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Her tenure as CMO, a position created under the auspices of the DCFRA Control Board, has not been without controversy. There had been some irregularities which gave the impression of possible improper assignments of high-dollar contracts to former associates from her tenure as CMO in Austin Texas. There have also been ongoing questions as to her effectiveness in visibly improving delivery of city services to residents. Mayor Anthony A. Williams has criticized her for the slow pace of visible improvements in District life. However, knowledgable sources say that there have been marked improvement in the internal operations of many city agencies, particularly in terms of increased efficiencies in communications and accountability. However, there has also been criticism that Barnett had surrounded herself with her own core management clique and had thus "reified" a major flaw of the District government, that of multiple strata of management, each tending to insulate the end-user from their resources.

Commentators note that while both Williams and Barnett have excellent reputations for management, particularly of finances, they evidently have very different styles of goals-assessment. Barnett is known to be more of a "process-in-process" person, in effect instituting seemingly-minimal but widespread functional changes at the bottoms of organizational foodchains and letting the effects propagate. Under this theory, not too different from the Reagan Trickle-Down theory (or mathmatical "chaos theory"), small changes to initial conditions can synergize down the line to create disproportionate results. But the time-scale in question is comparatively long. Mayor Williams appears to have a management style which sets immediate improvements as an immediate goal.

There is something to be said for both styles. Mayor Williams style might possibly be best compared to a military intervention, sure to restore order. Yet as history shows, top-down imposition of structure may often be likened to a pre-fabricated house trailered in and simply dropped on a beach. It may be beautiful but it is also unstable, and may either be undercut or blown away. Foundations are necessary if the structure is to last, and emplacement of sturdy foundations that will not be moved appears to have been Barnett's goal. In any case, while she was able to work no massive visible changes, no grand and obvious works, streets have been repaired, and new parking meters have been emplaced, replacing the decapitated poles from which the junkies had stolen the antiquated meter heads. Also the alleys have been cleaned and a timetable has been established for an ongoing cleanup. Trash collection has been greatly improved and recycling efforts have been reinstated. Also, the telecom systems have been improved as well. Rotary-dial phones had been the standard in District government offices, and the ancient phonelines have proven entirely inadequate to the datatraffic needs of modern offices, and many of those phone systems were upgraded under Barnett's watch.

Barnett, whatever her personal strengths or failings, had ineviably run up against the District government bureaucracy, which has been categorized as "not just a leech on the neck of the city but an ugly and sullen one". Long infamous for incompetence, sloth and indolence (not to mention occasional insolence), the District govenrment probably has no equals in North America when it comes to digging in their heels and refusing to let things work, particular when what's supposed to work is them. With the exception of the police, who have proven surprisingly helpful and polite (at least in terms of giving directions, etc), my personal encounters with the DC government bureaucracy have in general proven to be extremely depressing where not outright frustrating to the point of contemplating suicide; with suicide at least something would actually happen and wouldn't take forever. Barnett is to be greatly credited for having gotten any motion at all out of this vast inert lump known as the District bureaucracy.

No replacement CMO has yet been named. Mayor Williams has sent out feelers examining the idea of tapping the repository of "persons of good conscience" in the non-profit sector, which has over the last few years proven to be one of the few competent elements in the vast mix of entity in Washington. Incredible improvements have been effected by these groups, especially considering their budgetary constraints. In particular, some of these groups, especially the non-profit housing groups, have possibly had the most profound changes on the cityscape. While they cannot pave the streets, they have done much to restore many buildings which had been run down wrecks, converting them to comfortable residences and storefronts. This greatly improves quality-of-life - not only for the new residents, many of whom are first-time homeowners or disabled pensioners - but for the present residents, who no longer have to wonder if the junkies squatting next-door are going to set the block afire by accident. There is a fierce yet compassionate light shining from, and a major intellectual and organizational resource, to be found within, these nonprofits organizations.

We note in passing that court-appointed Public Housing receiver David Gilmore was recently picketed by a group of contractors and subcontractors for an ongoing rebuild of some public-housing projects. Gilmore has refused to pay, citing shoddy worksmanship and flagrant safety-code violations. Many of the subcontractors, it appears, had no qualifications other than being able to swing a hammer, and didn't do that all too well. Gilmore stated something to the effect that when individual subcontractors could demonstrate that they'd done particular work and had done it acceptably, his ofice would pay them directly; he stated directly that in no circumstance would he pay the top-level contractor (Team/Ace, of Baltimore) because in his opinion, none of that money would ever make it to the sub-contractors.

The District's police have been under unrelenting pressure from all sides in the last two years. Massive changes have occurred, including several changes in top management, assorted heads have rolled in the middle-management, it was revealed that about half of District officers were technically unqualified to use their firearms, and to make matters worse, a Washington Post investigation of the last ten years of police shootings revealed that the District's Metropolitan Police Department (MPD) led the nation in police shootings, and also in "questionable" uses of deadly force by officers. There was a major concern that undertrained officers had used excessive force and worse, that officers made mistakes which were covered up by internal investigations which dismissed charges against the oficers, suppressing evidence of incompetence, negligence, or wrongdoing.

MPD Chief Charles H. Ramsey, by all accounts a man of integrity, had recently proposed that MPD officers, who are required only to have a high-school education or GED, should in the future be required to have at least a two-year degree or equivalent. DC Councilman Kevin Chavous figuratively shot not only himself, but a large chunk of his part of the city itself, in the metaphorical foot when he objected, effectively, that this would exclude District residents from the police. He did note the necessity of having local officers who lived in the neighborhoods, were familiar with the neighbors, and thus had an investment in the city. However, Chief Ramsey and others noted that the quality (or lack thereof) of communications skills possessed by many officers had caused the dismissal of many cases, permitting offenders to get off scot-free. Ramsey, who has a Masters Degree in criminal justice and acquired his degrees while serving fulltime as a Chicago police officer, has apparently taken the position that if he could do it, so could anyone else. He hasn't directly taken the position that officers presently in the employ of the District should be dismissed due to poor education, only that he believes that a much higher standard should be required of officers, particularly as regards literacy and professional training. He's reported by the Washington Post as saying: "US Attorneys call me and complain about case reports submitted by officers who can't put together two sentences". Chavous is reported as saying that requiring college degrees of officers is particularly demanding and exclusive of "particularly African American males who live east of the river". Chavous, himself black, represents a city ward which comprises most of that area, which is one of the poorest areas of the city, and the most plagued by violence and open-air drug trafficking, and one where neighborhood involvement of resident police officers is probably most crucial to effecting a change in conditions. It is in this part of town that the public schools are the worst, in a system rated second-worst in the nation. In the meantime, reconstruction of the schools continues apace, with among other reforms, a refusal to graduate anyone who can't write coherent English.

