the programs when the receivership ends roughly 2000 July.
And now we come to the source of the immense sucking sound. The DCFRA Control Board was created by an act of Congress, and its members were appointed by President William J. Clinton. By law, after four years of balanced budgets it is to be disbanded. But we see that there is a looming deficit which, predictably, will most impact those who can least afford the impacts.
Considering that the DC Council in its wisdom saw fit to overestimate the financial prosperity of the city and passed a multi-year tax cut of some $134 millions to take effect later this year (the sucking will be louder then), it's small wonder that there will be an estimated $66 millions of budgetary shortfall this year, according to a report filched from the offices of Chief Financial Officer Valerie Holt by the intrepid reporters of the Washington Post.
Technically speaking, the District will in fact be running a balanced budget, rather than spending into deficit it will instead begin reducing services. For some of the seven agencies which are responsible for most of the deficit there is a remedy to be had in the $150 millions "emergency" fund preallocated as a buffer against such eventualities, but by law this funding is not available to the three agencies which are under court-ordered receivership. Those agencies are:
The Department of Corrections, which runs the District's prison system, was revealed in the last year to be riddled with corruption, was alleged by Amnesty International and other rights groups to be openly in the business of selling female prisoners' "favors" as sexual slaves, completely incapable of managing their "halfway houses" -- to the degree that convicted violent felons simply walk away to pursue lives of crime and commit acts of violence, and ran up a $25 million deficit. An Office of Internal Affairs was established to be a watchdog operation in the final days of 1999, to report to Corrections Director Odie Washington. The new warden of City Jail is 17-year veteran Patricia Britton-Jackson.
Child and Family Services has had a dismal year 1999 as well. The District has a very spotty performance at moving children out of foster care and into adoption, and computer problems have been failing to pay some foster-caregivers their payments, and has double-paid others. Record keeping is terrible. The Mayor, who had a major plank in his campaign platform to do with helping children be safe and secure -- which should be further reinforced by the fact that the number one concern of the Citizen's Summit was children and safety -- really needs to get on the ball with this issue. He has appointed one Carolyn N. Graham to be the Deputy Mayor for Children to oversee the agencies dealing with children and youth.
Part of the problem with getting on top of programs caring for the defenseless is that having taken strides to improve the financial flowcharts of various agencies, almost no internal government activity has been undertaken to punch downward through the layers of bureaucracy to see how services are actually delivered. Nowhere is this more the case than in the "services" delivered to the people who are least in position to complain about it. For instance, a Washington Post investigative series revealed that over the last decade or so, literally scores of mentally retarded persons died under the aegis of the District government, which had essentially paid people to take care of the retarded and then never bothered to do much followup. "Caregivers" turned out to be drug dealers, scammers, completely-unqualified, physically abusive, or simply uncaring. Steps are being taken, it is said, to remedy the situation. We will keep you posted.
Back to that sucking sound you hear, interspersed with the sounds of kicking, screaming and insane babbling... The Commission of Mental Health services closed out last year with a few appearances in court wherein the receivers were asked exactly what they were doing for the mentally-ill of Washington and they essentially said nothing, rather than saying "nothing". Please see last year's page for more details. We note in passing that as a great many of the District's homeless are also its mentally-ill, the projected $5.1 millions shortfall for Mental Health services may be supplimented by President Clinton's promise of $8.7 millions to the District (part of a nationwide $1 billion distribution) earmarked to help the homeless.
Not sucking quite so badly anymore is the District's drug-treatment program, a division of the Department of Public Health. The DPH has a new director, who removed the four top staffers in the treatment program. The program is characterized as, among other deficiencies, being hamstrung by intransigence of city employees in the staff.
In the totally sucking department, in the last year, the District remained absolutely (and by far) dead last nationwide in the Welfare-to-Work department and we are now slightly more than halfway through the statutory five-year lifetime limit. I thus predict that in about 2003, the District will have one real big problem on its hands.
And even more sucking is observed in the staggering rents being engendered by the amazing scarcity of rental apartments in the District. Two-bedroom apartments in "fair" condition in tolerable (not good!) neighborhoods are as high as two thousand dollars monthly.
Business is Booming
1999 was something of a feeding frenzy for development in Washington, and for Washington's Developers.
1999 was also the year that the bandages came off of the face-lift.
With the bandages off, that ol' gal Washington doesn't look half bad.
At long last, most construction was completed along the agonizingly tardy MetroRail Green Line. In Columbia Heights, the station is now open and the construction equipment is gone and the lone and level sands stretch far away. At any rate, there is massive vacant property (fenced away from the streetlife) surrounding the new station, and fine new concrete without a pothole in sight greets the eye, instead of a blighted landscape filled with trash cars and furtive denizens plying their respective trades amongst the barricades and in the rubble-filled lots.
Furthermore, those vacant properties are to be developed, and rather lavishly, and to top it off, the rancor which had erupted over the Redevelopment Land Agency's selection of one plan over some others has been resolved with, as we suggested it might be, the relocation of a proposed grocery store to across the street from, instead of built within the facade of, the historic Tivoli Theater.
Downtown, there is massive construction underway, six square blocks north of Mount Vernon Square already cleared and excavated for the foundations of the new Convention Center.
Other new construction is underway along "M" Street SouthEast, in the area between South Capital and the Navy Yard. The Navy Yard is to be the home of a much greater military presence, as NavSea is moving in, as are a large number of Marines who will be building a modern barracks at the site of the old Arthur Capper Dwellings.
Elsewhere in downtown, there is lots of development, redevelopment, and modernization.
The city is being very rapidly wired with fiber-optics.
Thank You Mister Fed! (mostly)
The National Capital Planning Commission released its strategic plan for the next fifty years.
The Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco and Firearms has chosen a site for its new headquarters just south of the intersections of New York and Florida Avenues NorthEast.
New York Avenue is under construction and hopefully will be completed by roughly 2003.
Major bridges are being repaired or rebuilt all over the place.
Tax-delinquent properties have been sold at auction by the city to "homesteaders" who will bring the properties up to code and live there for five years.
The DC Building Inspector's Office is being used to shut down eyesores and dangerous crackhouses all over town. This is definitely not sucking.
Vacant properties are being either demolished or refurbished.
Mayor Williams has proposed placing all of the District government headquarters in the historic Wilson Building downtown, and selling off most other such properties. This does not suck. However, many caution that the Franklin D. Reeves Center at 14th and "U" Streets NW should not be sold off, and with this we agree. The idea is that the District government would be able to use proceeds from the sales to establish a much more distributed neighborhood presence, serving people where they live. This also is the anti-suck.
Noted in passing: the bankrupt Greater Southeast Community Hospital has been sold to Doctors Community Healthcare Inc., of Scottsdale Arizona. 900 jobs have been retained and services will continue to be available to the 100,000 people in the service area.
The District Police have not had quite the banner year expected of them.
In midsummer, epic violence erupted in the 1400 block of Columbia Road NW, due to rivalries between two rival teen Latino gangs based out of, respectively, Park Road and 14th Street NW, and 17th and "R" Streets NW. Police have since increased activities in the area but violence remains recurrent, with a lot of murders centered around the Columbia Heights Metrorail station, cases unclosed so far as I know. Among other things, the city has allocated funding for outreach programs which will convince youth, especially Latino youth, to avoid getting caught up in gangs, and to pursue other and more-beneficial activities leading to a successful life.
Increasingly, according to high police officials, violence has a youthful face. Also, increasingly the face of violence -- and of the victims of violence -- in the region and in the District in particular, is that of a teen girl. And the victims are increasingly younger.
Police Commander Rodney Monroe notes with dismay:
"Everyone talks about boys being changed by the single-parent home. But girls are changed by single-parent homes also... Many of their mothers have to project a tough image to not be taken advantage of. Younger girls may follow that model."
Monroe also unhappily notes that the cultural shift is also increasingly involving young women in dealing drugs. He probably expects to see an increase in the numbers of violent deaths suffered by young women, an expectation borne out in a spate of murders of teens towards the end of 1999.
On the plus side, fatal shootings by police declined 66 precent from 1998. Police Chief Charled H. Ramsey says that increased training and supervision, as well as a new deadly-force policy, are responsible for the reduction.
Welcome back again to the show that never ends, "Welcome to Washington". Come and join our Party. Dress to Kill.
