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Last Updated: 2000 December 17th! Want to jump to the most recent entry?

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

Happy New Year, and Happy New Century

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.

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...

The Region

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.

Downtown

The Mayor Does Not Suck and The Council Is A Tease

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:

• Reginald E. Gilliam Jr.
  Managing director of Hill & Knowlton, a public affairs firm

  Charles J. Ogletree Jr.

  Professor of Law, Harvard University

  Mark Palmer

  Former ambassador, presently a venture capitalist

  Peter Rosenstein

  Executive director, National Association of Gifted Children

  Reverend Willie Wilson

  Baptist Minister, community activist.

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.

The Receiverships Mostly Suck and Suck and Suck

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:

• Department of Corrections
• Child and Family Services
• Mental Health

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.

Cheap Tart At The Docks On Payday

But She Cleans Up Fairly Pretty

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.

Good Feng Shui

Not Sucking At All

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.

Metro Police in 1999

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.

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:

• 2-D:
  Cmdr. Peter Newsham, replaces Shannon Cockett

  3-D:

  Cmdr. Ross Swope

  4-D:

  Cmdr. Abraham Parks

  5-D:

  Cmdr. Anthony Poteet

  Communications Division

  Cmdr. Evelyn Primas

  Forensic Services Division

  Cmdr. Christopher Cooch

  Institute of Police Science

  Asst. Chief Shannon Cockett

  Office of Professional Responsibility

  Asst. Chief Brian Jordan

  Operations Command:

  Cmdr. Joseph Griffith

  Cmrd. Christopher Lojocana

  Special Investigations Division

  Cmdr. Jose Acosta

  Special Services Command

  Asst. Chief Alfred Broadbent -- was at Institute of Police Science, replaces Asst. Chief Brian Jordan

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:

• Andrews, Officer Vincent
  First-degree sexual abuse of a ward, assault, tempering with physical evidence, obstruction of justice

  Ahn, Lieutenant Yong

  Recept of bribes (brothel shakedown)

  Branch, Officer Marvin

  Assaulting a prisoner

  Christian, Officer Clarence

  Misdemeanor sexual abuse

  Cencich, Detective Michael A.

  Extortion (brotherl shakedown)

  Downing, Officer Milton H.

  Attempted aggravated assault

  Gingrich, Officer Joseph

  Making false statements, filing a false report in connection with a shooting

  Goodridge, Sergent David M.

  Theft (confiscated in a search and resold)

  Jones, Officer Donald

  Sexual abuse, Lewd and Indecent acts

  Mehalic, Detective John III

  Kidnapping while armed, second-degree sexual abuse while armed, bribery, stalking obstruction of justice

  Najiy, Officer Wallace S. II

  Forgery, wire fraud, tampering with physical evidence, first-degree fraud, obstruction of justice

  Nelson, Officer Kenneth L.

  Two counts simple assault, two counts cruelty to animals, theft, 11 violations of a civil protection order

  Stringer, Officer Eric

  Misdemeanor domestic assault

Awaiting trial:

• Brown, Derrick
  Sexual abuse

  Cannon, Antonio

  three counts misdemeanor theft, receiving stolen property

  Cranford, Kevin

  Possession of controlled dangerous substance, to-wit, cocaine

  Evans, Cynthia

  Destruction of property

  Ford, Edward

  Domestic assault

  Matthews, Kevin

  Domestic assault

  Pindell, Warren L.

  Two counts armed robbery ("john" shakedowns)

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.

Health, Wealth, and Safety

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.

• Jearline F. Williams, Director
  Retired immediately before the axe fell, had been in poor health for some time.

  Viola Keyes

  Admitted to shredding documentation, evidently part of an attempt to destroy any paper trail supporting the Post's allegations of neglect

  Frances Bowie

  Senior policy analyst at Human Services and former director of MRDDA

  Charles Hubbard, Director of Case Management, Human Services

  Formerly administrator of the infamous Forest Haven Asylum, closed by court order in 1991 due to dangerous conditions and neglect of wards

  Gordon Barrow, Director of Clinical Services

  Pam Campbell, Director of Case Management, Clinical Services

  Accused by an employee, Dwayne Franklin, of rewarding employees for covering up cases of abuse and neglect of city wards.

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.

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.

District Revitalization

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.

Police Special

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.

District Computing

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".

Health, Hunger, Homelessness, & Poverty Outreach

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:

• In 1997, the hospital failed to record the diagnoses of some 5,000 uninsured patients, making it impossible to determine causes of hospitalizations or whether treatment was successful.
• Medicaid reimburements/payment filings were consistently tardy and haphazard.
• Costs were uncontrolled.
• No systematic attempts to uncover fraud.
• Inflated bills were sent to uninsured patients above what DC Medicaid had already paid the hospital, and when the patients were unable to pay, DC General marked the irrecoverable losses in the ledger under "accounts receivable".

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.

Wards of the District

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.

And now for a diatribe.

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.

The Anacostia Watershed Society has an informative page which you may want to peruse. It's got lots of links to do with the Anacostia. It's especially helpful if you'd like to get in there and help clean it up, up close and personal.

It appears that the District's Water and Sewer Authority is moving more rapidly than expected to replace the extant liquid chlorine sanitation system at the Blue Plains Wastewater Treatment facility. The present system stockpiles some 180 tons of lethal Chlorine in tank cars near the river, and the plant was seen last year to be in terrible condition, with exposed wiring, inoperative safety systems, and missing emergency equipment. A new security system has been installed, and staff is to be reduced as well.

Noted in passing: District Schools enrollments are still declining, with a potential drop in enrollments of up to 30 percent in the next 10 years if current trends continue.

The District has received a clean bill of financial health for the third year running. After one more year "in the black" the District will no longer be under the oversight of the DCFRA "Control Board". There had been considerable annoyance on the part of the DC Council earlier in the month, due to the lateness of budget figures, as well as a mysteriously "missing" $40 millions. Apparently the DCFRA paid off $40 millions to the WMATA ("Metro") transit authority, and an unnamed DC Department of Public Works accountant remarked the payment, but misattributed the source as coming from the City, and remarked it in the City debits, leading to the impression of a shortfall.

Noted in Passing, the District has in fact greatly improved the operation of many of its facilities, but the Department of Motor Vehicles is not one of those which has been improved. There is at present only one Inspection Station, which has lines of vehicles waiting as much as two or three hours before they can get inspected. The city had thought some time ago that since people were moving out of the city, they could close an aging facility elsewhere and double the capacity of the Southwest facility. However, since the city has begun its turnaround, they have experienced a 40-percent increase in vehicle registries. A new facility is expected to be completed in about 18 months, possible as early as late 2001.

Noted in Passing, the DC Council passed legislation which would make it illegal for slumlords -- who had been threatened with closures due to massive housing-code violations -- to evict their tenants. This closes a loophole that would essentially reward such slumlords; by merely waiting until they were ordered closed by the city and then evicting tenants before completing repairs, they could stand to quickly displace tenants en-masse and rapidly upgrade their properties for the emerging luxury markets expected to center around Columbia Heights.

This still has not kept tenants facing eviction from picketing the city and announcing that the District government is racially prejudiced against Latinos and Vietnamese. I suppose that rather than either pay more in rent or get used to living in nasty conditions, they expect the city to make their slumlords give them perfect housing for next to nothing, simpl because they can demonstrate on the streets. It must be noted however that this is the District and one thing they do hate downtown is being accused of being racist, which is good.

Noted in Passing, the $5 millions in fines that the District was to pay over their shameful treatment of retarded wards over the last several yers has been temporarily suspended at the behest of an appelate court on the grounds that the District should have had a jury trial, as the awards were so large as to be considered as a criminal (rather than civil) contempt award. The fines were originally imposed due to the District's habitually tardy payments to service providers for the District's retarded wards. It is generally accepted that this payment problem contributed greatly to the deterioration of the District's providers' "services" to the District's wards. This lawsuit in question was brought some 24 years ago, giving some indication of the timescale and scope of the District's absolutely inexcusable treatment of its most defenseless people.

Noted in passing, the District's health officials close a facility in the 500 block of Rhode Island Avenue NW which had been housing a groupd of mentally-ill persons. These outpatients were of the variety that needs 24-hour supervision, and so some of them were taken to DC General Hospital due to a lack of alternatives. With all of that 24/7 supervision, you'd think that one of the supervisors would have noticed the Rats and other health-code violations. But hey, who's going to listen to crazy people when they say their caretakers let Rats run wild in the house... or maybe the patients just figured that the exposed wiring was at just the right height for the Rats to be the ones that got zapped. But that would set of those damned smoke alarms. Oops, maybe not, smoke alarms aren't working... Thanks folks, people letting people live like animals because "them crazy people don't know no better, probably don't even notice" -- well, it's just not right.

Also please note that we are in the process of developing a higher level of connectivity and are now serving these updates exclusively from EarthOps.Org, which has just exceeded over five years of service, lowly Linux box that it is.

Note -- as of 2000 October 14, get this page served much more quickly from EarthOps.Net!

Welcome to Washington!

A long damp, cool springtime has given way to our usual "other season". The region is gifted with roughly two and one-half seasons, one being winter, one being fall, and the "half season" being whatever comes between the two main seasons. the flowers are up, the trees have greened, the forsythia have come and gone and the azaleas are showing a bit of wear as they fade. And as the bloom comes off the rose in due time, the bloom is off of the District of Columbia, at least in part.

At long last, the Powers That Be have heard my cry, which has been directed at them, I might add, for lo these many years, five years at the very least.

I have long raised the cry, demanding that the City do something about the pitiful state of Mental Health outreach in-particular, and outreach to the poor and downtrodden in general. Did anyone pay me any attention? Hell, no! It's been a lot easier to just sweep the mad under the rug and to let them die. Literally.

University Legal Services -- an advocacy group greatly responsible for putting the pressure on the City of Washington DC and keeping that pressure on -- has been bringing to the public's attention over recent weeks exactly how shoddy and threadbare is the "support system" for the city's vulnerable and discardable. This week, they came forward with a report utterly damning the District's "callous treatment of clients" which has recently included letting a woman who was clearly overdosed on Lithium sit and stew in her own shit for at least two hours before deciding that she really needed to be hospitalized. The woman was finally taken from the "mental health emergency center" to DC General Hospital where she died, one of at least 30 clients who have died in the last year, under the "care" of the receivershipped Mental Health Commission. The new receiver, one Denny Jones, has stated that the issue will be addressed, not by fixing the system, but by examining whether or not the system does a timely job of documenting its failures.

Among other failures of the Commission, it appears that as it assumes the role of administrator of the financial affairs of the clients, it often fails to make timely payments. A mentally-ill person -- who is sufficiently organized as to make their own payments out of their monthly Social Security RSDI or SSI -- is often very welcome in the rental community, as their income comes from an unimpeachable source, the Federal Government; there's no question that they will get paid and will get paid on time and the rentor can if necessary find the client and follow them down to the bank and get paid. However, when the District Government takes assignment as caretaker, the rent may never get paid, the grocery bills may never get paid, the client may in fact walk about town with no shoes on their feet, not because they are insane and cannot manage money but because the District government cannot manage money.

Also noted in the report was the fact that the inpatient psychiatric hospital, St. Elizabeth's, is being increasingly used as a housing facility for the seriously mentally-ill who cannot take care of themselves, but who otherwise pose no danger to themselves nor to others... and as the harmless are increasingly stockpiled in "St. E's", the facility is becoming noted for releasing people who should not be released, the high-functioning criminally insane and sexual predators. This is related to the inability of several agencies to establish or promote public or semi-private housing facilities in the communities. Community housing is considered essential for the care and therapy of most mentally-ill people, who generally do much better when given "examples of sanity" to emulate. Yet community housing is, on the one hand, essentially unregulated and not part of any public network and thus placement is by word-of-mouth from the street and not through agencies; on the other hand, efforts to establish any form of regulation of semi-private rooming facilities dedicated to supporting the mentally-ill tends to expose lackluster landlords who operate their facilities for top dollar in conditions which do not meet the building code. It's very problematic, and few are even trying to offer any solutions. In fact, the people who are supposed to be solving the problems now stand revealed as being themselves part of the problem.

In 1995, on UseNet and in other places, I began raising my voice against the Barry Cronies(tm) Administration largely over one single issue, which was reported upon exactly once by the Washington Post and then was subsequently ignored thereafter. There was an irregularity of some $725,000 misapprorpiated by the so-called "mental health advocates". These Federally-funded administrators at the "Information, Protection and Advocacy Center for Handicapped Individual/People with Disabilities (IPACHI)" took it upon themselves to use the corporate credit card to finance a trip to Africa and shop at high-toned retailers. According to the Federal (HHS) audit, IPACHI officers were paid about $238,000 for advocating for the disabled, and could not prove that they had advocated for the disabled at all. According to the National Association of Protection and Advocacy Systems:

It was a nightmare, an embarassment to the District... [i]f they had done their job, you wouldn't be seeing the deaths and problems in care we're seeing now.

IPACHI is "off the case" in terms of advocating for the District's disabled and mentally-ill; the new advocate, University Legal Services is developing a very positive reputation for aggressively pursuing the need and upholding the rights of the District's most-needy adults.

Moving right along to the most-needy children in the District, let's not forget the unsolved murder of little Brianna Blackmond, initially thought (by the unsuspecting general public, but of course we knew better) to be simply a sad case of someone the system could not reach. But as details have emerged, it has become evident even to Congress that the system is badly broken. See previous entries on this page for more detail. The House of Representatives is finally realizing that slapping down a lot of fresh concrete in the District to improve its appearance is merely cosmetic, and does nothing to address the rotting cancer within. The strength of the future generation is the child of today, and in the tender cares of the District of Columbia's "sordid, shameful" Child Welfare System, the child of today is in danger of its life. Said the House Majority Whip, Texas Republican Tom DeLay:

Remember that this is about the child who has died and will die again when deadlines come and go and reports are not completed. This is about children who depend on us to intervene when the family can't or won't keep them safe from harm... I see this as an opportunity to actually do something here... something that the nation can use as a model.

All of those who testified before Congress on this matter made note of the fact that "massive reform" is needed: so long as the distric'ts child Welfare System remains as is, the best that can be done is to try to tighten up the patchwork that holds-together the present multi-agency kludge. In particular, there was a major problem indicated by many, which involves the division of labor between the police and Child and Family Services. Cases which are of a sexual nature are handled by the police, while beatings and neglect are handled by Child and Family Services. It may in fact be necessary to create a new system which has its own police force. The Metropolitan Police Department's higher-ups declared intent to create a new unit which would handle both abuse of a sexual nature as well as cases of neglect, but again, this would simply create another interface where information could bottleneck and logjam, the exact sort of thing that got poor Brianna dead.

Again moving right along, but sticking to the subject of waste, mismanagement, fraud and that goddamned sucking sound coming from downtown Washington, it is getting near that time, people. What time? Time for the City of Washington DC to shut down DC General Hospital. "Public Benefit Corporation (PBC)", the quasi-governmental agency in charge of DC General and much of the publically-funded healthcare sector in the District, has been under intense scrutiny as DC General has slid farther and farther into the quicksands of finance. There is the ongoing under-the-table and possibly illegal payment by the District Government to DC General amounting to about $2 millions a month and totalling some $60 millions over the last 30 months. There is the interesting creative accounting practiced by DC General, which claims that DC Medicaid owes the hospital some $65 millions, which comes as news to the DC Public Health director Ivan C.A. Walks (MD), who called the claim "bizarre". DCFRA "Control Board" Chair Alice M. Rivlin admits that "[w]e clearly have very serious problems at the PBC". As many as four-hundred jobs may have to be cut, possibly not a bad idea as DC General, the "hospital of last resort in Washington" has been experiencing declining patient loads over recent years. In any case, the PBC really needs to get out of the hospital business and into preventative care, as it will better benefit the patient and cost everyone a lot less if patients can be seen in the neighborhood instead of having to wait until their problem becomes potentially-fatal and then visiting the emergency room only-then because by law they can't be turned away if they have an emergency need.