Chief Ramsey's calls for increased education requirements, and heightened training of officers, came just hours before District police shot and killed a drunk man on the porch of his parent's home. The grief-stricken parents, who had called to have their son told to "move along", are outraged by the way events were handled. However, from the facts as reported to the Post, the officers acted within reason by firing on the man who had barricaded himself within his parent's house and refused to come out and surrender. Even a witness friendly to Joe Durant Jr. says that Durant claimed to have a handgun, but also says that he never left the doorway of the house and thus could not have been a threat to officers. Could this situation have been prevented if the officers had been given special training, or if there had been on-call a specialist in handling "psychological situation"? Only further investigation will tell.

There will be additional investigation of this, and of many other incidents. Chief Ramsey stated that, among other things, he's asked the Justice Department to investigate police uses of deadly force over the last ten years. US Attorney General Janet Reno has said that she was "already on it". Why? Public confidence simply isn't given to the MPD right now, and even Chief Ramsey says that he doesn't believe that the department has the credibility to investigate itself.

Among other things, citizens action groups have protested the lack of treatment programs for persons having problems with alcohol or drug abuse, both of which social ills are rampant in Washington. During the final years of the Barry-Cronies(tm) administration, cost-cutting in budgets combined radical reduction in expenditures on treatment and therapy programs and facilities, with rampant abuses by Barry cronies who either spent no funds on the intended programs, or who diverted these funds for their own personal misuse. The District most definitely needs to expend a great deal of the budget surplus on outreach to the homeless, mentally ill, and addicted, who are at present seen-to only by charitable groups, outside of actual incarceration in the failing and delapidated St. Elizabeth's Hospital.

It may well be that this recent shooting of a man who was clearly having some sort of extreme psychological/drug problems reflects the District's present attitude towards the "goddamned homeless". In a city which has at last lowered unemployment over the last years from roughly 10 to 8.6 percent, while concurrently deconstructing Welfare-as-we-know it with (officially) the worst welfare-to-work transitional program in the nation, and an inept social-services administration compounding a dysfuntional employment-services department, the homeless abound. Panhandlers are everywhere, or at least they are everywhere in weather less-inclement than has been seen in the last two weeks. Around Christmastime, the weather dropped from freakishly summery balm to a more-seasonable hard freeze, complete with high-wind conditions. The shelters are overflowing, as is any restaurant that will let someone sit and warm up while drinking a cup of coffee. Many of the homeless are homeless because of drug or alcohol addiction, and many of these seem to think they like it that way. But most of the homeless are homeless because they're mentally-ill, and there simply are no treatment resources available. We do hope that Mayor Williams won't forget these people, and won't simply let the cold weather solve the problem for the city. He did, after all, promise to not forget them, and we're all relying on him being an accountant, and not a politician. Politicians tend to conveniently forget their promises, and we will hope that a little thought will add up the human costs of lives spent on the street in the misery of winter, compounded by the miseries of madness and despair... all exascerbated by the revulsion and disdain of the well-employed power elite who generally treat the homeless mentally-ill as lepers, instead of as the people who they, but for the grace of god, might themselves be.

Moving right along, the above-mentioned cold snap has led to water-main breakages all across the region, but particularly in the District. Additional funds have been allocated, and outside contractors are being lined up and indeed some are already on the job. The present state of affairs has repairs continuing around the clock. Also moving right along, the District schools are preparing to fire all of the large number of schoolbus drivers who do not have the proper licenses. On the subject of licensing, etc., we note that an individual contracted to provide snowplowin services to the city was discovered to be operating an illegal dump leaking toxic wastes into the Anacostia river. When his equipment was inspected by police, it was discovered that none of the snow-removal equipment would pass inspection (lax in the District, in any case) and indeed, much of the equipment was inoperable. Please note that the whole present state of affairs - the upheavals and change of power, etc. - in the District is a direct result of an inability to get the streets cleared of snow after a moderate blizzard. So much time and so much hot air later, the snowplows still don't work.

A note is in order about the heads of various committees of the DC City Council.

• Consumer & Regulatory Affairs: Sharon Ambrose, Ward 6 Democrat.
• Economic Development: Charlene Drew Jarvis, Ward 2 Democrat.
• Education & Libraries: Kevin P. Chavous, Ward 7 Democrat.
• Finance ↦ Revenue: Jack Evans, Ward 2 Democrat.
• Government Operations: Kathy Patterson, Ward 3 Democrat.
• Human Services: Sandy Allen, Ward 8 Democrat.
• Local, Regional & Federal Affairs: David Catania, at-large Republican
• Judiciary: Harold Brazil, at-large Democrat.
• Public Works: Carol Schwartz, at-large Republican.

During the first term of the DCFRA Control Board, formed to oversee reform of the District's finances, several management firms were retained to audit and examine several of the District's agencies and also to generate suggestions for reforms. What they saw, in general, was a degree of incompetence, mismanagement and occasional outright malfeasance which was generally considered "astounding". District workers, wherever asked, generally admitted to no awareness, no wrongdoing, and certainly no responsibility. Denial-of-everything had been the order of the day. Yet, despite overwhelming footdragging and naysaying by the District employees, the management-consultant firms have consistently seen through to the dirt. And now that District agency heads have apparently demonstrated that they will be attempting to repeat the former patterns of footdragging and naysaying, the management-consultants will again be offering their services towards the reconstruction of District government. However, where before they had been paid quite-handsomely for their services, they will now be offering their services gratis.

This may, or it may not, turn out to be for the best of all concerned. We at Earth Operations Central have the greatest respect for the competence and ability of the firms involved. We have, however, grave reservations regarding the wisdom of turning the management of the Nation's Capital over to corporate concerns. It has long been noted that there is possibly excessive intertwining between certain elements of the corporate sector and the political sector at the Federal level. This was particularly notable during the Cold War years, when even then-departing President Dwight D. Eisenhower remarked "beware of the Military-Industrial Complex". We cannot possibly imagine that such management-consultancy firms of international reputation and scope as Booz-Allen Hamilton (among others) would fail to simultaneously provide excellent management, and firm steering towards utilization of well-known and reputable private outfits in which they held substantial investments. Washington is, as a town, already well-permeated with lobbyists and other corporate-front conduits, primarily operating at a Federal level. It may be rightly stated that in some regards, the District government has provided a certain element of checks-and-balances on what might otherwise be seen as a corporate overrunning of Federal Washington. Where lobbyists might otherwise have had a field day dancing on the backs of the bruised American taxpayer, they could always be held in check by some lowly District clerk putting the screws to them by making sure that their car remained lost in the impound system, as an example, or refusing to issue a permit which would increase the ability of lobbying groups to have more and better places for unnoticed deliveries of small suitcases full of large bills. Would it make sense to have publicly-traded corporations acting as a check-and-balance on other corporations, or in fact, acting as regulators of themselves? Of course, if this is going to happen in any case, I suppose it's best that the management consultancy outfits provide their steering services gratis rather than charging a fee for this service.

(We at Earth Operations Central will of course, with tongue not entirely in cheek, continue to offer our own opinions on certain matters, particularly as regards low-cost high-performance Information Resources for the District. We'd also like to note that we are not affiliated with any major or minor corporation, own no stock, and in fact barely have a logo.)