First, the obligatory apologies for making you wait a whole month to get your fix on what's up with Washington. Basically, not all that much happened, and what has happened is essentially a continuation of process; we are in a period not really characterized by starts nor by endings: a thousand eddies swirl through the river of life but taken as a whole, it flows to the sea. This is the nature at present of the Greater Washington Metropolitan Region. There is the occasional foundering of this or that minor vessel upon this or that minor rock, but largely whatever floats one's boat continues onward, as do various projects -- neither is there any great flood through cataracts of note. Yet, as always, one must ask as one observes the apparent placidity, beneath that surface, what mighty currents may roil unseen?
The region's economy remains in excellent condition. In both Maryland and Virginia, massive allocations are being made for capital improvement of roads and bridges, essential in a region which rates among the worst in he nation for genreal traffic congestion, despite an exceptional public transit system, which is beginning to show its age in some of the oldest segments. However, the proposed Intercounty Connector ("ICC") between I-270 and I-95 in Maryland remains essentially a dead issue, although State legislators have proposed legislation which would prevent Montgomery County from selling off land parcels it had acquired for right-of-way. The ICC will have to be built sooner or later, and these rights of way would become essentially unaffordable if they had to be reacquired. In the meantime, the traditionally-underserved east-west routes will be upgraded, in particular MD Route 28 will be widened, which is desperately needed. No serious discussion has been afforded to the concept of a trans-Potomac crossing enabling a so-called "Rockville-Reston TechWay".
In the meantime, we are seeing a strong public consensus throughout the region which is all for establishing limits to growth, or so-called "smart growth". Even as business interests are pushing for the establishment of a rail line to either extend the WMATA "Metro" subway/surface-rail service, or to establish a separate rail service connecting to Metro, said line serving the Tyson's Corner and Dulles/Reston areas. This is clearly "in the works' and destined to happen. The only question is "when and exactly where". Also "in the works", it would appear that open-spaces proponents will be working with local Virginia governments to establish a fund for purchasing land to be set-aside as parks or greenbelts, to preserve said open spaces and wooded areas against future development. In Charles County Maryland, new housing starts near overcrowded schools have been severely restricted. Charles County is Maryland's fastest-growing county.
Reform proceeds apace in the District, unsurprisingly slowly.
First and foremost, we are dissatisfied with the pace. But as with any ship, the ship of state must proceed with all deliberate speed. Again we note that most of the visible and significant improvements in delivery of services to District residents, or in significant infrastructural remediation, are largely the result of forces set in motion long ago, as in the completion of several Metrorail station and the restoration of surrounding areas to non-disrupted condition.
Some operations are proving much more recalcitrant and irremmediable than are others. The most troublesome are of course the District Schools. Politics has of course reared its head, with the Mayor seeking the authority to have the School Board be comprised of a body of five appointed professionals, rather than the eleven-member pack of rank amateurs and backbiting political hopefuls consistently chosen by the public under the present electoral system. The DC Council and assorted pundits proceeded to turn what might have been an orderly working out of details, into reportedly a cats-and-dogs free-for-all. After much bickering and posturing by all involved parties, a compromise was reached whereby the one political strategy guaranteed to be successful in District politics was adopted: stalling for an opportunity to pass the buck. The mechanism selected was to put a question on the ballot and put it to the voters, as to whether or not they'd prefer the school board to be elected. We guarantee that this will be the fastest way for the Mayor to assure that the school board remains elected... but the problem here is that it won't be fast -- it couldn't take effect until roughly 2000 December or 2001 January -- and that is the crux of the matter.
We are as a nation concerned greatly about the future prospects of the District of Columbia. The residents of the District of Columbia often claim to have the greatest respect, and desire, for Democracy. But what has been their experience of it?
I now will give you Livy, on the early Roman Republic, and I do feel that it should be easy for anyone who has followed recent District history to see the parallels:
"The hard-won liberty of Rome was rendered the more welcome, and the more fruitful, by the character of the last king, Tarquin the Proud. Earlier kings may all be considered, not unjustly, to have contributed to the city's growth, making room for an expanding population, for the increase of which they, too, were responsible. They were all, in their way, successive 'founders' of Rome. Moreover it cannot be doubted that Brutus, who made for himself so great a name by the expulsion of Tarquin, would have done for his country the greatest disservice, had he yielded too soon to his passion for liberty and forced the abdication of any of the previous kings. One has but to think of what the populace was like in those days -- a rabble of vagrants, mostly runaways and refugees -- and to ask what would have happened if they had suddenly found themselves protected from all authority by inviolable sanctuary, and enjoying complete freedom of action, if not full political rights. In such circumstances, unrestrained by the power of the throne, they would, no doubt, have set sail on the stormy sea of democratic politics, swayed by the gusts of popular eloquence and quarelling for power with the governing class of a city which did not even belong to them, before any real sense of community had had time to grow. That sense -- the only true patriotism -- comes slowly and springs from the heart: it is founded upon respect for the family and love of the soil. Premature 'liberty' of this kind would have been a disaster: we should have been torn to pieces by petty squabbles before we had ever reached political maturity, which, as things were, was made possible by the long quiet years under monarchical government; for it was that government which, as it were, nursed our strength and enabled us ultimately to produce sound fruit from liberty, as only a politically adult nation can.
The government of the District of Columbia is in no way politically adult. We see this in the "compromise" presently obtaining between the Council and the Mayor. What the District Schools need, and need now, is more professionalism. They have a great deal of professionalism present in the person of Superintendent Arlene Ackerman -- over whose office the Mayor sought from the Council, and received, the right to directly appoint or dismiss -- and the District's schoolchildren deserve even more professionalism in the form of a schoolboard which is at-least half-comprised of professionals whose concern is the education of children, not political grandstanding.
This tactic of "let the people decide" is simply a stall, and a passing of the buck. We need a decision and we need it now. If, to extract the clear metaphor from Livy, above, the DCFRA Control Board prematurely yields too soon to their passion for liberty (yes, Dr.Rivlin, I'm talking to you) there will in fact be exactly what we presently see on this School Board issue: petty squabbles will incapacitate the city government and whatever gains have been made under DCFRA oversight will rapidly erode, leaving the city ripe for another such as Marion Barry and his Barry-Cronies(tm) "administration".
We note with extreme trepidation that the city appears to be able to make four straight years of balanced budgets. In 2002, with the completion of the fourth year, by law, the DCFRA Control board will be disempowered and disbanded. Our reason for concern is that this is the exact same time when the five-year lifetime Welfare benefit will be reached by a very large percentage of the District's poor. We have increasingly grave reservations regarding the stability and ability to function of the District government under the impact upon it of nearly 100,000 untrained, uneducated, inexperienced single parents with absolutely no income and no insurance.
Noted in passing, the Mayor has earmarked $25 millions for improvements of District playgrounds and other recreational facilities.
Moving right along, during the later weeks of January, we had snow.
Ordinarily, snow is not a problem in most cities. Most cities are competent to get the snow removed. However, under the Barry-Cronies "administration" massive degeneration of the Department of Public Works' snow removal equipment left the District, in 1995/1996 New Year week completly unable to deal with a surprise accumulation of nearly three feet of snow over a few days. The city was entirely shut down, along with the Federal government. Nearby Maryland and Virginia coped with some difficulty but cope they did. This risable ineptitude on the part of the District was possibly the single greatest factor resulting in the ouster of Marion Barry, the most glaring and disruptive systematic failures of government.
This month's snowfalls amounted to only about six inches to a foot of fluffy powder snow, and in fact the streets were fairly well cleared, and fairly rapidly. However, the alleys were not cleared, and in the rush to get the streets plowed, collection of refuse was essentially abandoned in some parts of town. The low temperatures prevalent during this period have tended to prevent the garbage from festering, but in the meantime, the rats are getting fat and happy. Also, on many of the District's back-streets the streets were never cleared, simply rendered relatively passable by "snow-packing" them, and subsequent melt and re-freeze is turning those streets into skating rinks.
The refuse pickup problem is being dealt with by having trash picked up curbside instead of in the alleys. However, it's clear that more improvements must be made regarding getting the streets and alleys cleared of snow, especially after such a light snowfall as a mere foot.
Moving right along, but not so far as you might think, the District is expanding classes for parents, which are intended to improve the abilities of District residents' parenting abilities.
Changes continue within the Metropolitan Police Department. Chief Charles A. Ramsey, who is determinated to eliminate crime in the District, presse forward with his reforms. In the first week of the New Year, he shook up management in the force. One of the reasons for this is his push to start with the crimes characterized by ruined lives.