Moving right along from a change in leadership that probably should have happened a few years ago, we move to a change in leadership that just plain happened. First, Chief Financial Officer Valerie Holt has tendered her resignation, after 16 years in District government. After finally producing the 1999 financial report, which got a clean bill of health from auditors and showed the city to be ahead by some $86 millions, she decided to move on to bigger and better things in Federal strategic planning, with the new position rumored to be with the Department of Labor. The Deputy CFO, Natwar Ghandi, will be the interim CFO, and probably eventually the CFO.

Also departed, and under a dark cloud not of his own making, was interim Fire Chief Thomas Tippett. After fighting long and hard for the addition of a fifth firefighter to the ladder-truck teams, and for aides for battalion firechiefs, the Control Board vetoed the funding for the positions, and rather than lose out as being not able to deliver the goods, Tippett quit. Despite support from Mayor Anthony A. Williams in pursuit of his goals, Tippett couldn't get what he needed to "do everything in my power to improve safety and not unnecessarily place my employees in harm's way". No successor has been named.

Again, moving right along, we must note that the first-draft of the Republican National budget for the next year drastically reduces funding for projects such as the Red Line's proposed new MetroRail stop at New York and Florida Avenues NorthEast. This would effectively kill all of the planned new construction in the area (BATF headquarters, among other things) and stunt the Revitalization. May I propose that the District's movement to place the motto "taxation without representation" on the District's vehicular license plates should consider whether or not to bite the hand that was intending to feed them. Congress holds your leash, O Washington, and can very quickly strangle all of your hopes, not to mention you yourself, if you persist in this contumacy. It would be an absolute shame to see the District lose all of that money intended to make everything "all better now" by getting cocky before the neighborhood gets rebuilt. The whole point it to get cocky after the neighborhood has not only been rebuilt, but is crime-free, well-maintained, and something to be proud-of. Or you can act the fool now, get nothing, and it would be truly said of Washington that "they'd rather jump up on stage and break bad with god and get damned, than take a blessing from the angels off on the sidelines". Now please be quiet and take your blessings instead of, as the story goes, taking a knife to a gunfight. You want Revitalization? Act like you appreciate what you're getting, or I guess you never will "get it".

And stop cussing at me, okay? Once you calm down and think about it you'll see I'm right. I always am.

Meantime, though it appears that it may not get get funded very much, the old Redevelopment Land Agency (which handled the Columbia Heights makeover recently) is now to be called the National Capital Revitalization Corporation. Perhaps it can be partially-funded by DC Delegate Eleanor Holmes Norton's proposed 2-percent tax on residents of Maryland and Virginia who work in the District. This would simply be a cut out of the Federal taxes already paid out of income, but redirected to the District. Um, do hear something sucking? I do too.

May Days Part II

Still, Things Fall Apart

Welcome back again to the show that never ends. "Welcome to Washington."

I won't apologize for tardiness as I'm not tardy this time! I will apologize for my lack of diligence in muck-raking and stirring up trouble in news:dc.general. I just really haven't had the time, and you're actually lucky that I am giving up my entire weekend to complete this month's entry. Or maybe it's not so lucky: after reading a month's worth of the Washington Post as well as a lot of old articles saved for issue-tracking purposes, I'm feeling substantially depressed and once again I am trending towards predicting doom and gloom for the City of Washington shortly after Congress disbands the DCFRA "Control Board", should the District manage to continue to balance its budgets for another year.

The District of Columbia

After many years of a steady and implacable decline, the District of Columbia had reached a level of decay which -- despite the concerted best-efforts of a wide-variety of local factions all preferring an environment of ineffective law-enforcement in a decadent general local culture -- attracted the outrage and loathing of the national electorate and their elected representatives. Congress created the DCFRA Control Board, and President William Jefferson Clinton hand-picked the members of the Board and their Chairman as well. As the terms of the first Board expired, a new leadership was emplaced -- almost all lifelong Washingtonians -- and it must be observed that the gains of the first two years of the Board, scarcely-visible and largely-systemic as they were, may end up being nullified as the second Board may sensibly be viewed as "the fox in charge of the henhouse", merely of a more-competent and thus more-dangerous caliber than the Figureheads of Corruption which formerly presided over the deconstrution of the United States' Nation's Capital.

The first Control Board, US loyalists all, often formerly associated with Centrist organizations such as the US military or financial sector, have been largely replaced by a group of people whose social activist tendencies are rather towards the Left. Largely this may have been a Functionalist Left -- as opposed to those of the Left who openly called for the destruction of the Capitalist Regime, if only in revenge for having outlasted Communism -- but it is the Left nonetheless. Even as the political Right exercised the Public Will with an attempted closing of the borders to the extraordinary migration from corrupt Latin American regimes, elimination of Welfare As We Know It, deconstruction of the Welfare Culture Enclaves in our cities, and concentrization and concentration of Global Economy on the United States system and model, the Left has dug in its heels and to this very moment schemes toward the day when they may return to the policies that had, by the mid-1980s, very nearly destroyed America.

Even as the Metropolitan Police Department in the District of Columbia is touted as egalitarian, effective, concerned for human rights, and above-all "in control", we find after innumerable interviews with the veterans of the recent demonstrations against the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund that the cops are in fact "in control" but quite willing to stoop to a variety of tactics which are better considered as edging towards totalitarian as opposed to libertarian. And while Ubiquitous Law Enforcement can indeed reduce the levels of crime, it also unquestionably represses the exercise of political freedoms, and it especially does this when operating in conjunction with a well-trained and brought-to-heel national media. The American People should be informed that the Corporate-Government Talking Heads Media Machine -- once thought to be banished to posterity due to the Freedom Forces of privately-published and distributed-ownership InterNet -- are once again flexing their muscles. Be Warned! -the Liberal Media are off of their leashes once again, and all the greater national public saw of a nearly-brutal repression of peaceful demonstrators amounts to a candy-coated lie. The truth of the matter is that this Demonstration -- against interlocking transnational directorates eroding National Sovereignity, including that of the United States -- was suppressed with a variety of tactics including abuse of city authority preemptively shutting down support facilities, disrupting communications, mass jailings, telecommunications intercepts, infiltrations, and in fact made use of almost every tool of the totalitarian state, and made use of those tools against American citizens attempting to exercise their First Amendment rights in support of US Sovereignity. Yet these same "public protectors" cannot use the same techniques against forces clearly aligned against the American best-interest, and associated with extranational causes which regard our way of life as their enemy and our best citizens as their primary prey.

Recently the City of Washington "did the right thing" by finally activating enforcement of housing codes governing occupancy of slum properties which primarily housed noncitizens in the very heart of downtown Washington. Having deconstructed the Welfare Enclave slums, rents are very high in the District and in fact throughout the region. But rather than evict noncitizen tenants and permit/require the slumlords to bring their properties up to code, the City has shamefully kowtowed to special interests which believe its better to have self-contained enclaves of foreigners taking up blocks of downtown, when a mere continuation of present rent-control policies combined with an upgrading of slum properties would provide medium-cost housing to American-born District Residents coming off of Welfare immediately adjacent to where they might easily secure rewarding employment in the massive construction soon to come in Columbia Heights. Instead, the City government has bowed to foreign special interests and will leave their own people high and dry, festering in their outrage, while foreigners get all of the work and all of the housing and all of the money to be made from this construction centerpiece of the Revitalization of Washington. However, it would be mean-spirited for the City Concil or the Office of the Mayor to simply toss these people out onto the streets where they will angrily plot riot or assassination as was so common-practice in their war-torn homelands; therefor we recommend fast passage of a law which prohibits slumlords from collecting rent until the buildings are brought up to code. This will permit a window of time and income so that they may secure housing elsewhere, and provides incentive for the slumlords to get the buildings up to code as rapidly as possible, ideally so that native District residents can move out of the Welfare Enclaves into housing close to upcoming work.

Columbia Heights, it must be noted, still sparkles with fresh new concrete and a vista free of barricades, and even as the flowers bloomed and the springtime trees budded forth, business blooms along the 14th Street NW corridor, if not so quickly as the vegetation. Yet elsewhere in the city, any vehicle not equipped with tank treads is confronted with a massively devastated streetscape almost guaranteed to put any car or small truck in for repair. Columbia Heights was for many years the economic and social victim of the tiresome subsurface MetroRail construction, but as the streets opened up and became passable, life returned! Elsewhere in the City, though, even as vines strangle the greatest of trees, cuts in sidewalks and streets threaten the District's economic growth. Right now, in the springtime of a supposedly-unstoppable national economy, despite the strangling effects of the utilities' (and the City's) unrepaired street cuts, the City's economy nearly thrives. But once this season's growth-spurt is over, the weight of the vines will kill the tree, and the lack of passable streets and sidewalks around Washington will have the effect on the city-at-large that MetroRail construction for many years had on Columbia Heights: Destruction or Stagnation.

Fees for utilities making street cuts had been advised by innumerable sources, and in fact it was the Mayor's staffers who apparently thought (or did they?) that just getting the work done was more important than assuring the funding to make sure it was done right. But we see that either their thinking was in error, or that their stated plan was simply a ploy to warp the sensible goals of the Revitalization into a reality which grated on the daily life of the citizen. What better way to secure one's own future promotions than being able to point to that bad old Control Board and "their ill-advised occupation" as being the cause of impassible streets all over town? The average DC resident is exceptionally easy to hoodwink with this sort of rhetoric. But it was, after all, the Mayor's staffers who were responsible, according to the Washington Post story of 2000 April 23. The rates finally imposed amount to roughly one-sixth the average use fees recommended by various advisors and consultants, and leave the District holding the financial bag for the cost of repairs. Will the District ever get around to fixing this with the District's own money? No way, they'll be off to Congress with their hat in their hand, right at the same time that they drag their feet even further, demanding Statehood or at least, contrary to the explicit requirements of the US Constitution, elected representatives in Congress.

Another prime impediment to any real progress towards ultimate solvency and financial responsibility -- essential precursors to any long-term Revitalization -- are entrenched major interests. One of the worst of these is the "Public Benefits Corp ("PBC")", which is intended to be primary dleivery system for health-care to the District's poor. Among other things, the PBC operates the moribund DC General Hospital ("DC General"). DC General is increasingly in the news as it increasingly approaches Fiscal Black Hole status. This is alarming as we move to within 18 months of the initial period of the lifetime Five Years Welfare Max. There are some 80,000 persons in the District, largely lifetime recipients of public assistance, who will be entirely uncovered by any form whatsoever of health insurance coverage. This will roughly double the approximately 90,000 persons already with no, or next-to-no, insurance coverage. Add to this recipe for disaster the fact that DC General relies almost entirely on two sources of revenue, one being possibly-illegal under-the-table "loans" from the District, the second and major revenue stream being overbilling of District Medicaid and US Medicare. The Medicare revenue stream will not be going away when Medicaid withdraws coverage from people exceeding their lifetime limit on Welfare, but it has been well-publicized that independent auditors of the PBC have exposed that organization's practice of accounting irrecoverable overbillings rejected by Medicaid as "accounts receivable. Nobody knows the exact degree of "cooked books" in the PBC or DC General, but informed opinion is that "DC General is, financially, a house built of wet cards set on cardboard floating on oil". To make matters all the worse, there has been little or no investment in the single possible remedy to the PBC's DC General crisis; the problem here is that the PBC has invested only the most-scant resources into neighborhood-clinics dealing in cost-effective preventitive and minor-care medicine: it appears that they prefer to cook the books over inflated emergency-care "receivables" running into thousands of dollars, as opposed to acknowledging taking minor losses in cost-effective neighborhood clinics.

It is worth noting that the District's 1999 Financial Report was released at the end of 2000 April and was rated as "unqualified" in terms of accuracy by an independent accounting agency. The City of Washington ran approximately $85 millions in surplus, additionally with approximately $35 millions set aside to pay off debts. Yet we wish to note in no uncertain terms that it would be at best throwing bad money after good for the District to continue to prop up the PBC and DC General as they are presently operated. We recommend that steps be taken to create a new oversight agency which will eventually replace PBC, with only the highest levels of responsible planning and accounting in place from Day One of the new agency's operation. Furthermore, we believe that any such new agency should have as part of its charter authority a mission-statement promoting outreach into community preventative healthcare and early treatment of non-preventable illnesses and injuries, with a primary emphasis on health and nutrition education as well as a popularizing of first-aid and minor-care awareness. Vast savings may be realized once PBC and DC General no longer count on people waiting until illnesses/injuries become life-threatening and showing up at emergency rooms, from which by law they may not be turned away due to inability to pay. It is much better to admit you spent money on an ounce of prevention, rather than to claim -- as is the present practice -- that the government owes you money because rather than an ounce of prevention, you overcharged for a pound of cure. In the meantime, health-maintenance organizations receiving funding from Medicaid have increasingly steer clients to hospitals other than DC General.

A preliminary report issued by Cambio Health Solutions, an independent consultant hired to review the status and procedures of the PBC and DC General calls for, among other things, effective oversight and supervision of the performance of the clinical staff. Also called for was a major turnover of administrative and financial management functions, and such positions have been bid out to the private sector. Predictably, in mid-May, DC General workers demanded the ouster of the official responsible, who had also predicted that another recommendation of the Cambio report, extensive staff cuts, would in fact occur.

Other major institutions in the District will continue to foul efforts towards Revitalization, and none moreso than the ingrained culture of "the way Washington works".

It must be observed by an Washingtonian, and it remains almost incomprehensible to anyone from anywhere else in the country, but the crony-riddled "kleptocracy" of former mayor Marion Barry -- again seeking local elected office where his election is almost assured -- was less the result of a man run amok in pursuit of his own celebration in a cult of Personality, and more the inevitable expression of the political culture of the District. Poor uneducated people are often prey to the victimizations of better-educated people who come from their ranks and who know them all too well and know exactly to which weaknesses they should pander to best bilk their "comrades". That this is true was adequately demonstrated by a report from Federal auditors which was mentioned in the Washington Post on 2000 May 9th. The Post article detailed how local "leaders" in Public Housing projects wasted a total of $28 millions on such fripperies as big-screen TVs and "questionable services", often in apparent collusion with former employees of the DC Housing Authority, which was by this time being placed into receivership by a Federal judge. The grants were originally intended to be used for such things as creation of on-site training facilities to assist lifetime recipients of public subsidies to prepare themselves for employment in such fields as data-entry. Instead of InterNetworked computers, it seems that the residents intended to benefit from the grants got mostly nothing, while the "consultants" and "community leaders" appear to have gotten a little something something which is presently unaccounted-for and which can probably never be traced or restored to the intended recipients.

And quite probably, this being Poor Washington, the intended recipients never really truly expected otherwise. And as the deadline to the end of the Five Year Lifetime Limit nears, don't expect people to suddenly wise-up and do the right thing by busting their butts towards a longterm benefit of rapid education for themselves or family members, expect them to "get whilst the getting's good" and divert what they can, and not wanting to get caught with any material goods, to divert the funding for their hopeful future to one hell of a party tonight. The solution to this is, of course, to simply have the programs slapped into place from the top down with no community involvement until the programs have been in place, and successfully utilized, for several years. Otherwise, it's just more "money down a rat hole" and you might as well just throw money at junkies with the expectation that they'll cold-turkey and invest sensibly -- you'll get the exact same results.