In any case, having received the resignation of former Chief Management Officer Camille C. Barnett (some prefer to say she was ousted), in the interim Mayor Williams will also take on the role of CMO. The office of the Mayor is, under the present system, not intended to be a managerial role, but rather is a policy-setting position. However, as Mayor Williams notes that there is "not a readily available pool of candidates who can step up to the plate and [face and surmount present conditions]".

( Earth Operations Central humbly re-announces, for the third year running, that we are ready to face and surmount some of the District's Information Resources present conditions, by supplying Linux operating system and associated software, to provide Internet and Intranet servers. We're too small to sue, but then again, that's because we work so "cheap".)

Mayor Williams has announced that he'll be cutting back on public appearances in order to devote more time to fixing things. In a way, that's good, because things will actually be happening, instead of having us all listening to the awesome sound of the entire District government dragging its feet. It's also not-so-good, because he'll have less time to listen to the complaints of the residents. Of course, by this time there's no doubt that he already has heard a substantial and probably cross-sectional sample of what's rubbing the residents the wrong way. Another possibly bad thing is that as the Mayor dives into hands-on mode, he'll have to increasingly depend on the willingness of staffers to pass-along whatever anyone outside of the office has to tell him.

It's fortunate, then, that Mayor Williams Chief of Staff is one Reba Pittman Evans. Evans (no relation to DC Councilman Jack Evans) has a reputation as being the sort of fiercely competent dragon lady who can tell someone exactly where to get off in the sweetest terms imaginable. She's also a Washington native, has no known associations with any political groups in the District (is this the beginning of a trend we believe should be enlarged upon?) and proclaims her pride in Washington and its people. A former deputy director of operations at the US Department of Agriculture (USDA), and later acting-assistant Secretary of Agriculture, Evans has developed a reputation for competence which Mayor Williams reportedly noted and tracked as a personal example. According to the Post, she was at one time the District events coordinator and then later the operations director at the Convention Center. We can only hope that she will pass along to the Mayor anything that he needs to hear, and will also have an excellent feel for what the Mayor needs to know.

We note in passing that while the rest of the Washington area, particularly contiguous Montgomery County Maryland, was within the last week rocked by a horrendous ice-storm which caused widespread and prolonged power outages, the District itself came through quite well.

However, during the preceding weeks, from roughly Christmas to mid-January, extreme cold combined with the District's century-old plumbing to cause water-main breaks all over town. While water-main breaks are nothing new in Washington, never before has there been such as spate as in this period. Crews have worked around-the-clock on 12-hour shifts, and staffing levels have been increased.

This last event occurred when it became evident that there were major problems within the Water and Sewer Authority, which had a months-long backlog on repairing leaks and breaks.

Also noted in passing, one week after District officers shot a man to death in the door of his parents' home for allegedly waving knives at officers, MPD Detective Frank Tracy, the union head for DC police officers, denounced coverage of the MPD's police killings rate as "a feeble attempt to depict [MPD officers] as trigger-happy cops who take pride in shooting people, either armed or unarmed". According to Tracy, in the first seven months of 1998, 212 officers were assaulted and in the whole year, there were only 63 shootings by police. Tracy noted that most of the officers - whose careers were tracked in a Post series critical of the nation's-highest police-killings-per-capita city police force - were hired under extreme-pressure circumstances during the Barry-Administration years of 1989 and 1990. At that time, Federal mandates combined with an exploding murder rate in Washington, causing crash-priority hirings without adequate background checks. Detective Tracy has also noted with displeasure that due to the coverage, Chief Charles H. Ramsey found it necessary to call in the Justice Department for an independent investigation, to which call the Justice Department responded with the statement that it would not only assist in such an investigation, but had already launched one even before Ramsey's request.

Roughly a week after Detective Tracy's blast at the press, Chief Ramsey announced that a Department of Professional Responsibility, centrally located instead of divided among the precincts, would henceforth investigate all police killings. The MPD has undergone a great deal of shake-up over the last two years, and Chief Ramsey has stated his intention to buckle down and do whatever it takes to restore public confidence in the MPD. Detective Tracy was overheard to remark at one point that he wishes that the press would, "[l]eave the police alone and write about the dirtbags on the street." While we admire and respect the MPD's rank-and-file, and the job that they do, we have to support Chief Ramsey's, and the Justice Department's, efforts to believably assure us that the the cops on the street aren't the dirtbags on the street. In any case, it's the nature of journalism in general, and journalism-in-Washington in particular, to not report dog-bites-man stories; dirtbags in the streets are considered a given. Uniformly excellent police in the streets of Washington are not, sadly, considered a given. Time will tell as we report how this can be made, whether in perception or reportage or in reality, to change.

Noted in passing, the Right Honorable Senator Kay Bailey Hutchinson, a Texas Republican, is now the new Chair of the Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on the District of Columbia.

Recalculations of the District's financial position indicate that the budgetary surplusses already forecast will increase by roughly $100 millions, according to former DCFRA Control Board Chairman Dr. Andrew F. Brimmer. This will permit the District government to put-paid to some $332 million deficit. According to Mayor Williams, "[a] lot of this surplus will go to a rainy-day fund.

As we we might hope that it shall. During the final days of ex-Mayor Marion Barry's empowerment as top-dog in the City of Washington, we noted a peculiar symptom of the collapse in local government - the programs which showed either the most abusiveness or the most imcompetence were those programs which reached out to the poorest and the most-needy. The saddest part of all was that in many of these programs, the money was there for the asking, in the form of Federal grants, but nobody bothered to ask for the money. This was largely rectified, mostly due to public outcry once the presses informed them of what was happening, but some grants which had been duly applied-for and received, are set for expiration in the near future.

One such grant is the funding for the fight against homelessness in downtown Washington. At the end of 1999 March, the final installment of a five-year $20 million loan runs out. The US Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) loan, which came as part of an agreement between the Feds, the City of Washington, and its non-profit social-services providers, was intended to add Washington to the list of jurisdictions nationwide where are attempting to develop an improved "continuum of care" for homeless persons. The City of Washington, throughout the program, had increasingly cut payments into this program, in the final years of the near-collapse leaving almost all expenses to the Federal payment, and almost all effective programs were administered by non-profit organizations, which - driven by necessity to occasionally-radical invention - somehow, if barely, coped.

Nationwide, homelessness is radically reduced from the recent high levels seen in the 1980s and early-to-mid 1990s. In part, this is due to the rebound in the economy, which is, interestingly, partially tied to Wall Street exuberance over the impending "end of Welfare as we know it", and enactment of laws restricting illegal immigration. Studies have indicated that for every 65 illegal immigrants, 100 Americans either lose their jobs, or are prevented from finding work. Thus, eliminating illegal immigration tends to provide employment niches for citizens, and combining this with the upturn in construction has led to many - who were desperately homeless through no fault of their own - to work, and thence to housing and self-betterment. but there are those who are difficult to help, since they've adapted to the life and/or have fallen into addiction or mental illness.