The District is notorious nationally for a great many things, but one of the most glaring causes of this notoriety is the prevalence of open-air drug markets and their associated assaults, robberies and killings. The District can still be characterized as improving along the lines described in the infamous quote by former mayor Marion Barry: "Actually, outside of the killings, crime in Washington is actually down". While the rest of the country at-large basks in unprecedented wealth, in the District unemployment remains tied in a heat for dead-last with West Virginia. Unemployment for the District's Latinos is at a record low of 5.9 percent, but black unemployment remains high, at 7.9 percent. Such jobs as are available to non-degreed persons tend to be characterized by long hours and low pay, and it's also not easy to get -- anyone needing a quick infusion of cash may be readily tempted to enter the underground economy. It's not helping matters much that the District's penalties for possession and sale of marijuana are among the least in the nation. Generally, we oppose criminalization of marijuana, but in the same way that the District's draconian anti-gun legislation creates a massive flow into the District of weaponry from "shall-issue" Virginia, the District's low penalties for marijuana offenses causes a massive influx of suburban visitors into the District, seeking the abundant herb from the equally-abundant dealers, who compete quite violently for "turf rights". Ideally, the surrounding jurisdictions would reduce their penalties for marijuana violations, but this isn't very likely.
Dealing with the exceptional violence that has come to be associated with the marijuana as well as the "crack" trade in the District is becoming one of the Chief's priorities. Solving murders is also high on the list. Despite a series of reorganizations in the MPD, and changes in enforcement strategies which included saturation of various neighborhoods and increased night patrols, the murder rate remains high, and the rate of case closures remains appallingly low. Hence, new commanders have been assigned in the majority of the District's police districts.
Here are some reassignments:
Hopefully this will do something to shore up the ability of the MPD to salvage its reputation, which is not particularly good. Once considered a model for police forces nationwide, during the Barry Cronies(tm) years the force fell far behind the rest of the nation in almost all categories. While the rest of the nation's police forces moved to require advanced degrees as a prerequisite for new hires and advancement within the force, the District's police remained largely a blue-collar force. Also, while other forces were assiduously rooting out corruption from within their ranks, a variety of forces assured that within the District, even as mismanagement hamstrung the physical facilities and hardware functionality of the District, even moreso was corruption entrenched.
One top story within the last month was the arrest of one Officer Andrew James McGill, age 29, 5-D. He was charged by the DEA, mostly for aiding and abetting an ongoing criminal enterprise, to wit, organized cocaine trafficking, going back over a nine-year period, and ostensibly for releasing critical insider information to assorted criminal co-conspirators and assorted street dealer crews. Also in trouble, one Officer Darrell L. Green, on charges of theft of several thousand dollars worth of goods frm a Vienna VA self-storage locker. Also not a credit to the force is one Officer Warren L. Pindell, accused of shaking down a couple of customers of District prostitutes.
According to followup by the Washington Post, clean-up of the department continues, with something of a "double-edged sword" effect. Yes indeed, the MPD is getting a good housecleaning, but it also stands revealed as having had a lot more "bad apples" than was previously known. It would appear that the MPD's reputation as a house of cards full of lice was not only well-deserved, but moreso than was expected.
Here's a list, from the Washington Post, of officers either pleading guilty or being found guilty, and their offenses:
Awaiting trial:
Noted in passing, the Department of Justice almost pulled $22 millions of Federal money to be made available to the District, mostly for the hiring of new officers. With a conviction and arrest rate as cited above, they need to hire some new officers. The MPD had not achieved 100 percent attendance at a diversity-sensitivity program, and had also failed to comply with a certification program aimed as insuring that bilingual officers were sufficiently fluent as to be paid for said bilinguialism. The State Department was chosen as the certifying agency, with 35 or so officers having been certified so far. Many more are needed, as there is a massive foreign element in and about the District, particularly Latinos, mostly from Central America, residing here under amnesty as refugees from the civil wars of the 1970s and 1980s. Diversity-sensitivity training is ongoing. Justice has yet to pay out the funds, but at least the active compliance with the requirements of Justice allows Justice to continue to reserve the funds.
We have been with much dismay, and for years, complained that the district of Columbia has lagged miserably in terms of taking care of the sectors of the population most desperately in need of service, which is to say, the homeless, the mentally-ill, and the retarded. Finally, the complaints of many were substantiated by the Washington Post and a public outcry arose over the neglect and mistreatment of the retarded who were farmed out by the city to caretakers who quite often were either blatant abusers of the system, or simply unqualified as caretakers for those who could never fend for themselves. Over a period of decades, the Post articles revealed, literally hundreds died or lived out their lives in inhumane conditions, all "overseen" by one District agency, the Mental Retardation and Developmental Disabilities Administration ("MRDDA"). We have recommended that such agencies not simply have top management replaced, but that an effort be made to punch down through the layers of bureaucracy and get to the level where services are supposed to be provided.
While the latter suggestion remains to be entirely followed, at least the former suggestion has seen action. On 2000 January 18, Mayor Anthony A. Williams removed the following from their posts at the MRDDA.
The Mayor has stated his intention to "blow up" the agency and rebuild it from the ground up, and apparently this may well be done. An administration report on the agency basically damned it to hell with the stated conclusion
...the entire mental retardation and developmental disabilities service delivery system ... is incapable of providing quality service... the system is highly dysfunctional and unable to execute its mission at its most basic level through its current structure and procedures.
It's pretty sad that for years, the retarded were essentially relegated to the role of sad flesh left to rot alive at the hands of an uncaring and broken system. Thanks to the Post and the administration's investigation and the Mayor's actions, what "everyone knows is going on" will hopefully no longer be "business as usual in Washington". While the MRDDA is deconstructed, day-to-day case management will be covered by a coalition of private groups led by the Lt. Joseph P. Kennedy Institute, a well-regarded non-profit with a 50-year track record. In the meantime, one Beverly Doherty of Wisconsin will be taking over as director of the MHDDA, and former Virginia Department of Social Services veteran G. Keith Chadwell will become the chief operations officer.
The Mayor has other worries regarding other of the District's agencies which are supposed to defend the incapable. Having declared himself as being extremely concerned for the children of the District, and having discovered that this concern is one of the most important of the District's residents, he's starting to take aim at some of the rest of the District's support agencies, in particular the beleagured Foster Care agency.
The District's Foster Care agency is organizationally not quite the shambles of the MRDDA, or at least no such egregious failures as those of the MRDDA have come to light; but it is far from effective. Among other things, there have been continued difficulties with paying the caregivers, with some being paid multiply while other caregivers have gone without city funds for months. But that is administrative error and growing-pains to be expected as the agency abandons the old paperwork administration and moves into a service based on automated dataprocessing. More to the point, children remain in the District system longer than almost anyplace else in the nation, instead of being adopted. Foster Care needs to do a better job of finding homes for these children. Also, there must be a much higher level of communication between the various agencies which handle different aspects of Child Welfare. The case in that point would be that of Brianna Blackmond.
Brianna's mother had lost Brianna to foster care in 1998 June. Social Services had seen enough of Blackmond's home, where children were living in absolute filth and eating out of alley dumpsters. Blackmond's eight children were placed in foster homes. Over the years, Blackmond had repeatedly petitioned the courts to have her children returned to her. Recently, Child and Family Services investigated, and wrote a report stating that Brianna should not be returned to Blackmond's home. Among other things, it wasn't even Blackmond's home. she was in fact illegallystaying in subsidized housing assigned to a friend, one Angela T. O'Brien -- who also had children removed to Foster Care after evidence of abuse -- and Blackmond was on the very verge of homelessness. (She presently is homeless, living in a District shelter.)
But the report sat on the desk of one Judge Evelyn E. C. Queen, who inexplicably and without a hearing granted Blackmond's motion for Brianna's return. Child and Family Services, for reasons which remain unclear, failed to protest. Within two weeks, District Medical Examiner Jonathan Arden, a reknowned expert in pediatric forensics, dismissed the mother's suggestion that the child had fallen down a flight of stairs, saying "...the severity of such a head injury is more consistent with a child falling out of a third-floor window or being in a high-speed motor-vehicle accident". District police are pursuing the matter as a homicide.