Noted in passing: outbound DC Housing Authority Receiver David I. Gilmore, who has worked wonders with DC's decrepit and mismanaged Public Housing, is seeking greater autonomy for the Housing Authority. He makes a clear and compelling case that the Authority is doing an excellent job, and turning it over to the District government would be, to put not too fine a point on it, idiocy. The Authority receives no city funds and is financed entirely by the Federal Government. There is no good reason to put it under City authority and we firmly support any actions which would tend to protect it from any "opportunities" for the District government to return it to its former state, or to allow free run to such practices as described in the paragraph above.

That District culture is basically entrenched and resistant to change has been noted even by District Mayor Anthony A. Williams, during a recent visit to Capitol Hill, where he was praised for the progress that has been made, and also questioned about his ability to further improve management, or for that matter to maintain performance standards should certain key personnel retire or seek positions elsewhere. This issue is underscored by the recent announcement of Schools Superintendent Arlene Ackerman that she will be taking a position as Superintendent of the San Francisco California Schools, after having worked substantial changes on the District's pathetic public schools. She was hired after a major national "talent search", and officials of her caliber are difficult to find. Add to the rarity of such qualified individuals the fact that it is an accepted "given" in most administrative circles that a position with the District Government is almost inherently doomed to failure and thus acceptance of a District Government position would represent career suicide. Not least of such concerns is the increasing national awareness that the District Government Culture prefers cronyism, nepotism, and kleptocracy; it's also an accepted given that anyone accepting a District Government position almost certainly will fail not because of the difficulties of redeeming an organizational shambles, but because of extreme opposition by the local rank and file in midlevel management combining with incompetence among the employeess, all exascerbated by the exceptionally well-developed culture of backbiting, sabotage, skullduggery and manipulation which does in fact appear to be the sole core competency of many District Government employees. The insoluble conundrum here is that the incompetent drive the competent away to greener fields and better pay in more-rewarding conditions, with a rare few hanging on despite all of the odds, and with those rare few increasingly comprised of the older members of the older generation. It would appear that the Mayor's answer to Congress should be, despite any objections or reservations, to hire from outside of the District, and to do so en-masse so that those who can and will shall outnumber those who either can't or won't.

Assuming for now that there is suddenly (and inexplicably) a mass resurgence of competency, unity, and willingness -- who's going to pay for it all? This is one of the few positive developments within the last month or so: "The money's there". The District is required to retain a reserve fund for emergencies, and there has been a one-time deal brokered between the Mayor's office and the Senate Appropriations Committee for the District's chair, Texas Republican Kay Bailey Hutchison. This agreement would, rather than requiring the District to add $150 millions to the reserve fund annually, to maintain the reserve fund at $150 millions. Of course, either approach will be massively hampered by the City Council's insane act of last year, which instituted a massive tax cut in the District, even as the budget-cutters were pressed to the wall "pinching on the dollar 'til the eagle screamed". But now that the money's there, the Mayor intends to use some $132 millions to patch up some of the City's most problem-ridden programs, such as Mental Health, homelessness remediation, public health outreach, and especially on fixing the truly-pathetic child and Family Services and related agencies, which have been categorized as "a mega ton pile of really ugly accidents all piled up and just waiting to fall on the heads of defenseless children". Personally I think there's the one best thing that the money could be put towards fixing: the Council might think it's better to save up money (and give tax cuts at the same time, yeah right) against a future emergency -- I think it's best to fix the emergency that's been going on in Child and Family Services for the last decade, and fix it right now... before another child dies. The Council has given their approval, so long as the money is not spent except by approval of the Chief Financial Officer. It should be noted that the next CFO is widely expected to be guaranteed to be a creature of the Council, but it should also be noted that should such a person go on record stating that they were ordered by the Council to not spend money to aid the needful, the Council members might be looking for new jobs long before their creature does. We note in passing that Valerie Hold resigned under pressure in early 2000 May, and will be working for the US Department of Labor as a strategic planner.

Note in passing, and for some closure -- the former chief of the day-programs branch of the Mental Retardation and developmental disaiblities Administration (DC Department of Human Services), one Arnet C. Smith, was convicted of federal conspiracy charges and conflict of interest charges as well, all originating with investigations of Mr Smith's dealings with a provider of services for the mentally-retarded, in which the provider made a loan to Smith which resulted in a tidy profit from a real-estate deal, and subsequently Smith steered clients to the provider's services. The provider, one Denise Braxtonbrown-Smith (no relation), was recently convicted of bilking the District government of some $1.6 millions in fraudulent claims for some of those services.

Interestingly, this present reporting was triggered by an episode of exceptionally bad feng shui encountered while cruising between Gaithersburg Maryland and Rockville Maryland, along MD Route 355. The "Kings Farm" development, in my humble opinion of the feng shui there, is destined to produce a generation of heinously warped and possibly perverse individuals. I have long been tempted -- and never moreso than yesterday -- to write an astounding tome of epic horror involving the propinquity to Celera (which has just sequenced the Human Genome) and assorted other major biotechnology firms, the aforementioned bad feng shui, local Montgomery County politics, and the inevitable scheming of the political elements in the People's Republic of China. I may write this novel yet -- which should inspire deep shuddering in anyone reading it and passing by the place -- should I foolishly forget the effect that the Kings Farm development has upon me, and thus foolishly drive past the place again. I was forced due to the horror of it all (being stuck in rush-hour traffic didn't help) to engage in a nonstop rant about everything I hate about Rockville for the next several hours, which could be cured only by blowing $300.00 on a 60 gigabyte harddrive for the new server, and diverting myself with the intricacies of installing hardware onto my new Linux box.

But I feel much better now -- and won't go back to Rockville, to waste another year.

The Region

First and foremost, we note in passing that the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority ("WMATA" or "Metro") has extended MetroRail closing hours to 2 AM. They also are proposing early completion of rail stations and routes, with five Green Line stations into Prince George's County Marland being opened in 2001 January. Furthermore, eight new bus lines will be opened which primarily serve those travelling from suburb to suburb, as well as increasing the size of the Metrobus fleet.

Also noted in passing, we wish to note that Fairfax County Virginia has achieved a $90,000/year median income level. It should also be noted that the price of housing in that general area, especially near Dulles International Airport, is very expensive and increasingly-so.

Noted in passing, Montgomery County Maryland, contiguous with the northwest of the District of Columbia, has been named an All-American City. "MC" or "Monkey County" is, outside of a few small hamlets and the City of Rockville (Maryland's second-largest city and a former All-American itself, but not this year!) governed under the County Council model rather than the Municipal model, and thus was eligable for the award as an entity. It's also extensively urbanized.

Last year's drought appears to have been entirely ameliorated by the rainfalls of this year. In recent weeks, it rained more days than not, and the typical weather pattern of thunderstorms on a near-daily basis appears to have resumed at least for the month of June. The weather is once again as might be expected, hot, and extremely humid. Visitors beware! Dress for the jungle, light natural fabrics such as cotton, or specialty fibers designed to aid perspiration are advised.

With water rather less of a concern, the political pressure is off of Maryland Governor Parris Glendenning, who is reported to be ready to sign a deal with Virginia, which has sought to replace its canal-fed inland water intake feeding the booming counties of Fairfax and Loudon. Less studies will be required before approval might be given to extend the intakes to the mid-stream of the Potomac River.

The Potomac River itself is reported to be in the best health in this century, a far cry from its distinction as a sewer of filth through most of the 20th Century. The fish have returned, ranging from trout in the headwaters through a healthy selection of bass and catfish in the lower river, and the shad are said to be running again and building population. In the tidal river, the mixed-salinity fish are said to be flourishing at the highest levels ever recorded. With the return of the fish, we have seen the return of the fishers, with migratory waterfowl of all sorts re-establishing themselves to top a newly-robust ecology. Sports are challenging the sportlike, the fish are biting and so long as you catch them north of the Anacostia they're worth eating. Though not so mighty as the Mississippi, the Potomac is a world-class river and designated a National Historic River, primarily due to the north-shore Chesapeake and Ohio Canal, a national park, which protects the northern shore from river's edge development. We can only pray that Virginia will devise seome similar means to protect the Potomac River -- because it appears that they're going to be drinking it no less than are the Marylanders and the residents of the District of Columbia.

The District

In a rare fit of good judgement concerning the District's Schools, former Montgomery County Maryland schools chief Paul L. Vance has been named to the position of Interim Superintendant. The Superintendant position has been vacant since the departure of Arlene Ackerman, who is leaving for a position with the San Francisco California schools. Ackerman leaves behind a legacy of rapid change in the intensely-damaged District Schools, and how much of that change was useful, or can be maintained, has yet to be seen. Ackerman's tenure saw a veritable plague of computer-system problems which were unknown to her predecessors, largely because the District's Schools were almost entirely without information technologies. The main symptom was late or misdirected paychecks for the staffers. However, Ackerman was able to get rid of a lot of deadweight on the staff, has overseen a great deal of infrastructure improvement, and oversaw the beginning of a top-down rational system of accounting in the administrative areas. She's also credited with improving the standardized-test scores of District children, though not by much -- the majority still cannot meet "basic" levels -- but this is no damning indictment, as she simply didn't have much to work with: multiple generations of children have failed to learn much of anything in the District's pathetic public school system, recently tied with Baltimore Maryland for "worst in the Nation".

Ackerman cited, among other problems, what she categorized as excessive layers of bureaucracy and a very timid DCFRA Control Board which seemed unwilling to advance the pace and scope of changes. Ackerman was also not pleased with her critics, who insisted that she was spending too much time on day-to-day micromanagement, and not setting sweeping policy goals which could be achieved by delegate authorities. In any case, Ackerman was invariably caught in a crossfire between the Mayor, the Council, the DCFRA Control Board and the needs of the children and occasional activism -- but more frequently utter apathy -- on the part of the public, combining with well-intentioned but commonly poorly-conceived Charter School breakaways.

Among other problems was the truly daunting mess in Special Education. Besides problems with the drivers contracted to pick up Special-Ed students, inadequacies in records-keeping and paperwork submissions is losing the District Schools, especially Special Education, somewhere between $40 millions and $80 millions in missed Medicare payments.

Vance, who ran neighboring Montgomery County's school throughout most of the 1990s, has quite a job ahead of him. Montgomery schools were at one time some of the best in the nation, though they too have fallen on harder times of late. It also remains to be seen whether Vance's success in Montgomery was due to any efforts on his part -- in which case we should see sustained, if slow, improvement in the District Schools -- or if he was successful only in maintaining the levels of success endowed him by his own predecessors.

Within the past week the District voted on Mayor Anthony A. Williams' proposal to alter the composition of the School Board. The School Board has been purely-elected for years, with the School Board being generally considered a prerequisite of office in the City Council. Given that the School Board has of late been mostly a toothless tiger, still it has been the risable scene of histrionics and tissies of the caliber one ordinarily would expect only of the most insecure and highstrung of Hollywood divas. There have been fisticuffs, name-calling, probably anything short of ear-biting "goes" in the School Board; see previous entries for details. Given that the School Board tolerates this sort of idiocy and also given that the School board has historically been a steppingstone to city administration, it's little wonder that the City of Washington wound up in dire straits, and it's less of a wonder that the schools became a national laughingstock. The Mayor's proposal could do nothing to change the political ramifications of being on the School Board, but his proposal would at least ensure that some of the members of the School Board were not only interested in, but competent at, promoting the education and welfare of the District's schoolchildren. Slightly less than half of the Board would be appointed by the Mayor, and the rest would be elected.

The voters decided to favor the Mayor's proposal, by a bare scrape of about 1000 votes, and in fact not all of the votes have been counted -- it could go either way depending on the final tally of the absentee ballots. The sad part is that the districts reporting the final votes per district have revealed a city divided along both racial and geographic lines: everything to the east of North Capitol Street voted against, and most to the west of North Capitol voted for the Mayor's proposal. This is predictable being bandied about as "rich white people" versus "the democratic faithful of the District's majority population". The vote and the Act have been challenged as being dismissive of full democratic process. As usual, shortsighted idiots with an axe to grind will make the children suffer as they try to make their own political future through grandstanding that ultimately benefits nobody.

The City Council and the Mayor have sent a budget to Congress for approval which amounts to some $5.3 billions. The budget has increases for the schools -- about $70 millions more than last year -- as well as increased funding for the police. Among other increases, we see expenditures earmarked for neighborhood improvement programs, and some increases in public-health programs. Also included is a modest tax-cut for the general public. While the Council has insisted on the tax-cut as a meawns to make Washington more attractive, which the Mayor has called extravagant and a budget-buster, the Mayor has insisted on increased funding of public-health and neighborhood improvements, which the Council has called extravigant and a budget-buster.

The City of Washington, now approaching the fourth consecutive year of balanced budgets -- which will end the tenure of the DCFRA Control Board -- still has its hand out to the Federal Government, looking for handouts in a pathetic stance which is all too reminiscent of the final years of near-collapse under the Barry-Cronies(tm) Regime. Yet we have the following remark regarding the wisdom of the Council's tax-cut, from no less an eminence than Illinois Senator Richard J. Durbin (Democrat), who is the ranking member of the Senate oversight committee on District funding:

As your tax cut grows, your call on the Federal government for more and more money becomes less convincing... [i]f you can give money away, you obviously don't need it.

Furthermore:

Those of us who observe the District of Columbia find it difficult to understand how the City Council can ignore the shortcomings in your educational system, the shortcomings in public safety, and shortcomings in public health -- and decide instead this money isn't necessary.

Well, face it, Senator -- they're quite mad. How mad are they, Senator? I think you know:

The only analogy I can think of is someone who bought new draperies for their home and is enjoying them but didn't have the money to fix the roof and the water is coming in.

It is a fact that something must be done to try to give some sort of relief to the City's poorest, but I think that if we do some examination of the District's tax code, we'll find that the major impact of taxation on the city's poor is that of the sales-tax, not income taxes of any sort. If the District seriously wanted to ease the burden on the poorest, they'd combine the scheduled relief in income and sales taxes with adding a luxury tax on the possessions of the rich, who are not paying as great a percentage of their income on taxes as are the poor. This might, however, cause a tendency for the rich to move their domiciles out of the District, even as their businesses became more profitable due to lower income taxes.

It must be noted however that it is for the City, and not for the Federal, government to address the infrastructure, safety, and health needs of District residents. Already the Federal Government greatly supports the District, with the recent assumption by the Feds of responsibility for many, if not most, of the major thoroughfares in the District.

Noted in passing: The City began keeping records, of which streets had been cut open to install fiber-optic cable, only in March. We'll try to let you know when they're mostly done cutting up the city streets.

The Mayor and the City Council are debating the disposition of the first roughly $72 millions dollars of Tobacco Settlement money. Predictably, the Mayor wants to spend it to improve programs, dedicating some 65 percent of this year's payment to improving public health and education and saving the rest. But quite unpredictably, the generally spendthrift City Council has proposed saving almost all of the settlement money and creating an endowment. This would be an excellent idea if it was actually done, but we personally suspect that this endowment would tend to be frittered away as "tax cuts" right before elections. As the Senator notes above, "if you've got money to give away, obviously you don't need it". Although the matter was resolved by a decision to split the money evenly into funds for the endowment and funds for public-health and education, we propose that the only legitimate use of this settlement arising out of public-health concerns, is investment in improved public health and education.