It must be noted that within the coming year, there will be many persons nationwide - and Washington DC is by no means an exception - who will finally and for all time exhaust their recourse to Welfare. Also note that the City of Washington has the worst national rating for Welfare to Work transition programs. Effectively, it has none.

I call upon Mayor Anthony A. Williams to dedicate a small competent core staff to interfacing effectively with the District's non-profit outreach community, and to earmark and escrow a substantial portion of the District's surplus "rainy-day" fund, securing some of that for those who will - when the economy turns downwards once again as it assuredly shall - be someday in greatest need. I further call upon Mayor Williams to rapidly instantiate some sort of effective Welfare-to-Work training program, so that when it's skills that are needed, and not just warm bodies, those skills will be available.

Dr Brimmer has noted, as have many others, that this budget surplus event is probably not something that will be repeatable, or certainly not to the present order of magnitude. Much of the surplus stems, not from fine-tuned budget trimming, but from lack of services actually delivered. There's lot of work which still has to be done. Look at it this way: If you were "sick as a dog" for a month, at the end of that month you might still have a pocket full of money... but only because you were too sick to leave the house and get your bills paid and shop. You're going to need every cent of that money in your pocket, because you cleaned every shelf in the house bare. The District's in a similar position, budgetarily.

We note that the DC Department of Housing and Community Development has just moved into Round 2 Task Force competition in $15 millions of Federal Grant funds. Please contact:

Ms. Shirley Hilliard at (202) 535-1950

1999 January 28
"I'm simply asking us to do what government ought to do".

That was Mayor Anthony A. Williams, speaking at a news conference on January 27. Trying to deliver on one of his campaign promises, a visible change within six months, he set forth his plans for these improvements. They are to include:

• Educational outreach in the form of homework clinics and computer-education facilities at some 13 recreation centers in distressed neighborhoods. This is an excellent idea, as increasingly hopes for future academic or employment opportunity require at least some computer literacy. However, can this be done as speedily as the Mayor would like? He's set April 30 as a target date. He's also set the goal of opening three more recreation centers by September 30.

• Neighborhood clean-up is a top priority. This includes working with neighborhood groups to identify and eliminate conditions which permit crime and ugliness to flourish. Included in this particular thrust would be creation of a cadre of inspectors specially trained to deal with abandoned vehicles, run-down and abandoned housing, and sales of District-owned abandoned buildings, many of which are presently so-called "heroin hotels". Also in the works, coordinated efforts to rid the city of its awesome infestation of rats.

• Extended hours for many District agencies, allowing after-work access to District residents. Also, there should be, by the end of March, a single always-answered phone number whereby residents can get information and direction to whichever agency handles their needs.

• Short-term emergency fixes are to be given priority, in particular potholes are to be patched with 48 hours. Also, Thomas Circle underpass is to be re-opened as speedily as possible - work was halted last summer and it's looking pretty tacky, not to mention being a major traffic bottleneck.

Aiding the Mayor's efforts will be a recently-announced policy team headed by some fairly obscure but high-powered locals drawn from the ranks of various outfits, both private and public sector, including both District and Federal governments. The staff includes:

Federal:
• Carol Thompson Cole - special advisor on the District to the White House
  Janie Jeffers - deputy special advisor

  G. Edward DeSeve - deputy director of the Office of Management and Budget

  Rosemary Evans - special assistant

District of Columbia:
• Max Brown - labor-management issues, general legal counsel
• Norman S. Dong - formerly administrator of the Office of Grants Management, now working with Reba Pittman Evans as coordinating liason for the heads of various District agencies
• Reba Pittman Evans - Mayor's Chief of Staff
• Sherryl Hobbs Newman - reorganizing Customer Services, citywide. Also head of the Customer Services administration for the Office of Tax and Revenue.
• Abdusalam H. Omer - principal budget advisor. Also Deputy Chief Financial Officer for budget and planning.

Private Sector:
• Marie C. Johns - president and CEO of Bell-Atlantic (Washington)

The Mayor is going to need all of the advice and help he can get. For example, one of the bigger flaps to dog the new administration exemplifies the sort of by-whatever-means footdragging for which the City government is infamous.

One David Howard, 44, head of the constituent services office (Public Advocate, in charge of citizen complaints, etc.) and thus one of the people who would be most-responsible for "changing the way things have been to the way things should be", made a poor choice of words in announcing that the city had very limited funds for assisting residents with emergencies, including such emergencies as fire-victim housing and so-forth. His remark was something to the effect that he'd have to be very miserly. He used a synonym for miserly which sounds unfortunately slightly like a racist epithet, and one of the District workers took it upon himself to broadcast a rumor that Mr Howard was an open racist. This is in contradiction to the statements of camapign co-workers, such as this comment from Ward 8 campaign-coordinator Phil Pannell: "...I never once detected anything racist about him". Pannell (who is black) further notes that as Mr Howard was the Mayor's first openly-gay appointee, "this is really a slap in the face of a constituency that supported him". In a letter from a gay-activism group to the Mayor, who accepted Mr Howard's resignation (which was voluntary and almost instantaneous as the furor erupted) with hardly a comment, we see an echo of our own position regarding the entrenched District bureaucracy:

"By stating that the mere resemblance of an innocent word to a slur was enough to justify the resignation of a valued and much-admired staffer, you have played directly into the hands of the most unscrupulous political vultures in our city..."

We couldn't say it better. We won't even try. The fact of the matter is this: Washington DC is a city that has been for far too long divided along lines of class and race and income. "Can't we all just get along?" This is bogus and obstructive and in my humble opinion, it is just far beyond time to lay both racism and reverse-racism in a well-deserved grave. This city just plain needs to get over it. The "race card" that was so well played during the Barry-Cronies(tm) administration is a tired old horse that needs to take a short walk off of a tall building.

There's nothing in this town that's more sad than someone who doesn't get his own way screaming "racist", just to get the town to whip on whoever is foiling the plans of whoever's playing that race card. They say that "violence is the last refuge of incompetence" and this particular ploy shows only enough competence to get someone else to do the fighting instead of taking the blame for one's self.

If I am going to find any fault with Mayor William's handling of the event, it's this: he was reported by the Post as saying that if an investigation shows no wrongdoing, he wouldn't mind if Mr Howard was given another position within his Administration. In my opinion, if an investigation shows that there was no wrongdoing on the part of Mr Howard, that means that there was definitely malicious rumormongering for political infighting purposes by whoever it was who spread the lie that a good man was a racist. And anyone who's willing to spread racism by unfoundedly calling someone else a racist, they should be viewed as the common enemy, sowing dissension where there was only cooperation. Divide and conquer is what this is, but it's a sad and desperate ploy from someone who really needs to admit that they were part of the problem, and not part of the solution.