Another example of the failure to communicate may be seen in the case of Valerie Thomas and her family. Ms. Thomas, at the recommendation of one Maria Dyson, was placed in an apartment at 137 Forrester Street SW (managed by A-1 Realty of Silver Spring MD for Urban Investments, Inc.), in a block which had through the 1990s been an immense open-air drug market characterized by extreme lawlessness. Most of that block is boarded up and/or condemned. Dyson's concern was to get Ms. Thomas off of the street and into an apartment so that Thomas woudn't lose her kids to Foster Care. Thomas rightly states that living anywhere, even like an animal, is better than living on the streets. But what a place they put her in!
137 Forrester Street SW was somehow considered suitable for habitation, but a city inspection found trash four feet deep in one room, an essentially-inoperative central heating system, human waste was piled up on the garbage in abandoned units, and the conditions were described as being "worse than the Third World". Thomas was relocated to a hotel until she can get her permanent Section 8 housing, and city workers began cleaning up the mess. Clearly, the Building Inspector needs to either get on top of inspection of such facilites, or if they're already aware of this sort of rat-pile, they need to have their condemnations publicly posted where organizations such as Child and Family can find those condemnation notices.
It is worth noting that Child and Family Services was, throughout this period, preparing for a move to new centralized office in a leased facility located at 400 Sixth Street SW. Formerly scattered across several sites across the city, this centralization and consolidation should improve the agency's ability to function. But even as this "receivershipped" agency moves into new offices, it's facing a projected cost-overrun of some $24 millions above budget. And some $4 millions of that is being expended on this move, with half of that being allocated to new furniture. But it's worth noting that the phone systems will be consolidated, with more lines and also with pager numbers, and nearly $200,000 will be spent on an electronic filing system. Hopefully no more problems with paperwork and timely notification will cost another Brianna Blackmond her tiny life.
Astonishingly, part of this shortfall is being met with $11 millions shifted from the District's Welfare-to-Work training program, which is definitely the worst in the nation in terms of actually training anyone sufficiently as to be able to afford to live in the increasingly-expensive District of Columbia.
We are increasingly convinced that in 2002, when Welfare runs out, that some 50,000 to 100,000 single parents will hit the job-market practically overnight, and within months lose their housing and be unable to maintain themselves and their children. This will have an impact on Foster Care and Child and Family Services roughly equivalent to that of a major war. The District Schools may also be similarly impacted. It's clear that major preparations must be made now, and the ideal approach would be to beef up the Welfare to Work programs, which will be difficult to do with decreased funding.
It also must not be overlooked that the trends in the District include a dearth of any housing, with affordable housing next to nonexistent. It must be noted that the income of the richest fifth of families in the District is 27 times that of the poorest fifth; the average income of the poorest fifth of District families is $7,100 per year, which will not even pay rent at any place in the District of which I am aware which is suitable for habitation by a family.
Welcome back again to the show that never ends. "Welcome to Washington."
Again, apologies to all who actually checked back every few days to see if anything new had been added; I've been fighting a very bad case of "cabin fever", and of course assorted inauspicious horoscopes, general malaise, astounding poverty, and the inescapable bad feng shui have all contributed to my tardiness in posting this update.
Regionally, the economy remains good, and -- despite the looming cash crunch expected by summer due to high petroleum costs -- may in fact improve substantially as spring rolls on into summer. In the State legislatures of both Virginia and Maryland, there is something of a feeding frenzy atmosphere as both Maryland and Virginia have very large budgetary surplusses.
What's missing is anything resembling planning for long-term regional coooperation. Maryland has effectively scotched the idea of a new transPotomac crossing between Seneca MD and Seneca Virginia at Pond Island. Maryland, or at least affluent Montgomery County, is suffering a bit of political schizophrenia, with a multitude of divergent political forces pulling it hither and yon. Despite the clear need for the InterCounty Connector ("ICC") between I-95 near Laurel and I-270 near Gaithersburg MD -- on the Master Plan for fifty years now -- the leftist social-democratic governorship of Parris Glendenning and Kathleen Kennedy Townsend absolutely refuses to go forward with the project, and Montgomery County (often referred to as "the People's Republic of MC") attempted to further block the plan -- absolutely essential to its future -- by selling off right-of-way already held in possession. Maryland legislators are attempting to prohibit any such sales, in a rare display of sanity and forethought.
Northern Virginia is developing at what might well be considered "breakneck speed". Taken as a whole, Maryland is an extremely urbanized and smallish state, but Virginia as a whole is vast and largely rural. Virginia thus sees itself as wide open for expansion. Northern Virginia has, in effect, a green light from the Commonwealth, to go full throttle into unchecked expansion. But this is fraught with peril, in the eyes of Maryland's paternalistic government, and perhaps rightly so.
Due to the original landgrants and patents under British Colonial rule, Maryland owns the Potomac River. It does not own the Virginia shores, however. Northern Virginia draws its water from a variety of sources, but depends most heavily on an intake located not far from where a proposed transPotomac bridge at Seneca should be placed. Virginia had proposed to Maryland that Virginia would extend a new intake to center-stream of the Potomac. Maryland has refused, and Virginia has filed suit before the Supreme Court. Maryland's grounds for refusal was a fear -- probably appropriate in the present climate of Global Climate Change and the ongoing drought in the region -- that Northern Virginia would consider such a new and reliable source of water as a license for runaway development in the region. Already, Loudon County VA is the third-fastest growing county in the US, and the largest in growth in terms of expenditure.
The snow has finally melted and the weather cycles around the freezing point of water, with a few unseasonably warm days, generally very chilly nights. This is one of those seasons which gives rise to the local saying "Don't like the weather? Wait five minutes". The very slow melting of the roughly 8 inches of snow accumulated, finally hastened by a freezing-rain storm which turned into rain, will to some degree replenish the regional water tables, which were so depleted last year that wells were starting to run dry. However, neither Maryland nor Virginia -- both hit very hard in last year's drought conditions -- can afford to continue to develop recklessly. Maryland's action might in fact be a positive boon to the region in ecologic terms. However, should Virginia establish positive and effective "limits to growth" legislation as Maryland is doing, once again there must be consideration of the transPotomac bridge at the Seneca Crossing, and inclusion of a proviso letting Virginia extend their intake farther towards center stream may be the carrot needed to entice Richmond and the legislature to dedicate funds towards the Rockville-Reston "Techway".
Moving right along, we wish to note that a recent study indicates that Saturday traffic congestion has surpassed weekday rush hour congestion. We also wish to note that there is an immense parking problem in the suburbs. Parking, especially commuter parking, has been a problem downtown for some years now, coming to a head last year when it was generally a given that if you weren't parked by 8:00 AM, you were not going to be parking. In the fashionable Adams-Morgan district -- a major party zone for 20-somethings all over the region -- parking is practically unheard of around the weekend, and part of the Revitalization packages include construction of a massive parking garage, which probably won't be completed for at least five years.
In the suburbs, however, "in-fill" development with a lack of planned parking facilities has led to major problems. In Northern Virginia, there are almost as many vehicles registered as there are people in residence. For each person of driving age, there are something like 1.6 cars. This has led to major struggles over parking turf.
Still moving right along, most of the Capital Beltway (I-495 and I-95) is at capacity at almost all times, with substantial congestion along almost all of the western loop of I-495 between I-95's northern departure and I-66's western departure.
Noted in passing, two proposed new MetroRail stations are expected to be partially funded by the Federal government. One station would be a new station to be opened probably in 2004 on the existing northeastern leg of the Red Line, at New York and Florida Avenues NorthEast, not far from the new BATF building. The other station would be on an extension of the Blue Line to Largo Maryland.
Moving right along, in seedy Silver Spring Maryland, abutting the District around 16th Street NW and Georgia Avenue NW, Discovery Communications, Inc., (the Discover Channel) corporate headquarters will be a linchpin and anchor of revitalization efforts. Once the region's main suburban shopping district, anchored by such stores as Hecht's and Woodies, the emergence of major suburban malls combined with a major infrastructure rebuild and the placement of MetroRail to drive the place mostly out of business. However, massive infusions of money by the State of Maryland has made the area a bit more attractive to developers, and demolition of some eyesore properties coupled with renovations and restorations of some properties with historic value is tending to attract businesses and customers. Silver Spring may soon come to be another of the major centers of urban energies revitalizing the region.
Once again, Trash is big news in the District.