Regarding public health, for many years the District doesn't seem to have been getting a whole lot relative to the amount of money they've been spending. Congress has initiated an investigation as to the state of affairs at DC General, and also into the affairs of the quasi-governmental "Public Benefits Corp ("PBC")" which is the administrative authority behind DC General as well as most of the publicly-funded clinics in the city. A recent audit characterized bookkeeping in the PBC as "laughable" and "creative and inventive where not outright fantastic". The general state of the PBC's finances were characterized as "abysmal". Also questionable were bonusses paid out to the management of the PBC which prompted the remark "if that's what it costs to have it done like it's been getting done, there's no way we can possibly afford getting the job done right". There are many assorted irregularities in the under-the-table "loans" made by the city for week-to-week operations at DC General.

Not surprisingly, it came to light that many of the recent hired at the PBC/DC General are linked to City Council members. This is absolutely classic Washingtoniana. Assorted friends and relatives of Council members were hired slightly before the state of the PBC/DC General began to be publicized, but well after it was known within the City Council and certainly after the PBC/DC General management knew that DC General was spiralling into a financial rathole. Gilbert Hahn, a former chairman of the DC Council and former board chairman at DC General said of the hirings:

Mr. Fairman [the PBC chief Executive] ought to be replaced... [h]e's hiring people that are just intended to maintain his office.

On 2000 4 June, Mayor Williams removed from their positions at the PBC, some four board members, all of which were holdovers from the Barry-Cronies(tm) Regime. One vacant position was filled by appointment and the four removed appointees will be replaced as follows:

• Martis James Davis -- high-level specialist in directing public relations
• Chris C. Gardiner -- CPA, specializing in audits of governmen agencies through his business
• Nancy Taplin McCall -- RN, specialist in health-insurance payment systems and health-economist
• Edward T. Procaro -- attorney, expert in health policy and hospital statistical data gathering
• Loretta Tate -- President, Marshall Heights Community Development Organization (Ward 7).

Dismissed were:

• James O. Baxter III
• Maria S. Gomez
• Bertram M. Lee, Sr.
• James T. Speight. Jr.

Also in the news: Mayor Williams, caught "with his pants down" -- along with most of the rest of the District Government upper tier -- over the revolting conditions and practices ongoing in the District's contracted "caregivers" attending to the needs of the mentally-ill and developmentally-disabled, has publicly apologized for his lack of awareness and stated that he's going to get on the ball about improving the lots of those remanded to the care of the District. Among other things, he's suggested some no-brainer "duh" solutions, such as requiring background checks on employees and contractors, creating an adult-fatality review committee, and evaluating the medical conditions of the city's wards. But the most damning is the fact that reportedly the Mayor was informed repeatedly that people had been dying and continued to die under the "care" of the District government. We know that the Mayor is a busy man, but all we can say at this point is: Mister Mayor, when people keep telling you that your government is killing its citizens, you ought to drop what you're doing and get on the ball.

Noted in passing, MPD Captain Willie Dandridge, 37, a 15-year veteran and former head of homicide and community-policing units, has been promoted to Commander, 6th District, replacing Assistant Chief Rodney Monroe. Monroe had retired for a time to aid in community development and outreach activities, and then returned to duty. Monroe had reportedly been disheartened by a spate of killings of youths in his district and had expressed a desire to approach the problem from a position other than as a policeman. Apparently, he later decided that he could better promote the public welfare as Assistant Chief.

Noted in passing, the Metropolitan Police Department had an academy graduating class comprised entirely of experienced officers who transferred in from other departments, which might tend to ameliorate the effects of the rush-to-hire which, in the 1980s, resulted in the hiring of many unqualified officers who later turned out to be of very poor character and tended to get themselves in trouble with the laws they were meant to uphold. Police Chief Charles H. Ramsey was able to work a deal with the City Council which would permit the MPD to hire experienced officers at rates and with benefits commensurate with their experience. In the meantime, the City Council and various citizens-groups have been pressuring the MPD to greatly increase the percentage of sworn officers actually on patrol in the District.

Noted in passing, Augusta Georgia Fire Chief Ronnie Few has been nominated for the position of Fire Chief for the City of Washington. He would be paid $130,000 annually. Mr. Few would assume control of a Fire Department plagued by scandal, deteriorating equipment, in which budget problems have been blamed for the deaths of firefighters, and from which the last Acting Chief resigned over what he considered short-staffing due to budget problems.

Noted in passing, former medical director of the acclaimed Whitman/Walker Clinic (AIDS/HIV/gay and lesbian health), Dr. Larry Siegel, 64, has been named as administrator of the District's Addiction Prevention and Recovery Administration ("APRA"). He'll be paid $135,000 per year. A recovering substance abuser, he was hand-picked by the new DC Health Department Director Ivan C.A. Walks and he'll work to get more addicts into treatment faster. The DC APRA has long been semi-crippled by the long waiting lists and shortages.

As always, I must beg your pardon for the delay in reporting. Be advised that I am still doing catch-up for the month of June, see the entry above for July 1. This week's pathetic excuse is once again that work is leaving me with that drained feeling and as a rule by the time I get home, I pretty much want to have a few beers and pass out; certainly I'm not in condition to do much reporting -- at least not to the standards I've tried to lead you to expect from me.

Catch-Up

Moving right into catch-up, we will fly right along, expanding where necessary.

The Petworth Neighborhood, located just to the north and west of the District's prestigious Howard University on Georgia Avenue NW just north of Florida Avenue NW, has over recent years been the subject of some intense scrutiny and debate, notably as one of the most ugly and dangerous of NorthWest Washington's neighborhoods. This isn't too surprising, it was one of the neighborhoods which was rather well-and-truly trashed during the decades-long construction of the troubled MetroRail Green Line, now nearing total completion. While construction continued, the neighborhood was divided by the detours, yawning pits, closed sidewalks, and pelted by the gritty ejecta of the deep tunnelling and rendered impassible to all but rats, two-legged vermin, and the serious die-hard residents. But Petworth was at one time a highly desirable neighborhood, one of the best examples of tree-lined avenues and busy streets carrying the trade of the city. With the completion of most of the Green Line over the last year, and expected final completion end-to-end within six months, Petworth is due for renaissance.

But how do you get a renaissance to happen in Petworth? The place has a reputation little short of foul, due to the string of killings by an emergent serial-killer (apprehended) within recent years, and the increasing numbers of murders concentrating roughly between the Columbia Heights MetroRail Station and the new Petworth/Georgia Avenue Station which is scheduled to open in September. Mayor Anthony A. Williams has decided that one way to bring some life back to Petworth will be to place several government facilities in Petworth. Noted in passing, the Mayor has declared an intention to focus on the Georgia Avenue NW Corridor from the District Line across from Silver Spring Maryland, all of the way downtown. From there, Revitalization would join axes of new energy already radiating along "U" Street NW and Florida Avenue NW.

Noted in passing, Mayor Williams has named a replacement for departed Community Development chief Othello Mahone, said replacement being Milton J. Bailey, who was an astonishing sucess as the executive director of the DC Housing Finance Agency. He was able to convert that agency from a major debtor into a major asset-holder, and we do wish him as much, or greater, success in developing community organizations promoting neighborhood revitalization. There's so much potential here, all that's really needed is someone competent to, as it were, keep some water on the gardens.

Petworth would be one of the first, but not the only, neighborhoods to benefit from a plan to sell high-value downtown real-estate owned by the city, and relocate major government offices in neighborhoods, providing not only amelioration of the congestion downtown, but some anchors to rebuilding in the neighborhoods. One of the first agencies proposed for relocation, in this instance to Petworth, would be the Department of Motor Vehicles ("DMV").

While on the subject of renovation, we note that this has been "the summer of boom" for Washington. During the spring, probably as a result of several factors including aging underground cabling and the city's heavy use of anti-ice snow-removal chemicals, there have been a series of manhole-cover explosions. Now this is not all that uncommon here in Washington, where by law almost all wiring is either underground or in the alleys, but some of the recent explosions have been in places such as fashionable and busy Georgetown NW and on at least two occasions have caused sustained power outages for local residents and businesses, and also have tossed the manhole-covers sufficient distances to seriously imperil life and property. Any explosion capable of tossing a 200 pound manhole cover the length of a block is no laughing matter. The utility companies at first dismissed the explosions as "routine" (!) and then admitted that there was more that they could do about it, and then set about doing it. Such repairs and preventative measures will include the installation of spark-arrestors and suchlike, as well as better monitoring and sensing equipment underground.

Also problematic, if not quite-so explosively-so, was MetroRail's tendency over one period of some two weeks, to have some small fires halt service along substantial portions of routes. Mostly nobody's life was in danger, but this highlights the aging of the system. Within the recent year, other problems had come to light such as the aging of the relays that were supposed to almost-entirely automate the operation of the trains, and some of the recent small fires pointed out weaknesses in both the planning for fire emergencies, and the training of MetroRail personnel for directing rider evacuations of trains and stations in the event of such fires. Also, it was noted that the in-tunnel communications systems had been fully installed in the routes serving the wealthier neighborhoods, but such essential communications equipment was either not installed or insuffciently installed in neighborhoods serving the less-than-affluent communities. Metro states that it is in remediation process addressing the issues. Among other things, Metro is pressing the issue of the control relays with their manufacturer, Alstom, which makes rail-related products for use worldwide, and the National Transportation Safety Board is also weighing in on this issue because of the nationally-widespread use of these relays.

Health, Safety, Welfare

At last admitting that neither he, nor his staffers -- all of whom should have known especially after an award-winning Washington Post series of exposees -- knew about the dismal state of the District's "services" to the profoundly-retarded wards of the city, to say nothing of the "care" given to the mentally-ill of Washington, Mayor Anthony A. Williams claims that he accepts responsibility for his failure to read the Post and other loudly-screeching alarms such as this website. Even his staffers admit to having "had the wool pulled over our eyes". Reliable rumor has it that when pressed for explanations as to why nobody seriously investigated public health "services" for the outcasts and forgotten of the city, one staffer is said to have remarked "hell, this is the District, we should have presumed it to be fouled up beyond contempt and used that as a given, instead of being a bunch of happy Pollyannas and expecting like idiots that anything was actually being done right".

For instance, the city's hospital for the seriously mentally-ill, Saint Elizabeths's Hospital, so badly failed on three critical standards during a Federal review that it may lose some $80 millions in Medicare funding. Foul-ups included (and this is simply the stuff the Feds were looking at, and hardly addresses other major failures) gross understaffing of fulltime nurses; longterm therapy of patients consisted of being locked in a room and forced to watch television; and gross failure of top-level medical supervision of the decisions of underlings. For this level of care, the taxpayers are being billed roughly $300 per patient per day. For the sort of treatment the patients are being given, a syringe full of dope, a rent-a-cop and a lockable hotel room would provide better amenities, and for only about $100 a day, ask any junkie. Someone is getting hosed here, and this is yet another prime example of "that sucking sound coming from Washington".

Noted in passing: one Susan Braxtonbrowne-Smith was recently sentenced to prison for seven years for defrauding some $1.6 millions from the DC Government over her contracting to provide "care" for retarded wards of the District. According to US Attorney Mark H. Dubester, whose opinion and evidence the sentencing judge evidently found credible, Braxtonbrowne-Smith "lied, cheated and stole in every way imaginable" (typical Barry-Crony(tm)!) and was characterized as (typical Barry-Crony(tm)!) a "person of stunning greed".

Now, Moving Right Along to the One True and Mighty Sucking Sound in District Public Health, let's talk about the quasi-governmental Public Benefits Corp ("PBC"), the parent organization purporting to deliver public health benefits to the District's residents, and also not-incidentally the oversight body running the awesomely-troubled DC General Hospital.

In our last entry, we noted the appointment of several new top-level managers to the PBC, and they have taken their jobs and are reportedly daily ever-more astounded by the depths of mismanagement at DC General and in the PBC. Edward T. Porcaro, a lawyer and expert in gathering hospital statistical data and health-policy, while remarking on the $90 millions deficits for the last three years expected to be detangled from the laughable "bookkeeping" at DC General:

The finances are the symptom of the problem... [t]he problem is the fundamental lack of management infrastructure here.

Of course the same could have been said (and was) of the entire City Government. That the PBC might somehow be exempt is a concept that defies any commonsense. See remarks above concerning the state of the city's "care" of the mentally-ill and retarded.

Of course, the PBC and DC General are under investigation by the US General Accounting Office, with reports delivered to Capitol Hill. And as rumor has it, one phrase appears to be uttered with increasing frequency, vehemence, and loathing: "who the hell is this bozo Fairman and just what the hell does he think he's getting away with!"

He's getting away with plenty -- one of the last of the remaining legacies of the Barry-Cronies(tm) Regime, PBC Chief Executive Officer John A. Fairman evidently always saw the handwriting on the wall -- it appears that late last year, about the time that this writer and many others began to bring to public attention the fact that "things don't be right with the PBC", Fairman renegotiated his contract with the PBC so that no matter the conditions and circumstances of his departure from the PBC, he would receive one million dollars severance pay. As was remarked by the Mayor's policy director, one Gregory M. McCarthy -- evidently a man of a perspicacity all-too-rare in Washington, "This is insane". Well, of course it is, and all the more reason to do something about the city's Mental Health Care Crisis. Clearly, the lunatics have taken over the asylum. But that's old news.

As we noted in our last entry, the issue that had been raised was the issue of questionable bonusses paid out to the management of the PBC which prompted the remark "if that's what it costs to have it done like it's been getting done, there's no way we can possibly afford getting the job done right". Well, it looks as if the city has no choice but to afford getting the job done right, without Mr Fairman, cost to the city and the taxpayers, One Million Dollars just to take the first step in the right direction, canning the CEO of the PBC.

Moping right along to something that, for a change, is actually being done right, a $70 millions five-year agreement has been reached between the District and Federal governments to hire Richmond Virginia contractors VMS Inc to "maintain, improve and preserve" major roadways in the District. According to Washington Post reporting, VMS will be responsible for some 344 lane-miles of pavement (presumably after utility companies repair the cuts with which they've recently pockmarked the city while installing fiber optic cabling); nearly 3000 drainage catchbasins, nearly 120 bridges, nearly half a million feet of curbs and gutters, 8 tunnels, and a lot of guardrails and crash cushions. This may at long last do something to give a smoother ride to the long-suffering shock-absorbers of anyone driving in the District, which has for a decade been utterly infamous for its bus-eating potholes and truck-killer "centerline humps". Now if only they can do something about the infamous "washboard" pavement at New York Avenues and Bladensburg Road NE, maybe less people will break their chattering teeth during rapid decelerations at that intersection.

Also in need of repair is the venerable Woodrow Wilson Bridge aross the mighty Potomac River just to the south of Washington. This workhorse structure carries endless traffic from along Interstate 95 which bypasses Washington as the eastern loop of the Capital Beltway. While there is already a plan afoot to build a replacement span, that is nowhere near to being even seriously begun, much less completed, and engineers note that the present span needs a new deck by next spring, and they are requesting some $6 millions to get it done on time.

This comes at a time when the Federal government is balking at assuming higher-than-projected costs for the new span. Maryland and Virginia had previously offered to cover any cost-overruns, but apparently the cost-overruns are so far out of the ballpark that they cannot cover it, possibly due to overextension of tax-cuts or expenses already budgeted for such things as Maryland's highly-touted and long-overdue massive renovation of its schools' physical facillities. Expect some form of protracted negotiation to eventually allow good money funding the new span to be thrown after bad money putting new decking on the old span.