Yes, Washington has a "racial climate that needs a lot of work", to quote Mayor Williams. And in my humble opinion, the best way to fix that climate is to never reward anyone who plays the race card to remove competition or the potential for improvement.

Mr. Williams has consistently reiterated, in the face of questions that seem really quite ridiculous in this modern cosmopolitan and world-class city, as to whether he's "black enough": "I am committed to representing all of the people of our city and making sure my administration truly reflect's the city's diversity. I am particularly sensitive to the need to include people that have felt excluded from the political process and governance of the city, such as residents east of the Anacostia River."

A few years ago, the Greater Washington Metrpolitan Region had quite a few problems with the District proper, and the District itself had some problems with the surrounding jurisdictions.

Foremost among the District's concerns was the fact that probably the majority of people who work downtown lived in the suburbs. For quiet some time there had been a call for a "commuter tax", whereby those who used District services such as the police, etc., might contribute towards the cost of such services, even if they were not residents. This was wildly popular downtown and equally unpopular in the suburbs, as might be expected.

Foremost among many of the surrounding jurisdictions' concerns was the crime and voilence which boiled up out of the District, particularly along the District Line between the District and Prince George's County, Maryland. Small communities such as Mount Ranier Maryland were plagued by droves of open-air drug marketeers, who plied their trade in Mount Ranier, only to flee into the neighboring District, where there was no real threat of arrest. Responses to this included congressional extension of cooperative authorities between such agencies as the Secret Service Uniform divisions, the US Park Police, the MNCPPC Park Police, Maryland State Police and the police departments of Prince George's County and various local municipal law-enforcement groups and agencies.

Largely considered a success, particularly in cleaning up some of the most-blighted borderline areas, this short history of cooperation has proved that there is fertile ground for profitable endeavour, if only the Region starts seeing itself as a region, and acts in a coordinated manner.

This would appear to be "in the works". Mayor Williams has recently conferred with leaders from the surrounding jurisdictions to address not only his own concerns, but also some of the concerns of the surrounding jurisdictions. While details are not available, we assume that among other things an increased cooperation will be arranged between the City of Washington and the Maryland suburbs, particularly with Prince George's County. "PG" County was Maryland's first majority-black county, and while the District was undergoing a massive population loss within the last decade (having lost one-sixth of the residents over a seven year period), "PG"'s population swelled. Prince George's County Maryland was a primary destination for the departing black middle-class of Washington, and while their homes may be in PG now, the hearts of many remain in DC. It was, some will argue, this vast exodus of the black middle-class which sounded the final alarm in Washington.

Washington, like most American cities, had experienced the so-called "Edge Cities" effects. Edge Cities effects are well-understood. Early in the lives of cities, the amenities (such as factory or office employment) which make city-life preferable to rural life are gathered in one place, forming a city core. As the city evolves, land prices are less-expensive towards the edges, and there is a trade-off between commuting times to the central amenities, and the larger properties afforded by the lower real-estate costs. When enough people live in the outlying areas, amenities concentrate there as well as, and more affordably than, the downtown core areas. Normally, the downtown cores tend to lose amenities to the less-expensive suburbs, and these become new urban cores. Over time, the whole region tends to expand outwards, with new growth at the edges and with the center becoming abandoned. If, however, this trend last long enough, the edges of the suburbs begin to meet the expanding suburbs of other cities. The only place remaining for development is the now-derelict city core... and at about this time, the formerly-attractive "new" urban cores of the suburbs begin themselves to suffer senescence.

While room for expansion remained, suburban communities could afford to regard decaying urban cores with some disdain, although they did so at their peril. Effectively, suburban growth became a sort of Ponzi Scheme, wherein one bad check covers another, depending on processing lag to protect against overdraft. Zero-sum games, where one snatches limited resources from another party to their irrecoverable loss, work well in such conditions. However, at a time when limits to growth have been reached, oddly we now see the end of the zero-sum condition. The driving factor for urban flight to the suburbs was essentially land-costs. Land costs are now almost equalized. In this situation, the only zero-sum aspect allowing competition for resources is the consideration of quality-of-life, which for many is "convenience" and "accessability" - and simple geometry indicates that the point closest to all others is the center. The other major concern, of course, which so far has tended to make the suburbs considerably more desirable, is "safety".

The Greater Washington Metropolitan Area has been notoriously lacking in regional councils with any authority, with the main exception being the Washington Area Metropolitan Transit Authority (WMATA) or "Metro". MetroRail runs radially, with assorted rail lines originating in the suburbs, and passing through Washington towards central connections. The suburban bus-lines have been increasingly operated by contractors specific to each county, providing limited circumferential flow as a counterpoint to the MetroBus radial routes. While a majority of the Regional workers commute more than 15 miles to their workplaces, those workplaces tended to be in the suburbs, requiring either an automobile commute, or a lengthy detour downtown by MetroRail, there to switch trains and ride right back out to a different suburb. Recently, however, WMATA and other agencies teamed up to create a circumferential bus-line of limited scope. It is expected that there will be expansions of this service, which terminates at Tysons' Corners Virginia, which is very under-served by public transportation and the scene of daily traffic nightmares. This horrific traffic may be fixed within a decade by the addition of light-rail from nearby Metro stops through to Tysons', but that does nothing to aid the large number of, for instance, DC resident workers who have secured employment at Tyson's Corners, a rapidly-expanding office and retail center.

Mayor Williams has been trying to coordinate with leaders in the surrounding jurisdictions, especially attmepting to link up with leaders in the business community. Increasingly, due to an odd demographic shift, District residents are commuting "against the flow", in particular working in Northern Virginia's burgeoning hightech sector. This demographic shift counterbalanced the exiting black middle-class families with an incoming crowd largely composed of the so-called "DINKs" (dual-income, no kids) and single young professionals. Much of the District's increased civic revenue, outside of gains made in efficiencies in tax-collection and licensing, can be traced to the rapid expansion of this eminently taxable high-income class. However, the traffic across the bridges into Virginia has reached record proportions; "reverse commuting" was practically unheard-of only a decade ago. Clearly, both the District and the Virginia jurisdictions have a vested interest in improving trans-Potomac transportation.

One of the major concerns of the region has been, since the mid-1980s, the immense amount of crime in the District, and the question of how to halt its exportation to the suburbs has long ocupied the thoughts of regional administrators. So long as Marion Barry and his crony-riddled and dysfunctional police force continued to essentially either look the other way at the District's criminal combines or proved inept at the task of actually making a dent in the level of violence in the District, regional administrators gave no thought at all to cooperation with the District government. However, by 1997, it had become clear that multi-department task forces are becoming successful at eliminating the so-called "border jumper criminals" who had a very successful niche based on flight across jurisdictional lines.

We propose that these lines of communication between the suburbs and the District proper should be aggressively expanded, as many of our regional ills can be likened to "border jumper crime"; it's been too easy to say "their problem now" once the jurisdictional line is crossed. But the problem is this: after a suitable wait, the problem comes right back... or we may ourselves have to cross that line and now it's our problem. For any problem which is regional and not purely-local (and little is purely-local these days) we need regional cooperation and perhaps even Regional Authorities.