In 1995 the Supreme Court declared that local governments could not regulate interstate transfer of waste. Since that time, the District had become something of a dumping ground, or at least a transfer point, for a great deal of waste, some of it coming from as far away as New York, but with possibly the majority of it coming from the neighborhing Maryland suburbs. From the District's transfer stations, between half a million tons and a million tons of waste are shipped to Pennsylvania and Virginia's mammoth private landfills. The District, true to the form of those days, failed to generate much in the way of controlling authority or regulations to cover the industry. Laws were passed last year when residents complaints of vermin and stench came to a head, but every transfer-station is technically in violation, and the stench has not been much abated and the vermin continue to fatten.
Among other roadblocks to any quick resolution is the fact that letting trash sit around and fester is one of the District's few actual industries. (Which should tell you volumes about the place.) At $4 per ton of waste transferred, it's a minor cash cow amounting to up to $5 millions annually. Add to this the fact that the transfer services are rather desperately needed by both the District and the neighboring jurisdictions, and it's easy to see why the problem remains.
Among other trash woes in the District is the aging fleet of trash trucks, many of which are about ten to twelve years old. Due to breakdowns, nearly half of those trucks are out of service, 17 out of 38. Recently, the scarcity of working trucks was compounded by the icing over of the District's alleyways after the first snow and the subsequent "wintry mix" of sleet and freezing rains, and a great deal of trash simply never got picked up because the trucks couldn't get to it. It's clear that the city will have to shop for some more trash trucks, and fairly soon.
We note with some sadness the departure, from the Metropolitan Police Department, of Rodney Monroe, 42. Once considered as possible material as Chief of Police, Monroe's career can be characterized as "a good man in the wrong place at the wrong time". Once the commander of the group responsible for public safety and crowd control at major events in Washington, during the recent shakeups at MPD, then-Acting Chief Sonya Proctor move the possible contender to a position in the field, and when Charles H. Ramsey was chosen as Chief, Ramsey demoted Monroe to the position of Commander of Sixth District. Recently, Ramsey demoted the Lt. Robert Tate in the wake of a murder investigation Ramsey considered "botched" and this Lt. Tate was Monroe's head of Violent Crime investigations.
Monroe has retired from MPD, and has joined the National Committee for Neighborhood Enterprise ("NCNE"), which "pursues policy remedies that build upon the success of grassroots leaders and works to attract public and private support for their innovative solutions to societal problems such as youth crime and violence, substance abuse, homelessness, unemployment, substandard education, and deteriorating communities". It has a policy of canvassing "low-income communities and identifies neighborhood healing agents. Once found, NCNE applies 'miracle-grow' in the form of training and technical assistance that strengthens them and enables them to expand". Rodney Monroe has recently expressed concern with the rise of youth violence, particularly among young women. Monroe is quoted by the Washington Post as saying:
I have only been able to react after the fact [as a police officer] ... I would like to see if I could be the person who intervenes before the violence starts -- to prevent death from occurring.
This is laudable. This is necessary. We hope that Mr Monroe will be able to combine his 21 years of law-enforcement experience and his neighborhood knowledge with NCNE, which has among other things managed to broker peace between warring gangsta factions on several occasions. MPD's loss is the community's gain.
Mr Monroe will be director of the NCNE's Violence-Free Zones programs, applying lessons learned in Washington in other troubled cities across the nation.
The City of Washington's Financial Report will be delayed, probably until mid-March, due to presistent problems with the city's financial-planning software. Personally, I suspect repeated NT(tm, Microsoft) crashes. In the rush to avoid Y2K problems, a new $32 million system was rushed into place and it's just not working. However, the report is expected to indicate that the city has a substantial surplus, in the estimated vicinity of $100 millions.
A report by the DC Council on the crippled DC Procurement system -- which spends $1 billion annually, in rough figures -- indicates that some $115 millions were wasted on the development of two competing procurement computer systems, which don't get along. The report indicates that the competing systems "produced confusion, inefficiency, duplication and waste".
The District's Healthcare situation is one of startling contrasts. Despite some of the world's best hospitals, and the finest medical schools running some of them, there are some 81,000 District residents who do not have access to any healthcare other than emergency care -- and across the city, there are hundreds of empty hospital beds.
The very poor are to some degree covered by DC Medicaid, an agency of the City of Washington DC. However, Medicaid does not pay for services it does not believe were needed. And the DC General Hospital, a vast consumer of Medicaid funds, is having a bit of difficulty proving to DC Medicaid that it delivered services which were needed. And thus, although DC General claims that it's technically running in the black -- on the basis of payments it claims it's owed -- is in fact close to economic collapse due to non-receipt of funds that DC Medicaid refuses to pay, dating back in some cases about six years.
DC General Hospital, now a part of the quasi-governmental "Public Benefits Corp" ("PBC"), has been experiencing a steady decline in the number of patients served per day, and a steady increase in the number of employees as well as salaries and benefits paid out. Still, it serves almost one-third of the hospital visits annually.
A number of reports have filtered in over the last decade, noting among other deficiencies:
At this time, the District is spending roughly $35 millions a year, unbudgeted and under the table and possibly entirely outside of any legal authority, to prop up DC General, even though it appears that the Mayor and many of the City Council would really prefer to radically reduce payments to the PBC and use the money saved to either increase the number of District residents covered by insurance, or to develop neighborhood clinics. We personally believe that vast amounts of money could be redirected into such neighborhood "minor care" clinics, to great public benefit. Neighborhood clinics could aggressively pursue prevention and early treatment as goals, which would tend to vastly improve the health and longevity of the District's poor, who have an astounding morbidity rate, even when violence is factored out.
Details continue to surface regarding the depth of dysfunction in the District's agencies which purport to protect the weak and the defenseless. Their failures are numerous, and the results of those failures often are lives of indignity and anguish, or deaths essentially due to systemic malfunction equivalent to wilfull abandonment of responsibility.
District law has formerly prohibited any disclosure of records regarding Foster Care "beneficiaries". This privacy legislation was originally enacted with good intent, but unfortunately it has also lent itself to some misapplication in cases where the outcomes of particular cases were less than salutary. This has had the effect of shielding those responsible from any accountability. The DC Council has tentatively approved a bill which would -- in the cases of death, severe injury, or clear neglect -- allow those records to be examined by relevant authority, and in some case said records could be made public.
This writer has repeatedly called for the Mayor to punch down through the layers of footdragging bureaucrats to see how services are actually delivered. A recent timetable provided by the Washington Post indicated that the Mayor should have known what was going on in various District "ward care" agencies many months ago. But only a few days ago has Williams been publically-reported to be actually getting the process moving. In the meantime, possibly due to the ongoing nature of systemic dysfunction, Congress is reported to be calling for an investigation by its General Accounting Office. We absolutely concur.
The government culture of the District of Columbia is, and has for a very long time been, characterized by a policy of "do only what you must and only when you have to and if you've got someone breathing down your neck, someone somewhere else will foul up enough so that the overseer will go away and you can start slacking again and still get paid". And this is eversomuchmoreso the case under receiverships which have a blind oversight from Congressional authority essentially gridlocking any attempts at radical systematic change and providing absolutely no inspirational leadership. That is all. Mr Mayor, Honorable ladies and gentlemen of Congress, kindly do us all a favor and wake the hell up. You should have known this. The District has only been under Control Board control, and barely-so, for three years. Were you maybe expecting change?
Accept as a given, regardless of what public perception is, that there are people who are beyond slacking, beyond goofing off, and there are in fact people in town in positions of responsibility over other people who scarecely deserve the epithet of people. It has long been a given in Washington that the City government's lesser positions were sought-after and attained only by the lowest caliber of incompetent. Many of those "people" are characterized not by an incompetence of professionalism nor by an incapacity to get things done; rather they are characterized by an incapacity to even give a damn. There are some cartoons which are very commonly passed around by all government employees in Washington, one of which has an outraged duck muttering "Every day in every way forces me to add to the list of people who can just kiss my ass" but an even more common one has a spluttering cat pointing to a sign stating "Would you be so kind as to take your petty-ass problem down the hall, perchance therewith to find someone who will even give a damn". This is what you're up against. You will always be up against this. This is what these people know, this is what they accept as a given, they know that even if they themselves give a damn and aren't hating life, everyone else they have to deal with is going to be, simply put, some pipsqueak Washington bureaucrat who frankly, my dear, does not give a damn.
Babies are dying and retarded adult wards are living lives of pointless misery. "Would you be so kind as to take your petty-ass problem down the hall?..." There are crackheads operating their crackhouses on funds provided by the city, ostensibly funding care and feeding of people who are incompetent to eat on their own much less fend for themselves, and all they ever had to do to get over on the city like that was to get themselves added to the list of people who can just kiss some bureaucrat's ass; the bureaucrat simply looks at the paperwork and rubberstamps it because "I just don't feel like dealing with them pain-in-the-ass chumps" and they in fact don't want to deal with it enough to send Social Services around to check the situation, possibly to generate a ream of paperwork for the bureaucrat.