When the well-educated, resourceful, and generally centrist black middle class fled the District throughout the 1990s, reducing the population of the city by one-sixth in seven years, they generally landed in suburban Maryland or suburban Northern Virginia -- where for the first time they had representatives in Congress, representatives justly known for listening to their electorate and equally known for making things happen. Enough voices were raised in a rational if mournful howl, and Congress stepped in, and the rest is history. The DCFRA Control Board was created, with a mandate to control the District's expenditures and organization until such times as the District should sucessfully run a balanced (or profitable) budget for four years running.

Once empowered, the DCFRA Control Board set about propping up the District simply so as to be able to discern to what degree, and where, there as damage or corruption. And once eyes had begun to search in places from which they were no longer prohibited, it was seen that far more than even suspected, the District government was a house of cards shakily built on water, rotten to the core and corrupt to the bone. Heads began to roll. The police chiefs were replaced several times, the worst of the agencies which were obviously directly responsible, but unable to provide, for the common welfare and public safety, were deconstructed and to some degree set on the path of rebuilding. But the question remains -- one year from the mandated dissolution of the DCFRA Control Board -- how far from "fixed" is the once hideously-broken government of the District of Columbia.

Recently, the present Mayor of the District of Columbia, Anthony A. Williams, was called before Congress to explain the progress, or lack-thereof, made in the District:

[I] ...inherited a work force rarely held accountable ... and an organizational culture that is resistant to change ... I have not come here to tell you we have met all of our challenges in the District ... I am not even going to tell you we have met half of them. We are tackling problems that have been more than twenty years in the making. However, through continued diligence, come hell or high water, I am confident we will reach our goals.

Mayor Williams is noted for his honesty. He also may be somewhat suspected of being overly optomistic.

We are tempted to suggest that the DCFRA Control Board's period of tenure be extended by another four years, or two years at the very least. However, the complaint has been made, and the complaint is a valid one, that District governance may be to some degree characterized as burdened with too many layers of bureaucracy, intended to act as checks-and-balances but in fact generally amounting to a nuisance and a source of delays. However, the oversight of the DCFRA Control Board has on occasion proved a blessing. The Control Board is in the position of acting as King Log (if you will recall the Aesop's Fable of the frogs who demanded a king), and allowing the city's own local bureaucracy to manage its own affairs, where capable, simply rubberstamping the occasional beneficial fiat-accompli in a sort of retroactive final approval of things already done without first assuring their permission, as securing said permission would only increase bureaucratic delay and amount to micromanagement from afar. However, the Control Board can also act as King Stork, simply by refusing to rubberstamp.

Recently, we and others reported the astounding one-million dollars severance package of one John Fairland, CEO and "father of" of the quasi-governmental "Public Benefits Corp" ("PBC") which is supposed to provide health care to District residents, especially to the poor and indigent. After running the city's public hospital, DC General, into the ground -- with lax bookkeeping propped-up by questionable under-the-table loans from the District government -- Fairland's severance package was approved without public notice nor comment almost a year ago, by the board of directors of the PBC. However -- as outrage mounted that this individual might be getting paid a million dollars just to get out of the way of fixing the broken public-healthcare system of the District -- it was noted that since the DCFRA Control Board had never rubberstamped the deal, it was null and void. Buh-bye, leech. This is one of the best examples of how the Control Board can save the District loads of money, without having to micromanage constantly, and while mostly remaining remote and aloof -- a final-authority check-and-balance much less unwieldy than squabbling Congress, yet with direct Congressional authority. This is also one of the best examples of why the tenure -- possibly under a re-legislated new mandate -- of the DCFRA Control Board should be extended by at least another two years.

Predictably this assertion will raise howls of outrage amongst the factions which are presently screeching about "no taxation without representation" and "ther's no democracy in the capital of democracy". We don't care. As the elected Mayor will tell you, as the elected representative to Congress (Hon. Eleanor Holmes Norton) will tell you, as anyone who knows diddly about the District will tell you: we need more time and extended authority to actually do the job of repairing 20 years of mismanagement, incompetence, and entrenched government culture.

Cases in point may be seen in the ongoing sagas of the receiverships of the District's mental-healthcare system, and especially in healthcare delivered to inmates in the City Jail system. While the quality of care delivered to the city's mentally-ill has scarecely improved under receivership, the once-horriffic level of "care" given to inmates in the City Jail system has, under receivership, improved vastly and is now considered one of the best in the nation. This may reflect interestingly upon the fact that increasingly the city jails are the primary mental-health caregiver for the poor in the District of Columbia -- even as no progress has been made in the official organization for mental-healthcare, those who could not be serviced by the outpatient or inpatient system have been being serviced by the jails, but unfortunately their mental-healthcare in the jails leaves them doubly-stigmatized as criminals as well as insane. In any case, the receivership is nearly ended, and the excellent care provided by the receiver is to be provided by a private company. Intensifying pressures from Congress to reduce costs for healthcare (mental and otherwise) in the City Jail system is in danger of placing the inmates at the same sort of risks and injuries suffered by the District's Retarded Wards, where lax oversight and systematic abuses killed hundreds of the defenseless over the last 20 years.

We propose that as the District's Jails are the de-facto organization actually providing mental-healthcare to District residents, that Congress or the DCFRA Control Board must provide leadership, and possibly direct Federal funding, towards the goal of providing more and better mental-healthcare outside of the last resort, City Jail and in the absence of providing leadership, stop bitching about "money wasted". It also might make sense to ask precisely why the mentally-ill have to get thrown in jail to get the treatment they need... actual treatment addressing their illnesses and related problems, instead of the "treatment" they'd be getting in the City Mental Health facilities, which has been known to consist of being locked in a room and being forced to watch daytime soap-opera television and such uneducational non-therapeutic "confrontelevision" as the Jerry Springer Show.

You may get a PDF copy of a US Government Acounting Office report on the District Jail's medical services here and you may also wish to take a look at the GAO report on how District government reforms are not adequately monitored. You should really read this, as it is the best indication with the hardest figures of how that Sucking sound is still coming from Washington.

Noted in passing, Steven L. Pullman, 41, a former director of DC Community Services, Inc. -- a company that runs group homes contracting to deliver "care" for retarded Wards of the District -- was indicted on some 18 charges including stealing over $600,000 from the organization and spending it on personal vacations and other luxuries. Pullman has a prior conviction for embezzling from the town of Vienna Virginia where he was the CFO. We are curious as to how he was given a position with DC Community Services, Inc., which allowed him access sufficient to embezzle, and we are further curious as to why this information was never noticed by whichever District agency was responsible for awarding the contract to DC Community Services. Doubtless, this and other questions will come up during a recently-launched lawsuit against the District government and their contractors, brought by the families of retarded people who died needlessly and horribly while under the "care" of the District government and their contractors.

Noted in Passing

Noted in passing, the District's licensing board has decided on a moratorium on the issuance of any new licences for restaurants serving beer, wine or liquor in the city's trendy Adams-Morgan party district.

Adams-Morgan is no less an attraction than Georgetown. Although Georgetown is better-known as a hotspot for jet-setters and tourists, Adams-Morgan is a favorite of the entire Greater Washington Metropolitan region. People come from Maryland and Virginia, as well as the rest of Washington. This can create some problems -- despite the recent extension of MetroRail subway operational hours to 2AM, and the constant cruising of MetroBusses along the Adams-Morgan 18th Street NW strip, almost everyone insists on driving and parking, which creates a parking problem of proportions which are astounding to the occasional visitor, and an unending annoyance to the residents. the liquor board has decided, under a great deal of pressure from all parties, that until Adams-Morgan's businesses and residents can address such issues as trash removal and parking -- not to mention police patrolling -- there is simply no excuse for enabling any increases in the intensity of present problems through proliferation of businesses selling alcohol other than to-go.

However healthy the Chesapeake may be at present, the remarkable gains of the last decade may be rapidly reversed, assuming that prsent suburban growth trends continue. Within 25 years of the present rate of development, very serious damage may occur. Please read this report from the Chesapeake Bay Foundation.

Noted in passing, Maryland Governor Parris Glendening has ordered that work begin on the new span of the Woodrow Wilson Bridge, which carries the Capital Beltway (I-95) across the Potomac River at the southern point of the District. Despite a projected shortfall of some $600 millions, Glendening decided to forge ahead for reasons which would be easily understood downtown in the District of Columbia:

We have to make some decisions and make them now, because we're kind of at an impasse ... [w]e have a real crisis.

The District

We wish to note that while elements of the District's infrastructure show little improvement or only slow change for the better, there are voices in the wind whispering of a future in which Washington is a better place. Examples noted in passing include the completed renovation of, and resumption of traffic across, the "Buffalo Bridge" of "Q" Street NW over Rock Creek Park; and, the restoration of the stately lion sculptures to the William Howard Taft Bridge of Connecticut Avenue NW over Rock Creek Park.

First, the Freedom Forum, a centrist Constitutionalist-Conservative organization originally founded by Gannett Co., the publishing giant through his Gannett Foundation, spun off into a well-endowed independence. Their popular Newseum presently located in Arlington Virginia, may move to a site near Capitol Hill, for which they've bid some $100 millions. The proposed new site at Pennsylvania Avenue and "C" and 6th streets NW is presently housing the District's Department of Employment Services, and is adjacent to the Canadian Embassy. The purchase offer is in the form of $75 millions directly to the District government, with an additional $25 millions to build affordable housing at sites selected by the City administration. This premiere site lies across from the intersection of Pennsylvania Avenue and Constitution Avenue, a fitting location as the Free Press is at the head of the list of the Cosntitution's Bill of Rights.

Noted in passing, the Hechinger Company, a longtime fixture of the Greater Washington Metropolitan Region for their chain of hardware outlets, had one of their flagship stores atop "Television Hill" along Wisconsin Avenue near the Tenleytown neighborhood. This store will now be the first Home Depot in the District.

As noted in previous installments, we find it rather amusing -- if quite sad -- that the District on one hand is willing to buck the will of Congress by proposing to print up license plates bearing the motto "No Taxation Without Representation", and to ignore Congressional warnings about giving tax-cuts where none are affordable while forging ahead with bold spending plans. Nothing could better exemplify this two-faced attitude in the Distrct than the present brouhaha over over Federal funding of the proposed New York Avenue NE MetroRail stop. A proposal coming from Congress would leave the project short of full funding, by about $22 millions of dollars. As Congress says, "if you can give money away, clearly you don't need handouts". But DC Delegate Eleanor Holmes Norton is stepping up to bat shaking at the knees about how Congress can't underfund the linchpin of the city's most ambitions Revitalization project. I suppose the City Council should have thought of that before they passed, against the advice an extremely wide array of forethoughful people including this commentator, a $300 millions tax-cut. My advice (voicing the opinion of much of Congress) to the Council and Delegate Norton? "Pay for rent and groceries next time before you go fuck off your paycheck at the track, 'cause we are starting to get pretty tired of bailing your ass out".

My apologies for strong language, so long as it got the point across.

Mayor Anthony A. Williams noted, on the funding cut's passage through House Appropriations Committee, that this would send "a chilling message" to the business community. However, we can assure Mayor Williams that the local business community was for the most part the greatest opposition to the Council's ill-advised tax-cut, and secondarily, the local business community can just scrape the money together themselves, and will, if they feel that this is that important to them. In any case, business is more likely to maintain or improve the new MetroRail station and surrounding properties if they themselves have a financial stake in the station. In any case, the needed funds are said to be included in the appropriations bill, but in a way that makes it exceptionally difficult for District officials to play "creative accounting" and divert the money to any use other than intended.

District lawmakers have come under fire for a variety of issues in recent days. The issue creating the greatest controversy was a law requiring insurers to cover contracteption. Predictably, this came under massive fire by various groups whose religious orientation precludes the use of contraception. Such groups, primarily Catholic-faith organizations, protested mightily for a "conscience exemption". However, further examination shows that most such groups are "self-insured" and thus would not be covered under the law in question: they are therefor attempting to force their own beliefs upon others. Should the DC Council, the Mayor, or Congress accede to the demands of these extremists, there should be grounds for one mighty chunk of litigation concerning the First Amendment.

Another piece of legislation addressed a major problem in the District, that of marijuana dealing. We wish to make it clear that we personally do not believe that marijuana should be criminalized. However, the problem in this case is that in the District, very light penalties were imposed for possession of fairly large amounts of marijuana, and penalties were imposed for actual sales of marijuana which were really not much higher than were penalties for simple possession. The surrounding jurisdictions have substantially higher penalties; this has resulted in the District becoming a haven for all levels of marijuana dealers -- and insanely, the marijuana sales sector of the community's drug marketers has developed into one of the most dangerous and gangster-riddled. Various groups have engaged in tactics such as beatings and robberies -- and in some cases assassinations -- in attempts to secure dealing turf for their outfits. The District's new laws bring penalties closer to the standards of neighboring Maryland and Virginia. We would rather have seen those jurisdictions lower their penalties, but what is done is done. Only time will tell if the only effect of this is -- predictably -- to increase both the prices and the bloodshed in the District's marijuana business.

We note in passing that a recent raid in the sadly run-down neighborhoods a few blocks north of Union Station, along North Capitol Street near "M" Street NW, police made some 48 arrests. Also seized were some 16 weapons and ammunition, a kilogram of cocaine, two pounds of marijuana and some $100,000 in cash, according to the Washington Post. The arrests were made after a sustained investigation by the Metropolitan Police Department, cooperating with the DC Housing Authority Police. Under rules changed within recent years, the Housing Authority has broad discretion regarding investigations of recipients of public housing. Public housing in the District has long been the focal point of the most egregious violations of safety and good public order, particularly with respect to the violence of the crack cocaine epidemic of the late 1980s and 1990s.

District Schools

The administrators of the District's troubled schools unveiled plans to restructure the schools' procurement and financial systems, which experts say are possibly the single greatest problem in the Schools. The new plan would involve the principals of individual schools more directly, as well as allowing the central administration to better determine in which stage of process and with which status various acquisitions may be. This trends towards more independence and repsonsibility for both the individual schools and their administration, and for the general schools-administration with respect to City Hall.

Whatever may come of efforts to revive the Schools' procurement system, it appears that Federal administration of the Schools' bus system may be inevitable. Recently, the Schools announced that they would be assuming direct control of the busses, which had in most cases been operated by contractors. But a string of foul-ups in the contractors' operations -- including egregious failures in transporting special-education students, and failures to do sufficient background checks on their drivers -- caused the city to assume responsbility, and they are apparently doing a worse job than were the contractors -- the major one of which quit last month, apparently for being asked to fulfill the terms of the contract. So far as is known, the City is doing a much better job of checking backgrounds, and a slightly better job of picking up special-education students, but problems with the financial systems has left many of the drives muttering something about "situation normal, all fouled up" due to the inability of the city to pay them. After first fouling up mailings and direct-deposits of paychecks, the city called all of the drivers to come and collect their month-overdue checks at the central office, and then turned them away, in some cases twice on the same day. Police had to be called in to quell the disturbance that, unsurprisingly, erupted.