1999 March 11
Within the Week, the District government under Anthony A. Williams passed a test, the failure of which test is generally considered the "straw that broke the back" of the former Home Rule government in the District, that of Marion Barry.

It snowed six inches, and the District's streets were promptly plowed.

To readers outside of the District, the thought of a major city being paralyzed by any snowstorm of less that four feet might seem ridiculous, but it actually happened here in late 1996. The snow remained on the streets of the District until the "January Thaw" of 1997. In the surrounding jurisdictions, all primary roads had been cleared within 24 hours of nearly three feet of snow, and most secondary roads were cleared within another 24 hours.

It's indicative of how far the District has come since Congress asserted its Constitutional right of final control over the District, and emplaced the DCFRA Control Board.

Other indicators have been appearing during the last month or so. One is the completely revamped Official Washington DC Homepage. Another is the rather informative site operated by the Department of Consumer and Regulatory Affairs.

To assist in finding information on these sites, I have instantiated the Washington WebSpace Search Engine, a public service of Earth Operations Central and TJH Internet SP - and yes, of course it's Linux - and of course, as always, it's free.

• The District's deficit has been eliminated. Mayor Williams initially remarked that it would be an excellent idea to put much of the surplus - above and beyond deficit-payoff - into interest-bearing accounts, saving for a rainy day. However, he later backpedalled and trotted out the idea of building a baseball stadium in Washington and bringing professional baseball back to Washington, which has been without a professional baseball team for over two decades.

• Metrorail has announced an opening date of 1999 September 18 for the last two Green Line stations. The Green Line can then offer direct access to Greenbelt and the University of Maryland, adding services to Columbia Heights and Petworth.This will at last mean an end to the horriffic congestion and ugliness in Columbia Heights and Petworth, which have been reduced to a war-zone appearance due to the deep-tunnel work.

• Initial preparations to a rebuilding of the hideously-decayed "eastern portal to Washington" - New York Avenue NE - have begun. Actual rebuilding of the main grades of this heavily-trafficked corridor is not expected to be completed until roughly 2001/2002. Some ramps have been closed.

• Almost all of this years record number of water-main breaks have been repaired.

• Improved enforcement of improved environmental-quality laws, especially better prosecution of dumpers.

• The District of Columbia Housing Authority has stated intention to move from an inflation-based wage increase system to pay raises based on merit.

• A new "one-stop tax center" has been opened at 941 North Capitol Street NE. It's clean, and modern, and supposedly it works.

• Vast improvements are evident in the office of the Medical Examiner. Where under the Barry Administration the ME's office became literally the laughingstock of the forensic-medicine community nationwide, the office is now up to professional speed, with many formerly "undetermined" cases reopened and resolved. In particular, the epidemic of infant deaths in the District is being revealed as an epidemic of infant murder. Infants formerly thought to have died of natural causes have been shown to have been killed, sometimes after abuse of long duration.

• Police Chief Charles H. Ramsey has announced plans to hire 200 new officers. Among other things, he will try to amend the rules so that he can hire officers from other departments and allow them to retain rank and seniority. This is expected to be fought tooth-and-nail by the local police union, which has been targeting Ramsey's second-in-command, Terrence Gainer, for purportedly disparaging the local officers for excessive use of their weapons. He received a no-confidence vote from the police union 1999 March 3.

• The DC Council itself is badly in need of fixing - please read the DC Appleseed Report. What a mess.

• The Office of Tax and Revenue, whose improvements are credited with being a major factor in the present sound fiscal position of the District, is still not fully up to speed - as much as $100-million may be lost at present to tax-cheats, due to the fact that the present processing system is still almost entirely paper-based and subject to a great deal of human error (or abuse). An automated system is not expected to be in place until 2002.

• Halfway Houses, intended as an alternative to prison, or as a pre-release process assisting establishment as a working member of the community - or, astonishingly as detention facilities for those awaiting trial on charges including violent felonies such as murder - have an astounding walkaway rate. Between a third and a quarter of those remanded to halfway-houses simply walk away, and a very large number of those evidently go unreported until far too late. Also, there is evidence of a total failure to provide alternative space for those who walk away repeatedly, and warrants for recapture of walkaways have taken literally months to be issued. There is no incentive for prisoners to remain, as the DC Council rescinded the ability of Superior Court judges to issue pretrial surety bonds, in a 1994 attempt to reduce crowding at the DC Jail. A recent study indicated that some 60 percent of those absconding from the halfway-houses were awaiting trial.

• A buggy computer system provided by Peat Marwick KPMG to the District Government in Fall 1998 has delayed millions of dollars in payments to dozens of contractors. Particularly affected are the agencies which pay contractors seeing to the disadvantaged, disabled, and needy, with the Department of Housing and Community Development's payment system reputedly balking utterly at issuing checks.

• Late payments to contractors providing services to some 700 mentally-ill and disabled residents resulted in a 5.1 million dollar fine against the District, which has demonstrated a policy of disenfranchisement, neglect, and in some cases abuse of mental-health consumers.

• A. Sue Brown, in charge of the city's welfare program, the Income Maintenance Administration, has been placed on leave pnding the outcome of an investigation by District Inspector-General E. Barrett Prettyman Jr.'s office. Brown has served as the District's acting commissioner of health-care finances, long-term care administration, and presided over the closing of the DC Village (a juvenile detention facility among other things) in 1996. She is under investigation for irregularities which the Department of Human Services believe may indicate that she was involved in the improper awarding of contracts.

• Problems remain with the District Government's telephone service. Not only are many lines still going unanswered, listed incorrectly for proper interagency referrals, but recently is was discovered that the District had been spending millions annually for nearly 10,000 phone lines which were never used, or in some cases being used by non-District personnel, including private businesses.

• The District's Motor Vehicle Administration still remains somewhat broken. Recent investigations into the MVA questioned why persons whose licenses had been revoked in neighboring jurisdictions were able to secure licenses issued by the District. Since 1997, the City had no employees available to do data-entry of paper notifications of revocations/suspensions into MVA records.

• The District's murder-rate appears to be on the rise again.

Evidently the improvements outweight the failures, as the House Committee on Government Reform and Oversight voted to yield back to Mayor Anthony Williams powers which they had stripped from Marion Barry, including the power to hire and fire agency heads, and to direct day-to-day operations of the District Government. The House of Representatives unanimously confirmed the committee's recommenations on 1999 February 9. The Senate confirmed on February 23.

The US Department of the Interior has announced their so-called "DC Sparkle" initiative, which will focus on beautifying the District's parks. Most of the parks in the District are managed by the National Park Service. Over five millions are expected to be spent - in particular the scenic and historic Meridian Hill (Malcolm X. Shabazz) park will be getting a face lift. Also scheduled is considerable work in Rock Creek Park.