There is so much "personality conflict" and petty infighting going on at all levels that the easiest thing for people to do is to simply not deal with other people and other agencies because if you send some paperwork over to someone who is suppozsed to deal with the problem, you are going to get a heap of paperwork back and half of it's going to amount to hate-mail.
Now that we've gotten your attention, we'd like to insult your intelligence. We'd like to offer some ideas regarding solutions. It is not rocket science, but it's a little more complicated than, say, Macintosh. Or maybe not.
All agencies must flowchart process. If the process leads out of their agencies, a clear reception point for the exiting process must be created. We propose the creation of what amounts to a help-desk, a sort of watchdog ombudsman group, which exists solely to expedite and document interagency communication, and assure that messages get where they need to go, to ensure the flowchart is in fact flowing.
Within each agency, there needs to be another expediting group, also tasked to see that flow is going as it should be. This includes assuring that orders given from the top down actually make it down to the street, and that the success or failure of the streetlevel actually gets reported at the top.
As an example: if a social worker makes a call on someone seeking to have their child -- removed by court order to foster care due to abuse/neglect -- returned to them, the social worker needs to know such things as income, lease/rent status, relationship/significant-other status, criminal and psychological history, and so forth -- and needs to know it from a source other than the subject of the inquiry! There need to be better lines of information flow between the agencies (interagency ombudsman/expeditor group), and receipt of information request, as well as of information, needs to be not only given but acknowledged. So if a social worker reports to a judge that they feel the situation is not conducive to the welfare of the child, the judge needs to have that information not only on her desk, but the social worker needs to know that the judge not only has it, but has read it. Until that last acknowledgement occurs, the "red flag" ought to be up on the case and no case should be able to proceed while there's a red flag showing. And within the social worker's agency, there needs to be a similar system showing a red flag up to all in the system, in case someone gets sick or goes on vacation and schedule changes occur elsewhere. The situation at present is far too noncommunicative in interagency terms, and if any one person is close to something so hot-button as returning a child into a dangerous home, everyone else in that agency needs to know it.
We recommend that a redundant e-mail/hardcopy system be implimented, and as quickly as practicable, with the e-mail serving to rapidly streamline the system and improve accountability and response time. The e-mail can be used, possibly combined with a cellphone web-browser, as a final last-minute check. I will leave details to the agencies and integrator/contractors but in the year 2000 it's simply ridiculous that lost paperwork allowed a little girl to die.
But that's just one suggested solution to deal with one particular instance which may have been simply a high-visibility fluke not to be repeated, yet highly indicative of the disarray of process.
In the case of the City's retarded wards, it has been known for some time by Federal agencies such as the Health Care Finance Administration ("HCFA") that there were extreme deficiencies in the City's group homes, and repeated complaints to highlevel officials in the Williams Administration were shovelled under the table and resoundingly ignored. Finally HCFA moved to cancel Medicaid funding for 5 of 13 group homes for the retarded in the District, including ones run by "Comprehensive Health Care II" (one home was characterized by repeated medical foulups), and "DC Health Care, Inc" (one home was characterized by apparent abuse of the clients). The Justice Department, in 1999 March, began an investigation into all of the group homes after Katherein Boo's horrifying expose, but city officials took very little action until 1999 December after a second expose revealed that, despite massive public outcry from March on, almost nothing had been done to improve the lot of the retarded. Further, Justice investigations allegedly indicate that there might be considerable "appropriation" of "burial account funds" (amounting to as much as $2000) from the city's wards. One has to wonder whether or not such diversion is accompanied by deliberate maltreatment of wards in the hope of getting "double-paid" by the agency in question, which might be expected to think that the funds hadn't been paid in the first place.
Mayor Williams is reported to have originally thought something to the effect that the agency was just another wreck he'd inherited, but we suspect that as details emerge, he will be astounded even more than at present by the depths to which the Department of Human Services developmental-disabilities division has sunk. We predict that as bad as it's known to be, it will be revealed that, while it is considered poor form to ascribe to malice what may be better attributed to incompetence, that handling of mentally retarded wards in the City of Washington were in some cases little short of monstrous.
Spring is Sproinging Right Along
Welcome back again to the show that never ends. "Welcome to Washington."
My, I really got behind on it this month! Sorry folks, spring was in the air and I had to get out of the house before Cabin Fever forced me to go postal. I am tempted to make the usual excuses involving bad feng-shui but I'm afraid that this just won't wash. I will remark however that I took the time spent out of the house and toured some of the parts of the District of which I've recently written, so as to be less dependent upon the Washington Post and more responsive to the evidence of my eyes and ears. I even gave a friend a tour of the town, who hadn't been here before as an adult, and I was treated to a sad re-affirmation of my own perceptions of the District of Columbia -- even after almost four years of Control Board oversight and clean-up/Revitalization efforts, I still heard this:
You know, when you said that the place was a largely a decadent rathole festering towards Doom, I had thought you to be merely invoking hyperbole and exaggeration for narrative effect. Actually I think you've been understating it.
As a result of this revelation, I was so filled with remorse and existential angst that I was forced to spend several weeks wondering exactly how it is that I could have so failed my readership as to mislead them into thinking that everything Washington is just "hunky dory" and couldn't be better, all aside from regrettable lapses on the part of assorted city officials and responsible Congressional parties, which lapses consist of doing largely nothing. While much is in fact greatly improved, I must reiterate that while parts of the city have gotten a face-lift, and while the city increasingly shares with the booming national economy, the changes are more cosmetic than systemic and I shall endeavor in the future to be less of a tout and a shill for the city and more of its most fierce -- if loyal -- critic.
The Region has never been in better shape economically. Global Warming has moved spring forward by at least a week, and the flowers have come and many have gone, with the Cherry Blossoms downtown arriving far ahead of the Cherry blossom festival. In the suburbs, it is peak tree season, with the almost ubiquitous Bradford Pear and Crabapples blooming profusely along with such staples as the Forsythia. Trees are well on their way to budding, and the silver maples once again grace us with voluminous deposits of tree sperm on parked cars and clogged sinuses amongst the citizenry. Temperatures have cycled well above freezing throughout the month of March, and have approached the 80 degrees Fahrenheit mark on many days and have surpassed it on a few. A full Moon welcomed the arrival of Spring and the celebration of Ostara (Eostre, Astronomic Easter). Nearly-aligned Venus and Mars greeted the equinoctal sunrise, and nearly-aligned Mars, Jupiter and Saturn bid the sunset farewell as the solar system ticks on towards the Grand Alignment of May 3rd through 19th.
...[M]ost of them are miserable huts, which present an awful contrast to the public buildings. The people are poor, and, as far as I can judge, they live like fishes, by eating each other.
-- Treasury Secretary Oliver Wescott, 1801
How little has changed in the last two centuries.
In few places is this more evident than in the city government of Washington, the District of Columbia.
But first, another quote -- seen first in the Washington Post -- from one who should be given the closest attention. Not only is she the present Chairman of the DCFRA "Control Board", but she was the author of a fine piece of prophecy which pointed out that an unfunded Congressional mandate -- that the District should prepay the pensions of its public-safety civil servants -- would inevitably lead to the fiscal calamity from which she is presently charged with rescuing the District -- Alice B. Rivlin:
Despite the good econmy, District revenues are growing more slowly than expenditures. The revenue estimates ... show an average annual rate of increase of 1.5 percent over the next four years ... [w]ithout major productivity savins or cuts in currently-provided programs and services, expenditures will grow at a rate of at least 3.0 percent annually over the same period. Hence current revenue policy and spending trends will lead to a $123 million budget deficit in 2004 if these trends are not corrected.
Dr. Rivlin, at the time of this statement, had probably not yet included in her figures the impact of the recent near-doubling of the price of petroleum products, upon which the District is extremely dependent, in terms of both heating and vehicle-fleet fuel. It may be reasonaly be expected that this impact will be significant, and while I am not yet privy to the District's proposed budget for fiscal 2001 -- nobody is privy to it as the figures are months late -- I suspect that Dr. Rivlin's estimate of expenditures growth probably ought to be rounded up to about five percent.