Two major issues concerned with Child Welfare and Family Services have been in the news this month. First and foremost, "Deputy Mayor for Families and Children' Carolyn N. Graham issued a report on the state of the horribly mismanaged and barely functional Child Welfare and Family Services structures in the District. "Systemic Issues" are blamed, although we could have told you that and did tell you that, many months ago. However, it's now official, and must be dealt-with by the District government. I have made recommendations but either nobody's listening, or they'd rather that someone was paid to arrive at the exact same conclusions at which I arrived:

"Systemic issues" are blamed in the report "A White Paper: Crimes Against Children in the District of Columbia". No single agency is tasked with a start-to-finish tracking of cases, much less actual start-to-finish responsibility. As the report says (quoting from the Washington Post), the fragmentation "increases the level of trauma for child victims". As many as 26 contacts with different agencies and services can occur between the initial traumatic incident and the first actual appearance in a courtroom. Further complicating the matter is the division of tasks between criminal abuse cases and neglect cases, the former being handled by the police and the Superior Court, and the latter being handled by Child nad Family Service. Even more problematic, information sharing between the US Attorney's Office, the Metropolitan Police, and other agencies is so bad that nobody can even determine the number or identity of persons prosecuted for crimes against children.

Purportedly, there are plans in the works for a "children's issues center" that would at least provide some coordination between the various agencies involved, creating a single oversight agency capable of dedicating itself to tracking the cases from start to finish, coordinating communications and so-forth. We applaud this move, after all, we suggested it some six months ago.

Moving right along to the second big-ticket item in the news about Child Welfare in the District, we'd like to point out that at present, Child and Family Services is under a court-ordered receivership, which was handed to Earnestine F. Jones. Jones, when ordered to court by a local-governmnt judge to explain her agency's mishandling of a case of a 20-month-ol boy, failed to appear, and became the subject of an arrest warrant. Jones has countersued, noting that as a Federal court appointee, she's not to be held accountable to a local judge. We might have to agree on general legal principles, but considering that Jones was appointed receiver more than three years ago, and some of the worst of the "systemic issues" have become page-one news under her watch, we'd think she'd be just a little more agreeable and cooperative. Remember, Ms Jones: it's not about you -- it's about the Children. We note that in the case in question, there was a failure of delivery of either the social worker's testimony or a disposition report, exemplifying the lack of communications and oversight of process which so endangers the District's at-risk children.

Speaking of Children, and moving right along, we note with mixed dismay and relief that some $12 millions -- from the Temporary Assistance to Needy Families ("TANF") block grant -- has been shifted from the intended purpose of moving parents from Welfare to Work, and instaed is being used to fund the DC Children and Youth Investment Trust Corp., which is intended to be a clearinghouse for funding for children and teenagers. This is legal because one of the secondary purposes of TANF moneies is to promote two-parent families and lower the rate of out-of-wedlock and teen pregnancies. This should -- we hope -- tend to work towards reducing the numbers of teen single moms, one of the largest and longest-term groups receiving Welfare. However, there is still very little progress being made in the District in getting people off of Welfare, and there is less than one year before the five-year lifetime allowance of Welfare is expired... which term includes probably three-quarters of the District's Welfare recipients.

Law and Order

While it was easily possible, a mere two years ago, to tout major reductions in almost all kinds of crime within the District as an harbinger of Revitalization and perhaps even of a Rebirth of Civility and Civic Pride, while most crimes are still down in the District, the rate of killings is again creeping upwards. To make matters worse, these are less of the crimes of desperation and greed which would characterize the drug trade or its clients, and more simple senslessness. Last summer, for instance, an inexplicable rise in ethnic gangster tensions in the general vicinity of Columbia Heights caused a shootout at the Latino Youth Center on Columbia Road NW, and similar factors were indicated in an ongoing series of killings, seemingly unrelated, in the general area. The response of Police Chief Charles A. Ramsey, at the behest of the Mayor, was to move more officers into uniform and to put them onto the street. This worked for a while, but the dearth of officers in the special units took a toll. This was particularly true of the detective units responsible for tracking down murderers: the emphasis on using manpower as a preventative depleted the manpower needed for after-the-fact resolution. The "clearance rate" for murder, shamefully one of the lowest in the nation, remains at less than 40 percent.

Chief Ramsey is once again trying a massive deployment of officers who normally pulled office duty, especially in the troubled Fourth Police District, which contains the Columbia Heights neighborhood (among others) of NorthWest Washington, as well as a small portion of Northeast. In Ward 4, mostly due to the increased violence in the Columbia Heights area, the murder rate is up 33 percent over the same period last year, and sexual assaults are up a staggering 246 percent, along with a mere 18 percent increase in vehicle thefts. Noted in passing, Ward 4 has a new Fourth District police commander, one Cathy L. Lanier, a ten-year veteran. She's characterized as being very supportive of community involvement. Commander Lanier replaces Commander Abraham Parks, who had been assigned to "4D" only temporarily, now moves to the Courts Liason Division. Parks replaces Inspector Ira Grossman, reassigned to the Quality Assurance Unit to assist in the development of statistical law-enforcement tools such as mapping systems.

Noted in passing, Chief Ramsey is pressing for a Night Court, which would, among other things, greatly cut the time that night officers have to spend waiting for the days-only courts to open so that they can get prisoners arraigned. This would be a fairly minor change in the DC Courts structure and procedures.

Continuing covering the Courts, it should be noted that the historic main problem in the District, that of the so-called "revolving door" -- where criminals would be arrested, arraigned, released on personal-recognizance, and then return to the community to terrorize witnesses, etc -- that's all over, or nearly so. Major changes in the pre-release, parole, and probation system are underway, or scheduled for the near future.

First, "parole" has been entirely eliminated. Next, the infamous "Lorton Facility", essentially run by the inmates for the inmates, is history -- as of 2000 August 7, penitentiary time will be served in Federal facilities. The former role of a judge in determining the sentence is total -- convicts will not get more or less time due to the decisions of a parole board. The time to which a convict is sentenced is the time that will be served.

Noted in passing, for those already on parole or probation, as well as those awaiting trial and released into the community, the Court Services and Offender Supervision service -- which in the District serves roughly the role of a Sheriff in other jurisdictions, as the enforcement arm of the Courts -- they now have a new top official in the person of one Jasper Ormond, replacing the trustee who started the agency as part of the District Revitalization Act's Federal bailout of the District, one John A. "Jay" Carver. Ormond is an acting director and may get a permanent replacement (or may be confirmed in the position) by a new presidential administration.

District Revitalization

Mayor Anthony A. Williams appears to be moving right along himself, as regards District Revitalization. A variety of changes are ongoing.

First, the Mayor has announced a $12 millions program to repave several District streets. Streets which are repaired under this program would be offlimits to non-emergency cuts for the next five years. Funding is to be drawn from the National Capital Infrastructure fund. Additional funding will come from the Barney Circle project, which was funded to about $90 millions but which was never built. Additional funding should come from the District's "rental fee" which charges some 88 cents per foot for subsurface cabling by utility companies. Peak reconstruction is expected to occur in the period of about five to seven years from now, although some curb-to-curb reconstruction will begin almost immediately.

Moving right along, the Mayor is attempting to kill two birds with one stone, but it appears to some concerned parties that he may simply bonk himself in the head, and then declare that it makes him and the district look much better, thank you.

In order to create the appearance of compliance with the scheduled massive cutbacks in expenditures which will be needed to stay within budget so that the DCFRA Control Board will have to relinquish oversight and disband, the Mayor proposes to cut about 1000 jobs from the District Payroll. Also, he gave DC Government civil service employees the option of either giving up their Civil Service protection and getting a 10 percent raise and serving exclusively at the pleasure of His Honor, or they could be demoted from their supervisory position. Most chose to remain supervisors and take the pay raise. We strongly suspect that all but the very best of those making this choice will be among those whose positions are retired in the Mayor's job cuts. This is probably all for the best, because if they're not doing their jobs well they need to be fired in any case.

Other cuts will be in various programs, especially in Health, Human Services, and Human Resources. (See notes above regarding DC General Hospital -- the massive staff cuts at that facility may go above and beyond what's necessary to bring that fiscal bottomless pit into something resembling accountability. It may be a case of cutting their losses in a case where the fiscal tentacles wind much farther than the hospital or the PBC.) Specifics are not yet available, but should be made public on or before September 30th. Some cuts are expected to come from the Technology budget, which should be fairly easy to accomplish as technology is advancing so rapidly now that budgets for computers and office-automation which were compiled two years ago probably can be halved and still provide comparable equipment if bought off-the-shelf. But the Mayor will have major problems cutting money from Procurement. Procurement, which used to be damned for being far too cozy with Barry-Cronies(tm) under the previous administration, is now being characterized as outdated, outmoded, incompetent, and "slow as molasses and by the time they get a contract written, what they asking for has damn near nothing to do with whatever you needed when you asked for it six months ago... and it's going to take another year to finalize the bids and award a contract". Reliable rumor has it that they're still finalizing bids for Windows 98(tm) software for a machine type that hasn't been manufactured for 18 months. It's gotten to the point where high-level officials are skirting the edge of illegality by evading Procurement wherever possible, simply because it's the only way to get anything done remotely on-schedule.

Other cuts may prove to be very difficult to manage, particularly in the District's administrative sectors. Ten years after the project was first specified, and after only one year of operation, the District is scrapping a management system which failed to track employees, failed to pay them on time, failed to properly record what they were supposed to be doing and failed to properly track what they actually did. A new system could probably be had which would do all of the above, if the District were willing to use modern equipment and software and programmers, for less than half a million dollars. But you may expect Procurement to foul up this effort as well as it has fould-up everything else it has touched. Expect Procurement to propose spending twice as much as must be cut from the budget, to order a system that hasn't been sold since 1997, to be delivered in 2002, and implimented in 2005.

Also expected to be problematic, resolution of the issues of "Interagency Personnel Contracts". District law forbids contractors doing business with the District from making a profit from arranging for specialists to fill positions. One company was charging the District government as much as $82 per hour for computer specialists who were paid only approximately half of that. The District needs to start being more specific in awarding these headhunter firms contracts -- the specialists need to be directly contracted to the District, and the headhunter needs to charge a one-time fee and then recuse themselves from further involvement. A lot of money can be saved this way. It also looks a lot better when you actually hire someone for $40 per hour and say "it takes top dollars to hire the big brains" and it's the big brains that are actually getting paid, instead of giving up half of their money to profiteers... with the total outlay per individual being something like three times the official salary-cap for District employees. For such specialists, the District government will need to have special salary caps which are outside the usual limits -- people won't begrudge paying for the best in the business -- they will begrudge paying twice what they're worth and having the talent getting only what they're worth while cronies are profiteering off of the citizen's tax-dollar.

Interested readers are, as always, directed to read a descriptive passage from Scripture. Please be advised, though, this is at the moment much more applicable to the inhabitants of the region's suburbs than to those of the District itself; at least the folks in the District are trying to reform and Do the Right Thing. Downtown things are improving greatly! But watch your back no less in the suburbs than you used to watch your back downtown.

The District>

First and foremost, we wish to note that the DCFRA Control Board certified that the District has met Federal requirements to be able to access capital markets for purposes of borrowing. At one point in time, a District Government bond was considered a sure thing, and then under the final years of the Barry-Cronies(tm) Administration, the District government bond was considered beyond a laughingstock, not worth the price of postage to deliver the paper it was printed on. The District has improved sufficiently in this regard that now only one hurdle remains to the City before the DCFRA Control Board signs off and returns full control of the City (outside of court-ordered Receiverships) to the elected District Government. That remaining hurdle is the delivery of a fourth year of balanced budgets.

The best way to balance a budget, it would appear, is to take in funds from Congress, and then never spend them. This does give the appearance of money in the bank, but sometime you really have to spend the money, because that green stuff in the vault is not food on the table.

A case in point would be, as we never tire of repeating, the District's abominable Welfare-to-Work program. Although the Federal government has paid almost $9 millions into a program ostensibly dedicated to providing training and job-placement assistance to those who will within two years exhaust their lifetime allocation of Welfare, the District has spent only some $639,000 to that end. So far, almost all of that money went to extremely questionable recipients who have almost nothing at all to show in terms of results from those payments. These grants begin to expire in 2001, scant months away, and will be entirely expired within three years. The program is administered by the highly-disorganized Department of Employment Services.

But this was only part of a total of some $53 millions, the rest mostly administered by the Department of Human Services, which is specifically allocated to the end of helping families off of Welfare and into a productive employment. By combining the grants disbursed to the two agencies into one fund administered by Employment Services, some confusion has been eliminated. However, there are questions remaining regarding the effectiveness of training programs, as many of the few beneficiaries of these Welfare-to-Work training and job-placement services have alleged that they are being left untrained, and are being assigned make-work jobs, often with the District Government itself. Such placements were one of the most highly-criticized elements of the former Barry-Cronies(tm) Administration, however, those were criticized mostly because the make-work assignements were due mostly to political patronage, as opposed to finding a way for the poor to feed their children.

Another way to balance the budgets is to have a smaller payroll. There are three ways to go about this: first, no new hires, especially no new hires of competent personnel who demand decent pay; secondly, fire or layoff present personnel; and finally, allow present personnel to retire on time or take early-retirement, and not refill those positions. It would appear that the District is taking a combination approach, as is reasonable and to be expected. This is a moderate course, but as the saint said, "all things in moderation -- especially moderation". Even as the city finishes the year with the books "cooked" (see above regarding failure to spend money where it desperately needs spending) to a surplus of $57 millions, services to the public and Congress remain somewhat patchy in most areas, mostly undelivered in others, and in most areas one service or service enhancement essentially destroys the accomplishment of other areas, or merely impedes the implimentation of other services.

On the subject of impeding implimentation of other services, along with the impending reduction in force of some 1075 jobs (mostly through attrition and/or non-hiring) there will be cuts in city fleet sizes, telecommunications outlays, and utility expenditures. We can only hope that in the last case, this won't be a very cold winter or there might not be enough money in the budget to keep the water-mains repaired; they commonly burst in cold winters.

Health & Safety

Earlier this year, we brought to your attention the looming deficits accumulated by DC General Hospital under the inept management of the quasi-governmental Public Benefits Corp (PBC). We were not alone in this, the Washington Post has been staying on top of developments as they have occurred and have been instrumental in rooting out the facts, which -- if true to typical District Government form -- would otherwise have never reached the attention of the public or the Powers That Be. And absent the outrage of Those Who Matter, DC General would still be not only a leech on the neck of the District's hopes for solvency, but an unheard-of and secretive leech.

We disclosed earlier that the chairman of the board of the PBC, one John A. Fairman, was exceptionally reluctant to depart his position as chief mismanager. He even produced a document -- which has since been deemed forged by the rest of the PBC Board -- which "entitled" him to a severance package amounting to over a million dollars. We, he's out, the PBC Board has voted that he doesn't get diddly. Congress is demanding that the DC General Hospital, which has racked up some $109 millions in under-the-table payments from the District Government, begin to operate within its budget.

The PBC Board has thus decided to lay off some 200 employees and 96 contract nurses, and reduce the number of beds in the hospital from 250 to 165. Inpatient services such as the obstretics, pediatricts, gynecology and trauma services remain operational. We predict that over the next six months, development of neighborhood facilities will permit further downsizing of the DC General Hospital and its eventual closure. We believe that it will be absolutely essential to shift most -- if not all -- inpatients to surrounding hospitals, which are all of top quality and are excellently managed. DC General is far from modern, and the books need to be closed out entirely, by whatever means are necessary. The present accounting system is broken from the bottom up and was never top-down. After full closure, the massive cost-savings to the city can be used to better serve the District's residents through establishment of a wide variety of neighborhood health-service outlets, ideally specializing in pre-acute care. Acute care and trauma can be and should be redirected to private hospitals. DC General, we must remind you, fell into financial chaos primarily because there were few neighborhood clinics offering free or low-cost services, and many individuals allowed what should have caused a 15-minute visit to a neighborhood free clinic escalate into something that required a visit to the emergency room, and then never paid. We do recommend, however, that the excellent and exceptionally experienced DC General Trauma team be left in place and in fact it might be useful to redevelop the hospital into a trauma-only facility with a sideline in emergency childbirthing... but this practice of the indigent going to DC General's E.R. for infected hangnails must stop, as it's a ridiculous waste of tax dollars and medical resources.