Evidence continues to mount that an overconfident element of the local-politics community believes the Control-Board period to be already over and done-with, and has apparently embarked upon a campaign to spoof Congress into thinking that sufficient restructuring has occurred within the District of Columbia.

While overjoyed by the District's sudden lack of a deficit, and a brimming surplus, we note with some dismay that very few of the overconfident faction downtown remind themselves that the vast majority of this suplus is due to the Federal Government shouldering the responsibilities and costs of operating many of the programs formerly operated by the District, and that this surplus thus does not indicate healthy or robust operational improvements within the District Government itself. It is premature, to say the least, for the District to start counting chickens before they are hatched.

On 1999 February 25, the Washington Post revealed that it had come into possession of a copy of an internal DCFRA strategy document detailing a move to essentially hoodwink Congress into thinking that it was time to restore full self-government to the District of Columbia. We pointed out immediately prior to the appointment of Alice Rivlen to the chair of the Control Board, that something like this was bound to happen as the honorable Ms. Rivlin is an extremely outspoken advocate of Home Rule. This is, as Representative Thomas M. Davis III pointed out immediately, "[t]he worst thing they can do... There is not a hostile environment up here towards the Control Board or the city, and they don't need to be paranoid about it." The Honorable Mr. Davis evidently has forgotten what city he's in.

We believe that Congress, as a National body which has a vested interest in the greater good of the entire Nation, as opposed to being a creature of the Greater Washington Metropolitan culture, must continue to keep a close oversight of District Revitalization.

On 1999 February 10, a group calling itself Committee for the Capital City filed briefs before The US District Court. They urged that residents of the District of Columbia should be enumerated as citizens of Maryland and should be entitled to vote as such in elections to Congress. We absolutely support such action and you may wish to read our reasons.

The District of Columbia is Federal Territory ceded by, and entirely lying within the borders of, the State of Maryland. We believe that the Government of the District of Columbia has no say in the matter who shall be entitled to vote in Federal elections, but we hold the position that the State of Maryland has failed in its Fourteenth Amendment obligations to provide equal protection under the law to all citizens residing within its State Lines. Therefor, it is incumbent upon the State of Maryland to extend voting priveleges to all legitimate residents of the District of Columbia, as they reside within the State Lines. Maryland may not like it much but it's signatory to the Constitution and thus bound to extend these privileges to vote in elections for Congressional representation, although due to the Constitution, it may make no claims to sovereignity nor dominion over the Federal District.

Also noted in passing, a US General Accounting Office report announced that the District was at risk of extreme system failures due to the Year 2000 (Y2K) bug. The Federal response was to throw lots of money at the problem - $60 million - at roughly $1000 per unit, the city could thus buy every single District resident (including babes in arms) a new Y2K-ready Internet-capable computer complete with monitor and printer.

The City's response was to seek approval to authorize the City's Chief Technology Officer Suzanne Peck for full discretionary spending powers without DC Council oversight. We strongly predict that much of the Y2K problem will be fixed in time, with a vast outlay of city financial resources, and we further predict that there will eventually be a minor scandal over payments done under-the-table and kickbacks and other such ploys typical of the entrenched Barry-Cronies(tm) culture.

Among other City responses, it was noted that people should expect some problems, and should stock up on food and water. It was also noted that the District might very well have less problems than might other similarly-sized governments, for the precise reason that the District had so few functional computer-based systems working. Since everything's already done by hand, continuing to do the same old things the same old (broken) way couldn't possibly be any further broken by Y2K.

Noted in passing once more, we do believe that we shall soon see one of our earlier predictions come to pass over the next year or two.

Never a pretty nighborhood in recent years, Columbia-Heights/Petworth has come into conditions approximating those of a war zone in recent years. The interminable MetroRail Green Line construction has closed streets, isolated small businesses from customers, shaken some houses nearly to pieces, covered the area with choking dust, driven out residents, and turned the already-wild local cultural absolutely feral. Junkies infested abandoned properties, and the Petworth neighborhood even sported a serial-killing suspect, allegedly preying upon the "strawberries" who prostitute themselves for crack, heroin and PCP.

Metro has announced that the new Metro station serving the area, Columbia Heights Station, will open in 1999 September. Some developers from New York and elsewhere are competing to develop some 13 acres of property from roughly 15th and Harvard Streets NW, running mostly northeastwards to roughly 13th and Monroe Streets NW. This is one of the uglier little strips along the 14th Street Corridor at present. It could easily become a new business and entertainment center, complete with a much-needed full-size grocery store, movie theaters, a variety of name-brand retailers, and one of the most-needed things in this part of town - parking.

Contracts are expected to be finalized by mid-April at latest.

Moving right along, a Barry-Cronies(tm) Administration deal which granted a 99-year lease to a foreign noblewoman, for development of a theme-park in the middle of Washington's eco-damaged Anacostia River, was overturned by the DCFRA Control Board, on the grounds that insufficient financial information had been supplied by the developer's organization. Mayor Williams, now in charge of the disposition of the two islands in mid-river, is said to be considering developing them under an as-yet-unspecified set of recreational and educational programs for the city's children. The islands, presently under environmental remediation (they had for a time been used as hazardous waste dumps), could be reconnected to the mainland by a restored bridge accessible from Robert F. Kennedy Stadium.

We note finally that the Mayor has evidently decided upon a wise policy of coordination with other regional leadership. Among other things, he's been doing a little coordinating with Montgomery and Prince-Georges County (Maryland) leaders, especially hoping to tie in District Reitalization efforts with revitalization efforts in adjacent Silver Spring, Maryland.

• Carlene Cheatham - "Office of the Public Advocate".
• Marie Drissel - "Office of Boards and Commissions".
• Gregory McCarthy - "Office of Policy and Evaluation".
• Lamont Mitchell, restauranteur (Imani Cafe). "East-of-the-River Neighborhood Revitalization Coordinator".
• Douglas Patton - Deputy Mayor for economic development. Former chairman of the Business Regulatory Reform Commission, attorney, and activist.
• Vincent Spaulding - former Federal employee (civil engineering), owner of a quality-management firm, and community activist in Hillcrest, SouthEast. Placed in charge of neighborhood cleanup as "Clean City Coordinator".

1999 March 17 - Happy St. Patrick's Day!
We've been saying it for years. Of course, nobody listens to EarthOps, it's known that this page is read solely for amusement value, as the author is well-known to be something of a "talking dog" of the Internet. We've tried really hard to occasionally bring up substantive issues which personally concern us, and in the last year or so we have consistently harped upon the sorry state of affairs in the District government - and the disproportionate impact on those who are most in need of a system that works. Until recently, our pleas have fallen on deaf ears.

In a superior demonstration of why the Washington Post was once admired as a top-flight paper filled with top-flight journalists who knew not only what to write, but why to write, this Sunday 1999 March 14 we were presented with the first of a series of articles by one Katherine Boo. She details the horrors which have for years been the lives of the District's most needy residents, the institutionalized mentally-retarded.