Dr Rivlin's remarks have since been categorized by Democratic Councilman (Ward 2) Jack Evans as "irresponsible". Mr Evans was subsequently soundly remonstrated, to which he snappishly retorted something to the effect that he stands by that assessment.
Polls of District voters indicated that nearly 85 percent of respondents declared that sustained or improved delivery of services to be more important to them than tax cuts.
However, it is becoming increasingly apparent that improved services are not to be forthcoming anytime soon. Furthermore, there are new problems arising, as well as old problems becoming apparent to the degree that they take on the aspect of grave new problems.
The DC City Council has proposed, atop a set of tax breaks enacted last year -- which would over three years reduce District tax rates by a whopping three percent over three years -- further reducton in taxes. Mayor Williams, perhaps anticipating Dr. Rivlin's forthcoming remarks, was not particularly pleased with the prospect of such a forestalling of desperately-needed revenue. "...we've had our major tax-cutting exercise last year," he remarked, referring to the Council's previous plan, very reluctantly endorsed, which slashed some $300 millions from the future revenue stream, in the form of reductions in corporate and personal income taxes and taxes on commercial property. In the proposal, there were some items which are worth the loss in revenue, such as an exemption from tax on shoes and clothing purchases under $100.00 and the creation of an Earned Income Credit, both of which would greatly benefit the working poor of the District, who are presently with their backs to the wall due to the skyrocketing rents in the District.
Other items which were less directed at the worthy cause of easing the plight of the poor didn't pass. Dr Rivlin was heard to make remarks to the effect that the projected $123 shortfall in the budget by 2004 was almost entirely due to the $300 millions in tax cuts of last year, and was further heard to remark that existing programs would have to be cut in order to counteract that impact, and that even-further cuts might have to be made to counteract the impact of this year's tax cut, amounting to nearly $31 millions. It is to be noted that this year's tax-cut is aimed primarily at the poor -- especially senior citizens making less that $30,000 annually, who will receive up to 70 percent off of property taxes -- as oppposed to last-year's tax-cuts, which were aimed at upper- and middle-class families and corporate interests.
There is a certain amount of uncertainty as to actual figures within the budget process. The District's chief Financial Officer, Valerie Holt, has come under a great deal of pressure in the last month or so, due to her pushcing back the availability date of the actual financial report. the DC Council had pressed to have her removed from the position, against the objections of Dr Rivlin. However, Dr Rivlin's support for Ms Holt appeared to be time-limited, and she conveyed the opinion of the DRFRA Control Board that there might have to be changes in leadership in the financial office . Whether this would entail a change in the leader of the financial office is presumably dependent on the near-term performance of Ms Holt in getting out the financial report.
Mayor Williams -- within about 10 days -- finally delivered a long-awaited proposal to cut about 1000 jobs from the District's bureaucracy. This should save some $37 millions by the common estimate. The draft proposal, which calls for staff reductions -- mostly through attrition and retirement, beginning 2000 June 15th: "Every agency director must identify and eliminate the many positions that fail to add significant value to their operations".
Questions remain regarding the wisdom of cutting staff or other funding at the agency responsible for collection of taxes and licensing revenues. It may be that some agencies will be much better able to locate and eliminate positions which are occupied by deadwood (or which positions themselves are deadwood) and thus allow more slack for retention of staff and budget at the revenue collection agencies.
However, as noted above, these cuts can only go so far in remediating the projected budgetary shortfalls over the next few years. Four years of balanced budgets is a precondition of full return of control over the District from the DCFRA Control Board to the District. It is uncertain whether or not a projected shortfall -- expressing itself after the expected expiration date of DCFRA control, but initiated under the period of their oversight -- will extend the tenure of the DCFRA. We propose that it should in fact prompt preparation for an extension of DCFRA tenure. There has been a figure floated of some projected $62 millions, $10 millions of which were expected as a result of reduced energy and vehicular costs, but we believe that the present near-doubling of fuel costs pre-empts at least that projected $10 millions in savings. More hopeful is the expected savings to be incurred by the creation of a Risk Management Agency, which would identify problems in District agencies and move to correct them before the District could incur massive legal costs from legal settlements or judgements.
Among other things, there is a pending suit against the District for some $35 millions, specifically against the Metropolitan Police Department concerning a man who died in custody earlier in the year. The coroner reports that the man died of a cocaine overdose, while the lawsuit contends that he was beaten so severely that his brain swelled, causing his death.
As for additional unexpected deficits impacting the budget, we are moving right along to:
Prior to the New Year, Mayor Williams -- who had been touting the arrival in Washington of the Digital Age, in the form of fiber-optical cable being laid to every last corner of the District -- declared a moratorium on new street cuts and cable-installation, until after the New Year. This was all well and good, although the lack of repairs left the roads bumpy. Yet now that new cable was being laid, it was discovered that -- contrary to previous agreements which were to have held utility companies making street cuts responsible for full restoration of driving surfaces -- nothing was being fixed, at least not in any manner that could be considered "timely". Also, to make matters worse, there has been no coordination between the various outfits laying the cables. We had called for such coordination, ideally through the Department of Public Works (DPW), but as always, we have been soundly ignored. However, while I may be safely ignored, the voices of outraged District residents and assorted suburban commuters cannot be as easily ignored.
Each contractor or utility making cuts into the road has, so far, paid only a $24 fee for a license. Most jurisdictions charge a certain annual fee per foot or mile of cable laid beneath the streets or sidewalks. At present, the District charges none. Even as the DPW's Director, Vanessa Dale Burns, negotiates with the assorted utilities for a "reasonable" fee (approximately one-third, so far, of what other comparable cities charge), the utilities continue to lay fiber -- possibly the negotiation is merely a stalling action to lay as much cable as possible before a fee is set, and then litigating against payment of fees on cable already laid, under the Ex Post Facto provisions of the US Constitution. Such litigation would have excellent chances of success, and in fact the District's extremely lax records-keeping of precisely who has laid how much cable exactly where could be eminently exploitable in such a case. While the contractors are indeed responsible for repairing the street cuts within four months of starting to work, at their own expense, Federal law prohibits communities from interfering with equal access by competing utilities to the customer. And so the District streets are cut first by one utility, temporarily patched, and then ripped up again by the next utility to come along laying cable or fiber.
On a positive note, the DPW has stringent requirements which must be met in terms of the size and quality of the patches. Rather than simply replacing the two-foot-wide section that is cut for laying fiber and/or cable, the permanent replacement concrete patch must be the width of a car, and we would propose going one notch better.
First, there must be coordination with the Department of Public Works. Secondly, we propose that rather than simply laying cable or fiber in the standard rigid plastic tube containing bundles of smaller tubes bundling fiber, steel piping should be laid where practicable, of a size suitable for traversal by predictable robotic or telefactor repair or "puller" units. This will permit additional future utilities to lay cable without tearing up the streets. Finally, we propose that anyone tearing up the streets be required to make their final concrete patch one full lane in width, in cooperation with oversight from the DPW engineers, to assure that rather than the cuts halving the lifes of the pavements, the patches will effectively replace existing pavements. With proper coordination, the District can get large chunks of entirely new street out of this at the expense of the utilities.
We note that nearly $5 millions of budget deficit in this present year alone may have been lost to a failure to collect fees for street cuts and cable-laying.
We note in passing the Deputy Mayor Norman Dong has declared that the various utilities engaged in street cutting must attend monthly coordination meetings, and soon will have to pay a $25,000 refundable deposit in advance of any cuts. The deposit is refundable only if adequate repairs are made. The City also intends to begin imposing the "subsurface rental" fees as soon as possible.
In the meantime, while all of the details are worked out, Mayor Williams has declared a moratorium of at least two weeks on any new street cuts by cable/fiber utilities.
Note as of 2000 April 1, Deputy Mayor Dong has announced that fees will be charged ranging from $739 to $2059 per mile beginning immediately, with rates possibly rising once the actual cost to the City to repair damages has been calculated. This has been tentatively calculated to enhance the District's cash income by as much as $6 millions.
Okay, I freely admit it. I do not like to see run down slum housing filled with the sort of impoverished immigrant who can't afford to live anywhere else. I used to be tired of seeing run-down slum housing full of Welfare Culture slackers, but due to the combination of the "End of Welfare As We Know It" process combining locally with the excellent oversight of David Gilmore's Public Housing Authority Receivership (due to end Real Soon Now), it's getting pretty hard to find publicly-owned subsidized housing that can be categorized as "run down slums".