Noted in Passing: A bill introduced in the DC Council would expand Medicare coverage for disabled persons. Coverage should be extended to cvoer community-based services, including care delivered at home. At present, most Medicare payments to the disabled are delivered to those who are institutionalized.

The US General Accounting Office, the investigative arm of Congress, recently issued a report utterly condemning a variety of failures on the part of the District's Child and Family Services Agency. Among other failures:

• more than 1200 neglected-child reports were uninvestigated
• 150 reports were not examined for over a month
• children under six are being housed in group homes for more than two years
• the emergency shelter is being used as a de-facto group home
• 48 percent of case records have not been entered into the tracking system and most entered data is woefully incomplete,
• 48 children were placed in unlicensed foster-care facilities in the District
• An unknown number of children have been placed in other States. Although roughly one half of the District's foster-care children have been sent to homes in Maryland, Maryland has embargoed further placements until the District can demonstrate that the District is placing the children in licensed facilities
• Most of the special needs of some 40 percent of the District's placements are being ignored.

Noted in Passing: the Capital Area Food Bank has opened a "Kids' Cafe" in the 2300 block of 11th Street NW, which will provide well-balanced meals and educational activities to low-income children.

Noted in Passing: An era is over, the Washington Marina has been closed by the US Park Service, which says the facility is in major need of a cleanup and renovation. Owners of delapidated boats are being given some extra time to arrange for the removal of their property.

Noted in Passing: Parking restrictions have been eased in high-density areas of town, for holders of residential parking permits for the specific areas. This allows embattled residents to find someplace to park in areas such as Adams-Morgan -- a popular nightclub spot -- which are grossly overparked at night. Residents must still rise early to move their vehicles so as to comply with the regulations, which return to full force with the morning rush hour.

Momentum is building towards construction of a new TransPotomac Bridge to be located anywhere between the present American Legion Bridge carrying I-495 traffic across the river to the west of the District, and Leesburg Virginia. Please see our own tentative proposal for a Rockville-to-Reston TechWay, which would connect the ends of a very long "U"-shaped commute followed daily by tens of thousands in the area, allowing a roughly 15 mile drive from the high-tech corridor of Rockville MD to the Dulles Airport high-tech district in roughly an half-hour, rather than the present grueling 70 mile drive taking one and one-half hours.

The District

Sustained business growth, with an emphasis on retail development in historically-underserved neighborhoods, remains high on the agenda of the Willaims Administration. Aside from the conversion of the Brentwood Impound Facility to a major retail facility anchored by K-Mart and Giant Food (and tentatively including Home Depot), there are further proposals to convert other city-owned land for similar purposes, with the city acquiring new facilities in parts of the city less desirable for development. Properties which the City government will surrender or sell include the site of the new BATF Building at New York and Florida Avenues NE; the Water Street NW site in Georgetown which will be redeveloped into a long-overdue waterfront by the National Parks Service; and, the storage lots along the Anacostia River's northern waterfront along "M" Street SE Extended at the 11th Street SE Bridge, which will be given to the Anacostia Rowing Club.

The former Brentwood Impound facility will -- once rebuilt into a retail center -- be served not only by the present Rhode Island MetroRail station, but also by a new New York/Florida Avenues station, which has been funded by Congress to the tune of some $25 millions to be added to roughly $34 millions to be contributed by the City and some $25 millions to be contributed by local businesses. Noted in passing, this funding was reached at the expense of the highly-successful "needle exchange" program, which is now prohibited from distributing sterile hypos within 1000 yards of schools.

Also on the construction or renovation schedule, is McKinley High School at 2nd and "T" Streets NorthEast Washington. Once one of the better schools in the District, it was closed three years ago due to massive deterioration. The Mayor plans to rebuild it into a technology school. The plan includes major inclusion of local technology firms, which would help advise in cirricula which would best train the workers they desperately need, and provide some funding for specialized training equipment and supplies. Noted in passing, the District schools cannot account for some 280 computers which were donated to he schools by the Federal government.

Moving right along, the District Department of Employment Services will be moving to a location near the Minnesota Avenue MetroRail Station. The present location is to be sold to the Freedom Forum for $100 millions, as the site of a new Newseum.

Noted in passing, a flagship project of Downtown Revitalization, a project combining retail, housing, and entertainment under one mammoth roof, is having difficulties in getting financing arrangements finalized. The project has been delayed for over a year due to District restrictions on tenants, leases, and lending practices.

Also noted in passing, five years have passed with no development actually occurring on the SouthEast Washington site, formerly the National Guard Camp Simms. This 25-acre site has been floating in regulatory limbo, even as the city prepares to relocate many of its own offices as it scrambles for land to offer to developers. The city hopes to finalize a choice of developer and commence groundbreaking by 2001 Spring.

A panel has proposed that the District's present waste transfer facility at Fort Totten be upgraded, and that DC Village in SouthEast be the site of a new, District owned-and-operated permanent waste transfer facility. Privately-owned waste transfer facilities should be phased out. Also, the Benning Road facility should be converted into a recycling center.

You'll note I am not apologizing for anything. This has been an interesting week, and this last weekend has been most fascinating. It would appear that I have an audience on UseNet:dc.general and apparently on UseNet:alt.politics.immigration as well. After posting some messages utterly decrying the large-scale return (as documented in the Washington Post 2000 Nov. 14, Paula Dvorak) of vendors of top-quality forged Social Security, "Green Card", and other ID and status documents in the trendy Adams-Morgan neighborhood, I have spent most of my time in public over this weekend being stared at by a lot of foreigners as if I were some sort of leper, and thus have found it really more enjoyable to sit in the basement and read back issues of the Post and get more-deeply involved in getting the news out all about Washington DC. However, due to the massive numbers of people giving me the "your ass will be mine, fsckhead American!" stare-from-Hell, I can only presume that I have somehow achieved an infamous celebrity status on some local broadcast media outlet. I must therefor propose to anyone paying attention up there on Capitol Hill, there there should be a speedy amendment to the US Copyright laws, absolutely prohibiting non-UseNet retransmission of anything posted to UseNet, under the same penalties as would be seen over public rebroadcast of a copyrighted video or record. If people want to know my opinion, they can ask me or they can read UseNet or they can read these pages. You will note that this page has no advertising, there's no advertising on UseNet, and if my intellectual property -- including my opinions -- are making other people money, I hereby demand that they pay me for retransmitting this copyrighted material and I must insist on 100 percent recovery of all advertising revenues generated by any such scurrilous practice as reading me on the air. I don't appreciate being taken out of context and I am not doing this to make money (particularly not for others who have not in any way negotiated permission to publish me!) nor to be made into some sort of scapegoat or laughing-stock by an intellectually-impoverished media catering to the lowest common denominator or acting as an agent-provocateur trying to get the immigrant community to kill me rather than have to listen to a voice demanding what the American People want from, and especially in, Washington -- Reform.

But enough about me, no question we're all sick of hearing me kvetch.

Money

First and Foremost -- Congress has, by unanimous vote, approved the District of Columbia Budget, amounting to some $4.9 millions. Included are funds for 88 new firefighters, 175 new police officers, and increased spending for a host of social programs, including the Schools, College Tuition aid, Affordable Housing, Drug Treatment, and Foster Care.

Also included, funds to help clean up the Anacostia Waterfront, and add a MetroRail Red Line station at New York Avenue NE, considered central to the Revitalization effort near the new BATF Headquarters, and close to the eventual site of a major new retail center on the old Benning Road vehicle-impound lot.

We note in passing, and with a great deal of satisfaction, that fully two-thirds of the DC Budget will be paid for by taxes generated in the District of Columbia, although the casual reader should be reminded that there are many projects restructuring and revitalizing the District which are essentially Federal Projects and which are being funded entirely by the Federal Government. This includes the vast majority of major roads rebuilding., etc.

Also included in this budget bill -- which President Clinton is expected to sign as this bill has been dissociated from a highly-contentious Immigration "reform" Bill and is a freestanding bill not attached to any other measures -- is permission for the City to reallocate, from the originally-earmarked purposes, some $90 millions towards a restructuring plan -- to be approved by Congress -- for the quasi-governmental Public Benefits Corp ("PBC"), the parent organization of the moribund DC General Hospital.

Health

DC General Hospital, and the parent PBC ("Public Benefits Corp") have been at near collapse, with nearly $120 millions being paid -- possibly illegally -- under the table, reallocated from other purposes by the District government. DC General serves the indigent population almost exclusively; it's where most of the gangsta shooting victims, drug addicts, welfare mothers, homeless, and mentally-ill are sent, mostly because they don't have insurance and the other hospitals won't take them so long as DC General is there to spend the public money instead of the private hospitals being forced to "cost-shift" their profit margins from the indigent uninsured to their paying patients' insurance.

We must reiterate that one of the reasons costs at DC General are so high is that too many of the uninsured and indigent will have some health problem which could probably have been prevented -- and could have been easily treated had they access to minor care -- but which was left untreated until it ballooned to crisis proportions, at which time the patient presents themselves at Emergency Services, from which they cannot be turned away due to inability to pay.

Such Emergency Services care is going to cost about $230 millions if DC General is preserved "as-is" -- however, Preventative Care outreach and neighborhood clinics, combined with conversion of DC General to an Emergency/Acute Care only facility, would cost only about $70 millions. Note that both figures are in addition to the roughly $45  millions already dedicated to the PBC in the city budget. Now, doing the math, we can see that the $90 millions authorized by Congress to be shifted towards the PBC from other uses will be able to cover an additional expense of $70 millions, but comes nowhere close to covering $230  millions.

The City of Washington should simply look at the math and ask themselves the question: "isn't it better to offer an ounce of prevention rather than get robbed for a pound of cure?" and the answer to that is clear -- save the money on that old rat trap of a hospital. Trying to preserve it is a fool's errand and in any case, everyone would be a lot better off if you put a lot of public health clinics all over town than if you wasted your time and money trying to save a sinking ship. This isn't rocket science, it's not brain surgery, it's just about not throwing bad money after good, and it's about putting the care where the people are and giving it to them when they need it, rather than making them wait until they're at death's door and having to run up unpayable bills at some central facility that nowadays seems to exist because folks are just set in their ways, and can't even tolerate change for the better.

At this point, we would like to do something we rarely do, make an actual proposal for a solution to a problem, one addressing the private-hospitals concerns about the reliability of the City of Washington as a guarantor of such indigent and uninsured patients as will -- and should -- be forwarded to these high-quality hospitals. The City of Washington should consult the proper actuarial experts and devise a system whereby they shall hold in escrow an amount which should be reasonably expected to be able to cover unavoidable defaults. This money should be held making interest, with the interest being payable into the general city coffers. However, we must insist that the city shall will all due diligence speedily and properly pay what is due their creditor private hospitals under this system. Thus, the City would have incentive to collect what's collectible, and the private hospitals would have reason to believe that the City can, and will, pay for care rendered to the indigent and uninsured Residents of the District.

First and foremost, we must direct you to a truly-excellent series of articles from The Washington Post, regarding the appallingly low rate of case closures of murder in Washington: Unsolved Killings Plague District. You are about twice as likely to get away with murder in the District -- at least so far as getting busted by the cops is concerned, unofficial revenge by locals is an entirely different matter -- as you are to be brought to justice.

Moving Right Along:

The District of Columbia Financial Responsibility and Accountability Board ("DCFRA Control Board") was created by an act of Congress, and the Board members were chosen by the President, as a remedy to the near-collapse of the District government due to a financial crisis, initially caused by a ongressional unfunded mandate to provide a pension fund for public-service workers, and hastened by poor economic conditions and the astonishing mismanagement of the Barry-Cronies(tm) regime under former mayor Marion Barry.

The DCFRA Control Board was, after four years of the District government running within budget. We are presently beginning the final year, after which the Control Board would legally dissolve if the City can keep its books straight. But as we have repeatedly pointed out, running within budget due to simply not spending money is not the same as delivering all required services and delivering them on time and under budget.

As many as are the improvements which have occurred since District residents voted in he new mayor, Anthony A. Williams, all is not perfect, and it's really far from it. The District's government has been for too long mired in incompetency, and despite the best efforts of the well-intentioned, any trip through the city bureaucracy convinces one rapidly that one is skipping along the fresh new pavings of a road to Hell.

Witness the recent dislosure that the District had borrowed some $186 millions intended for badly-needed Capital Improvements infrastructure upgrades, but has been able to spend only some $70 millions of that. They are paying interest not only on the money which has been spent -- and no data has yet been released which indicates how well that money was spent -- but also on the unspent portion of the loan.

Part of the problem is that there are large chunks of the Budget which are simply in flux. For instance, the fate of the quasi-governmental Public Benefits Corp ("PBC") --&bnsp;which administers the moribund DC General Hospital -- is somewhat undetermined. That DC General has racked up over $100 millions in losses over the last few years is not in question, but the bills have been being paid "under the table" from city hall for all of this time. Did that money come from the Capital Improvements funds? Inquiring minds -- and probably Congressional committees -- want to know. The District government blames problems with procurement and project management, pointing out the lack of staff qualified for such tasks. Outsourcing said procurement and management has been suggested as a possible remedy. A "failure to communicate" timely reports on the status of the Capital Improvements projects has also been alleged, and it may well be that had anyone been acting as overseer for these projects, their reporting to the Mayor might have kept the pace on-track.

Other elements of the budget which have been "in flux" and which have probably caused a lot of creative accounting include -- according to The Washington Post -- indecision over whether to spend some $23 millions renovating the Oak Hill Youth Center or alternatively on a new city Detention Facility.

Also a bit problematic is the roughly $4.5 shortfall in the Fire Department, which made a decision to staff firetrucks with five firefighters each; causing major cost overruns in the form of overtime until such time as new recruits can graduate training at the academy. Some of this shortfall will be salvaged by short-staffing three truck companies, and shortening the academy course from 22 weeks to 18 weeks so as to save money on academy expenditures as well as reducing the overtime by getting the new graduates onto the street as soon as reasonably possible. We can only hope that the missing four weeks of training will be continued after deployment of the new graduates, and that service won't suffer due to undertrained rookies being deployed into the field.

Moving right back to DC General Hospital, plans have been bandied about City all and in the Ciy Council chambers, regarding a proposed private-industry takeover of DC General. However, there have so-far been no serious offers and in fact very little healthcare industry interest on buying into a massive money-losing operation housed in a mostly-decrepit facility.

After the recent near-meltdown of the Public Benefits Corp ("PBC") -- which practically became a laughingstock over the former mismanager's million-dollar severance package, which was eventually repudiated -- and the continued losses at DC General Hospital, the DCFRA Control Board weighed in, as it should. Among other actions, the DCFRA Control Board:

• Repealed recently-passed laws enacted by the City Council which gave the City Council the right to help direct the future restructuring of the PBC. Council members have been grandstanding and meddling ceaselessly in efforts to come up with a workable solution. This is costing the city lots of money.
• Directed the District's Chief Financial Officer to sequester some $90 millions to over the cost of indigent care for the rest of the PBC's Fiscal Year which ends on 2001 January 15.
• Directed city administration to prepare to lay off 500 staffers from DC General by 2001 January 31, if an acceptable continuance plan cannot be worked out by the Williams Administration by 2001 January 15. At present the city is losing about $1.6 millions per week at DC General Hospital, which has over 2000 staffers.
• Directed administrators to prepare for the the conversion of DC General into a 24-hour outpatient urgent-care/preventative-care center.
• Directed the city, if unable to satisfactorily restructure the PBC and DC General Hospital, to absolutely cease expending city funds on charity medical care.

It should be noted here that a recent tour of accreditors went through the DC General Hospital and rated it very highly, overall, with the exception of the physical facilities which it rated as "a dinosaur".

Clearly drawing the analogy from medical practice itself, DCFRA member Constance B. Newman is reported to have said:

There's been an honest effort to solve the problem, but it's hard to agree to close an institution that's been saving people for a long time... It's hard to let people go, knowing what it does to them and to their families... But at some point it [the time of death] has to be called.

The recently-hired Chief Executive Officer for the PBC, Michael M. Barch, has proposed a rather grand vision for an "Urban Health Campus" on Capitol Hill, but this is not something that could be done quickly enough to meet the extant needs of the people living in the east side of the District. With the closure of DC General Hospital, the only remaining hospital in that part of the city would be the Greater SouthEastern Hospital on the border between the District and Prince George's County Maryland.

Our own proposal is that the DC General Hospital be largely closed at the end of January; that the quite-modern and world-class Emergency Care facilities be retained but dedicated primarily to triage and emergency care with the primary goal of stabilization for transport to other facilities, and the beginnings of deconstruction or replacement of the non-modern parts of the facility. We note that other regional hospitals have recently been struck by the nurses and medical technicians, largely over the issue of forced overtime. We propose that where possible, immediate negotiations be initiated with the goal of assisting the nurses and medical technicians of DC General to secure employment with other regional hospitals, and those other hospitals will no longer have any problems with understaffing and excessive forced overtime.

In no case should "capital improvements" projects be in any way directed at DC General Hospital, other than perhaps for improvements to the Emergency care facilities even as the rest of the facility is deconstructed.

We also recommend that the City develop a plan to work with the private hospitals of the city and region whereby rather than funding DC General, direct payments would be made to the private hospitals on a special fee schedule which should combine with Medicare so as to provide high quality care to charity patients while permitting DC General to be abandoned as a full-care facility. We also request that if the city cannot have this well on the way to completion by roughly Inauguration Day, that the Control Board should be prepared to drop such a plan into place insofar as is practicable.

The alternative to a sucessful resolution of this, as well as of many other financial problems facing the city, will be the city closing out the fiscal year running into deficit spending and exceeding the budget, which would automatically extend the tenure of the Control Board for another four years. Now is the time for the District of Columbia to bite the bullet and demonstrate that it really is a responsible government now. In any case, the District government should probably be asking itself how much medical care could be acquired for how many sick or injured residents with just the $1.6 millions that DC General Hospital is losing per week.

And once DC General is out of the picture, let's also see if the District Government can move ahead with actually completing some of the Capital Improvements projects instead of just paying loan interest on funds that are just sitting in the bank instead of paying off completed projects that actually improve people's quality of life.

The City of Washington and the neighboring Maryland Counties are Party Democrat and are such to the very core. For fifty years the Democrats have had their way around here, and I can state with full assurance and with complete knowledge that just about everything that's wrong in this area may be laid at their door. While the majority of the local Democrats are loyal as they come and largely decent people paving the roads to Hell with their best intentions, still, there have been... excesses which have occurred and which have been overlooked because those excesses were the acts of people who could not be removed without causing extreme damage to the Democratic Party machinery. There has been a tendency to close ranks, of course, in all parties, in all times and places. But in most parties, in most times and places, there has also been a tendency to close ranks to thrust the criminal and the monster to the outside, and in the Liberal Left local vanguard of the proletariat revolution, as often as not the criminal and the monster was in the position of being the fox guarding a henhouse full of foxes in feathered costumes calling out invitations to passing chickens to come and join the party. Keep in mind at all times, Republican newcomers to Washington, that the corrupt sheriff leading a crew of cops on the take with the full blessings of City Hall is a Southern Democrat tradition. If any incoming Republican expects to get anything but the run-around, think again. And any incoming Republican should expect to have their best potential allies introduced to them by "non partisan Democrats" with a nice hatchet job of poisoning the well with misdirection and the most slanderous of allegations. Thus I can only suggest that incoming Republicans take with a grain of salt any "backgrounders" provided by their predecessors which are just a bit too damned weird.

And as for me, what do I want? I want what's best for the Nation's Capital, and the people of Washington -- especially those who are doing the Nation's work. And now, on with the show.

The District

That Sucking Sound you always hear downtown got a lot louder in the last week, when the District government announced that it had somehow screwed the pooch and that unless if could somehow find $250 millions, it would have to drastically have to cut services across the board rather than go into the red and re-initialize the DCFRA Control Board for another four years of rule.

The city has elected to dip into the "rainy day" fund, which will deplete the city's reserves of emergency cash by some $75 millions, and will also use approximately $48 millions of the unspent Capital Improvements funds which only a few weeks ago were the subject of some suspicious eyeballing due to the fact that they remained unspent, purportedly due to the City not having enough people trained in Capital Improvements procurement and administration. The city will be forced to place some $60 millions into the "rainy day" emergency reserve when it is paid out as part of the national first-year tobaco settlement. This will be the entirety of the lump-sum payment, which local officials had intended to divide between the emergency reserve and possible funding of public health services or possible extension of medical insurance to the city's indigent.

Moving right along:

In SouthEast Washington, at Fort Dupont, there has been a groundbreaking ceremony for new construction on land contributed by the DC Housing Authority at the site of former public housing at 155 Ridge Road SE. A 147-unit townhouse development for persons with incomes in the $15,000 - $60,000 range is being built by the Washington InterFaith Network with $2.5 millions from religious groups and financial assistance from the Federal and District governments amounting to $4.7 millions, with an additional half-million dollar interest-free construction loan from Riggs National Bank. Affordable housing is increasingly rare in the region, particularly so in the District.

We are very pleased to provide you with a link (opening in another window) to a neighborhood successfully Revitalized through such a consortium and converted to attractive affordable housing: Please see The LeDroit Park Initiative Revitalization Project.

Please see also the Logan Circle Neighborhood Community Association Page, also in a new window. Logan Circle, fashionable and expensive in the late Nineteenth Century and generally noted for drugs and prostitution throughout most lf the latter-half of the Twentieth Century, has made an astonishing turnaround, with a brand new Fresh Fields grocery store on the 1400 block of "P" Street NW now employing some 315 people of whom some 60 percent live within walking distance. Also, northwards along 14th Street NW to "U" Street and beyond, we see a massive rebuilding of an area mostly left abandoned by business since the arson of the riots following the assassination of Dr Martin Luther King Jr. Most of the 14th Street frontage used to be car dealerships and auto-repair facilities, and thus the buildings are generally quite capacious. Along "U" Street, once the "Black Broadway" of the District, we see a massive revitalization of bars and restaurants.

Noted in passing, there is presently massive debate about a revision of the District's Liquor licensing regulations.

Noted in passing, more closures of slum properties thankfully loom. In particular, properties in the vicinity of 50th and "A" Streets SE owned by one Gregory S. Ferguson are to be closed. At last news, the final tenants were looking for shelter. Plans for the properties have not been disclosed although there are hints that they might be razed, potentially making the land available for affordable-housing development. Ferguson, who had taken it on the lam to avoid arrest and prosecution, recently turned himself in to the police to deal with some 1246 alleged housing code violations at his properties.

On Eckington Place NorthEast, very near the future site of the US Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms Headquarters, the last few years of intensive Revitalization and development have changed a former idled printing factory with a parking lot full of unused railroad tracks into a new showcase of modernity. And now, fittingly, the Metropolitan Police Department has moved a command center, from temporary facilities at Fifth Street and New York Avenue NW to Eckington Place NE. This will be the command center for the 1st, 3rd and 5th police districts. We recently visited the Eckington Place and were exceptionally pleased with how much better the place looks! It's astonishing, really. Property values in the area are skyrocketing. Also, at last we have had the groundbreaking for the New York Avenue MetroRail Red Line station just around the corner from Eckington Place. Across the tracks and New York Avenue, the old Benning Road car impound lot is to be developed into a major retail center.

Other development continues to advance. Soon, bids will be accepted towards the development of Camp Simms, a facility formerly used by the DC National Guard, and the largest remaining parcel of undeveloped land in SouthEast Washington. Giant Foods, Inc., has signed a non-binding offer to develop at that site. SouthEast Washington's Ward 8 has had no major grocery store east of the Anacostia since the closing of a Safeway store there some two years ago.

Barney Circle, next to the famous Congressional Cemetery, and on the north bank of the Anacostia River where it is rossed by Pennsylvania Avenue SE, has been tentatively selected as the site of a privately-funded $50 millions Memorial to the Millenium. The local neighborhood, while rather poor, is still in generally good condition, and such a development could only be good for the neighborhood. Additionally, as the Anacostia Waterfront development program progresses, that underused resource would also attract visitors, tourists and residents, and generally provide opportunities for employment and recreation.

Please see the Proposed Economic Revitalization Plan of the quasi-governmental National Capital Revitalization Corporation, courtesy of DC Watch, in a new window.

District Schools And Youth

There is considerable progress being made with the youth of the District of Columbia. Crime is down nationwide, and violent crimes by youth are down in the District. Also, students' scores are up significantly, but far below what you'd expect from a school system with some of the highest per-capita expenditures in the nation.

District Schools, once so generally dilapidated that a judge ordered them to remain unopened at the start of a recent school year until safety issues had been resolved, are improving somewhat. However, the refurbishing of the physical facilities continues at a snail's pace. The general assessment is that the improvements aren't coming as fast as people would like, but that repairs are being made slightly faster than new deterioration can occur. Among other pressures on the Schools, they are being sued over their lack of evacuation plans and enabling systems by physically disabled students' representatives.

A broad plan to restore and rebuild all of the District's schools -- which average 65 years old -- has been characterized as impossible to fully fund and probably not worth the effort at the proposed scale due to declining enrollment. Increasingly, students are enrolling in Charter Schools or are paying to attend suburban private and pubilc schools, rather than attending the traditional public schools of the District. At present, the District Schools has a student body comprising some 69,000 students spread over some 148 schools.

In a recent election which bitterly divided the city along class and racial lines, the city chose to go with a system which would allow direct elections of five of the city's School Board members, while the Mayor would appoint -- subject to DC Council approval -- the remaining four members. The Mayor's picks have been confirmed by the City Council. They are:

• Laura D. Gardner
• Charles R. Lawrence III
• Robert Peck
• Roger Wilkins

Elected School Board officials are:

• Peggy Cooper Cafritz, President
• Julie Mikuta, district 1
• Dwight E. Singleton, district 2
• Tommy Wells, district 3
• William Lockridge, district 4

They will take office in January.

Homicide

Washington remains the American city where one is most likly to get away with murder, at least so far as the cops are concerned. Given that probably most killings in the District are crimes of anger and retribution more than random stranger-slayings, one is less likely to get away with murder as far as friends and relatives of the murdered are concerned. People in the District have a rather amazing talent for remembering faces, and attaching names and addresses to them, and even though there have been several cash-for-guns exchanges in the District, the streets are unquestionably awash with highly-illegal guns in the hands of people who probably enjoy using them to settle debts of blood or "honor".

Homicide, to the District's Metropolitan Police Department, is apparently "just one of those things". It's not like the officers don't care, it's more like they don't have what it takes to get the job done: organization. According to recent articles in The Washington Post, recommendations circulated last April detailing routes to improvement have been basically ignored, but none have been more resoundingly ignored than the advice on how to organize case files and do the all-important paperwork in such a manner that it's usable by others. Another recommendation was that officers on the cold-case beat (looking into old cases where the trail may be lost in the mists of time, if not of antiquity) drop what they were doing and start looking into the most recent murders. It has been observed that in the District -- where closure is not a matter of sending a killer to prison, but is rather an administrative determination that the suspected killer is off of the streets for any reason, or has died -- the fastest way to bring up the closure rate, now at a dismal 30 percent and the worst in a decade, is to dig around in the cold-cases files and look for the names of recent murder victims on the cold-cases suspect list. This permits that administrative "closure", rather than requiring a lot of fieldwork. We recommend also that the MPD concentrate on very recent events and those cases where it's all pretty open-and-shut and clear out the backlog before focussing on the career killers and the so-called "effective predators". We also propose that once the backlog of simply-solved cases is shrunk a bit, that those officers who might remain on cold-cases should start looking into the "effective predator" cases on the theory that any recent "insoluble" cases are quite likely the deeds of "effective predators" well through their evolution into career killers.

Other recommendations include the universal promulgation across the force of standards for records-keeping, with special emphasis on an eye for detail and recording those details. We recommend also that much more attention be paid to reading those details. As the author of the original recommendations -- former MPD Captain (Ret.) William Corboy -- wrote, seeing the Post going through the files and apparently getting better understanding of it than did the career detectives:

...[Take action now and don't] wait until the Post reviews, analyzes and writes about the files. The Post should not have any difficulty securing the opinions of experts to disparage the work.

Hey, I'm no expert. But even I can see that there is something extremely broken about the MPD's ability to solve homicides which require more than the most-cursory investigation.

To add even more suspicion to the mix -- and to bring unhappy reminders of the extremely-suspicious sequestering by then-captain Alan Dreher of a report from the National Drug Intelligence Center ("NDIC") which was said to have been able to close probably half of the unsolved murders then on the ledger -- a single MPD homicide file on a 1997 case was recently found on St. Charles Parkway in Charles County Maryland by a resident. The MPD was criticized intensely by the NDIC which noted that of their study of some 1827 homicide cases in the District from 1991 to 1994, the files for some 613 (30 percent) of those cases were missing. At present, at least some 375 case files are presently missing from Homicide.

For what it's worth, it must be noted that the MPD recently arrested 22 persons in the violence-plagued Georgia Avenue NW corridor, seizing a pound of powdered cocaine HCl, two pounds of "crack", a half-pound of marijuana, $20,000 and 11 firearms, according to the Post. According to MPD Assistant Police Chief, Ronald C. Monroe:

This is a big deal... Some of the people who we arrested are responsible for much of the disorder we have in our neighborhoods.

Thanks again for getting your insight on the District from a name you can trust, Earth Operations Central. This is 'klaatu' signing off "until next time".

Please visit The Trash Force. Cleaning up our Homeworld, starting with the Greater Washington Metropolitan Region.

I am restructuring the Washington DC pages - the admittedly weird (but you ain't seen nothin' yet!) original Washington: Not a Pretty Site Page is here. Oh, before you go - a clue to the sarcasm-impaired: That page and most associated pages adhere strictly to my policy "if you can't beat them and you can't join them, mock them 'til their eyes bleed."

I'm also starting a page for the " other real Washington" - not necessarily the good parts, but the fun parts.

Other Voices, Other Visions

Fun Stuff

Visit the Earth Page. Save your Homeworld!

Visit the Business MetaIndex Page.

Visit the Computing MetaIndex Page.

Visit the Sciences MetaIndex Page.

Visit the Earth Operations Central District Office. Try a Glimpse HTTP Search (searches HTML content).