Apparently District authorities themselves got a bit tired of run-down housing filled with the sort of impoverished immigrants who can't afford to live anywhere else.
I would like to make something very clear here. I do not support unrestricted immigration to the US, either legal nor illegal. However, any immigrant who has been legally admitted to the US is, in my opinion, fully entitled to equal protection under criminal and civil law.
Run-down housing is nothing new in the District, nor for that matter anywhere. Yet it has been a vast shame to the District that for so many years the agency in charge of building inspections was hamstrung by a very minimal budget considering the scope of their mission; this resulted in a great many buildings -- many of them owned in full or in part by the District government itself -- becoming eyesores, junkie shooting galleries, dens of prostitution, and firetraps. But in recent years, the District has embarked vigorously on a path of auctioning off those properties to homesteaders, razing them utterly, or offering them for reconstruction to various public-outreach groups such as Habitat For Humanity. But what of substandard properties in private hands?
The City started on recent, and snowballing, crusade to clear the city of ugliness, which is long overdue. For instance, in early March, in the 4900 block of Foote Street NW, a 17-unit building was condemned as a public nuisance. Among other things, it was characterized as a long-time den of prostitution and drug-dealing and unfit for human habitation. Typically, it appears that the former owner who allowed the property to so shamefully deteriorate had sold the property to a new owner within a month prior to the closing. It is unclear at this time whether or not the closure comes as a result of inspection being required after a change of hands, instead of having inspections required before a property may change hands. Reportedly, there had been repeated complaints of long standing at the building-inspector's office.
Especially in the Columbia Heights/Petworth area of NorthWest -- recently blessed with the completion of construction and opening of a MetroRail subway station -- the city has recently moved aggressively to inspect buildings and cite violators of building codes. The result has been the impending closing of some notorious problem facilities. Scum-sucking absentee slumlord have been heavily cited and are to be fined, and some are up on criminal charges. Two such landlords, partners from Chevy Chase Maryland, received violations potentially amounting to more than 40 years of jail time. When arraigned, the pair plead innocent.
As well they might: the repair bill for the properties in question is staggering considering the level of decay. As I have said, I do not much approve of unrestricted immgration and I approve less of immigrants ongregating in ghettos. But regardless of that opinion, it is a moral outrage to me that anyone should live in squalor and filth in my Nation's Capital. It further outrages me, and I am not alone in this, that slumlords should charge rent for such conditions, and when finally brought to task for their failure to maintain fit conditions for human habitation, send notice of eviction to their clientele... in a part of the city which is expected to have the fastest-rising residential-space rents for the next decade at least.
District Councilman Jim Graham, Ward 1 Democrat, noted with some dismay:
I'm deeply concerned about the wholesale evictions. I don't want to reward these landlords... You turn over an empty building to these guys and what was once a slum property becomes a very valuable piece of real-estate.
Wholesale evictions? Valuable real-estate? Let's look at the 1400 block of Columbia Road NW.
In the last 15 years, the 1400 block of Columbia Road NW has been an open-air drug market, featuring competing factions, one of which operated largely out of the decaying building at 1458 Columbia NW. Columbia Road is the walking route from the brand-new Columbia Heights Metro Station to the trendy Adams-Morgan strip centered around 18th Street and Columbia Road NW. The north side (and points north and west) of Columbia Road NW between 16th Street and Connecticut Avenue is largely upscale, and has proven remarkably resistant to the decay (not to say blight) across the street between the south side of Columbia Road, the north side of Kalorama Street NW and 16th Street on the east and Champlain Street on the west. However, once you cross 16th Street NW headed east, things go to hell rather quickly on Columbia Road. Long the site of MetroRail subsurface construction, Columbia Road and 14th Street has been battered and bruised, as has been that neighborhood's economy, which has of late mostly consisted of nighttime drug dealing and occasional prostitution. It's also been the focal-point of one of the most consistently-deadly parts of the District for the last several years.
But with the recent completion of MetroRail station construction, and in particular with the razing of several eyesore properties in the region combining with the secure fencing of some notorious local alleys and vacant lots, the place looks clean, and driving north on 14th Street past Columbia Road, one can smell the future and it is sweet, beautiful and rich. As far as realtors and investors are concerned, the only thing holding them back from making an absolute mint off of rooms and housing in the area is a bunch of immigrants inhabiting their properties. If the realtors and landlords are forced to rehabilitate the housing for present leaseholders, they cannot sell uninhabited newly-renovated-to-luxury condominiums.
Noted in passing, at 1611 Park Road NW, allegations have been made that the landlord has passed out eviction notices, allegedly so that he can convert the substandard property to luxury housing. If true, the eviction notices, which give 180 days to vacate, are a criminal violation. However, if the landlord simply fails to improve housing, he will at no risk and no cost be able to have the City evict for him, possibly in as little as two weeks to a month.
Within the area, the following properties are known to be scheduled for closure as of 2000 April 10. Closure not only includes eviction of persons, but a lockdown of the building, perhaps to the degree that removal of personal property will not be possible. The buildings are:
Other facilities at major risk of closure and eviction within walking distance of the Columbia Heights Metrorail Station are:
Note: 200 April 1, the District is seeking the arrest of one Andrew J. Serafin, an attorney and businessman from Virginia, who is the landlord of the 60-unit unfit-for-habitation building at 1458 Columbia Road NW. He is charged with almost 13,000 housing-code violations, potentially adding up to 3,192 years is prison. Serafin has been given until May to fix the building, where rats and drug-dealers frolic with epic boldness.
The District has stated the intent to arrest weekly a different landlord in egregious contempt of housing code violations. We believe that the proper process would be to serve notice of intent to evict and close the buildings, and then when the time comes, simply serve the arrest warrant on the landlords concurrent with closure and lockdown of faciities in egregious violation, simultaneously prohibiting future ownership of commercial properties in the District. The District should then auction the buildings off, with preference given to consortiums of present residents, followed by preference given to consortiums of public-interest groups. Only as a last resort should the seized properties be auctioned off to commercial interests.
Please note that at present there has been no definite provision for securing alternative housing for the soon-to-be-former residents. Also keep in mind that there are almost no apartments available in the District at any price, and such as are available are priced well into the luxury-maket range, whether or not they are actually luxury apartments. One-bedroom apartments in "iffy" parts of town are going for as high as $1350.00 per month. Add to this already-tight real-estate market as many as 10,000 persons seeking lodging within the next few months and it becomes quite clear: whether intentionally or not, the District is being rid of its poor.
Noted in Passing: Prince George's County Maryland's County Executive Wayne K. Curry -- elected leader of the District's eastern neighbor and majority-black jurisdiction -- is incensed over the relocation of poor people from the District, and wants other jurisdictions, especially the District, to pitch in and help with the cost of settling newcomers. Almost 500 families receiving Section 8 housing vouchers have already within the last four years relocated to Prince George's County, home of one of the nation's largest black middle-classes.
There is an established and thriving Latino community straddling the Montgomery and Prince George's County line, which may or may not be able to absorb the extremely-large expected migration of Latinos from the District which may or may not occur in mid-April. If the City of Washington follows through with this plan to close down substandard housing, and does so in good order and with all due diligence, some 50 properties will be closed down and may not be reoccupied until the buildings are up to code. An attempt to pass a bill allowing the District to sue landlords for the cost of relocation failed to pass. Among other things, this might have enabled a massive profiteering squeeze-play as landords dumped the properties in order to escape from the group-action lawsuits this bill also would have enabled, with the new owners presumably immediately gutting the properties and retrofitting them as luxury condominuims or as refurbished townhouses. The properties in the 1500 block of Park Road, NW, cited above, were originally very upscale, and are sited conveniently to schools and playgrounds, though at present they are a playground for rats, gangsters, dope-dealers and prostitutes as well as some hard-working immigrant families. The city has offered to assist in the relocation of legal immigrants or persons with full work permits. Interestingly enough, this may be less than half of the population to be displaced. It may well turn out that the INS will have a field day throughout the month of April.
It's unbelievable. I'm just completely dumbfounded... This appears to be a punitive measure to discourage any family from suing the District when it harms a family member.
The suit was filed one month after Brandenburg's sister filed a $1.16 millions class-action lawsuit against the City.
Predictably, high-level City officials expressed outrage. However, there is some hope that the outrage is genuine: "I am outraged that there was a business-as-usual process" as the Post quotes Ivan C. A. Walks, the city's new head of the Department of Health. Walks comes f