Once hailed as a model of de-institutionalization short years ago, the District's retarded wards had been "busted out" of the city's Forest Haven facility in 1991, and were sent to group homes within the community. the city's money was to provide a setting where the disadvantaged could live as people, instead of being warehoused as unwanted objects.

Under the reign of the lax and corrupt Barry-Cronies(tm) Regime, hundreds of cases of abuse and neglect occurred - in some cases leading to horrible deaths - most of which could probably have been prevented had there been a different regime. But the legacy of the Barry-Cronies(tm) administration continues to surface spontaneously, as did the bodies of the dead interred in shallow graves in Forest Haven's grounds, where flooding streams occasionally washed them out of the ground.

Marion Barry once touted himself as the best thing to ever happen in Washington to the homeless and the disadvantaged. In actuality, when he had the city pay for hotel rooms for the homeless, he was simply directing city funds at far-above-market rates to the establishments of political patrons. Oversight was simply lacking. And we may well wonder if he allowed the District government to slip so badly simply because a working government would have revealed the web of payoffs and coverups abused by profiteers.

Marion Barry's dysfunctional government appears to have been the worst thing ever to happen to the District's mentally-ill and retarded.

The Post's investigation details the depth of corruption in the profiteering world of raking off the city, but it's best summed up by one Marcus Veazey, who is supervisor of the FBI's DC Health Care Fraud Squad:

"There haven't been a lot of audits of providers because the city's regulators are understaffed. So you end up with providers who know they're not being looked at. Those who want to get involved in criminal activity, will, because they don't think they'll get caught."

There were, at the time of the Post's investigation, exactly two government officials detailed to detect fraud of the city's disbursment of Medicaid/Medicare funding, overseeing a budget of over $800 millions. To make matters worse, the District government had failed to establish fee and fine schedules for offenses, thus preventing any action against home-care ripoffs and abuses.

The huge pack of leeches battening off of the compassion of the nation, as extended towards the mentally-retarded, have been exposed as being a huge interlocking network of the lowest scum ever to grow on the underside of a rock. Incredibly - or perhaps predictably considering that this was under the Barry-Cronies(tm) administration - companies hired to provide oversight of the health and well-being were engaged in rake-offs, false claims, and misdirection of the retarded into unneeded medical programs, while ignoring the evidence of abuse and neglect by cronies.

After the Post's story was published, the DC Council predictably expressed outrage and condemned the whole sorry state of affairs. There have been, of course, calls for action and a predictable wringing-of-hands - ut over and above all there has been the cry of "we just didn't know".

The DC Council should have known. I have been telling the public, for four long years, that the District government was failing miserable to root out the corruption preventing aid and safety to the most needy. Listen up, and keep repeating this to yourself: Earth Operations Central knew of this. Earth Operations Central told us all of this. We ignored Earth Operations Central. Maybe that's why we didn't know. Maybe we should listen when Earth Operations Central tells us how bad things really are. Maybe if we listen to Earth Operations Central when it gives us early warning we can act before our profound ignorance and lack of caring involvement is plastered all over Page One of the Washington Post.

Earth Operations Central has stated repeatedly that the District Government has followed a consistent pattern of neglect and abuse directed against those most in need of the city's services. The District Government has engaged in practices which have created fertile fields for flourishing corruption, fraud, rake-offs, which practices essentially ensure that most of the money society sets aside for the needy instead goes into the pockets of profiteers vampirizing the desperate. Earth Operations Central heartily commends the staffers of the Washington Post and all other responsible parties for at last daring to confirm that Earth Operations Central knows what it's talking about and never ever lies about Washington's institutionalized neglect of the truly disadvantaged.

We lay the blame for this horrendous and sickening systematic abuse of the mentally-ill and retarded directly at the feet of Marion Barry, and we lay the blame for failing to rectify this situation at the feet of whichever sitting DC Council members didn't bother to check up on those who cannot defend nor fend for themselves. Quit with the crocodile tears and get out in the streets. See for yourself. See what's happening. We do - but Earth Operations Central has neither the power nor the resources to right the wrongs - all we can do is tell you about it, tell you where to look, tell you what you would have been seeing if you'd bothered to care to do so.

We might also add as a parting shot that due to a Federal audit of a grant to the City, for misspending of monies by the moribund St. Elizabeth's Hospital for the mentally-ill, and the Department of Human Services (among others), a $17.1 millions grant was terminated, losing even more financial resources needed by the desperate and defenseless.

On the positive side? Mayor Williams, in his new budget proposal, would increase funding to youth programs, and provide health insurance for about 39,000 uninsured poor.

The University of the District of Columbia (UDC) may be moving - to Anacostia.

Anacostia, the part of Washington south and east of the hideously-polluted Anacostia River, has long been suffering from economic devastation and insulation from the rest of the city. Long regarded as, one the one hand, one of the major hearts of Washington's black community, and on the other hand, as the scariest place within 100 miles, Anacostia has far to go in terms of a Washington Revitalization. There is almost no industry of any sort, not much in the way of shopping, a very few historic landmarks, and in general, the atmosphere has been for decades one of utter desperation. Home to some of the worst poverty in the "civilized world", Anacostia needs an infusion of cash and development in the very worst way.

Anacostia does possess some of the most durable and decent people in Washington. Despite the crime and decay of many parts of the quadrant, there remains a stolid class of holdouts, the working-class of poor-but-honest families, the sort of folks who may be living hand to mouth but wouldn't stoop to welfare, whose kids go to school in hand-me-downs and earn straight "A"s and awards for perfect attendance. Those kids would be destined for college if they could afford it. Maybe they can swing a loan to go to college, but could barely scrape up the fares to ride the MetroRail across town to the UDC.

They may not need to ride across town to attend the UDC. They may, instead, have UDC come to them. Mayor Anthony Williams has proposed shutting down the Upper Northwest campus of UDC, and building a new campus in Anacostia.

Predictably, the pundits of racism have stepped forward with their paranoid cries of betrayal and woe. The general feeling expressed is that UDC is being "sold south". Yet Anacostia would greatly benefit - having the UDC, Washington's only public university, within the quadrant would immediately begin moving cash and businesses into the presently-destitute area. It would also add some pinache to Anacostia, a positive side to the area's present disrepute.

The land on which UDC presently sits would be a perfect site for business development, located in an upper-middle-class neighborhood mostly known for peace and quiet, once the site of a secret underground laboratory in the World War Two years. The site is presently limited, by the terms of the loan of Federal property to the District, to educational uses. Yet it could be developed as a graduate school, or as a facility for cooperation between the medical, research and technical/industrial communities, cashing in on the region's booming biotechnology economy.

At present, the site might be somewhat hazardous to the students - last year a fuel-oil leak of mysterious and unknown source brought the existence of the forgotten underground laboratories back into the light ot public knowledge. They'd apparently been totally forgotten until a leak in an underground fuel-oil tank flooded the tunnels to the point where the oil rose to the surface. The students and staff, rather than alleging racism, might be better advised to thank the Mayor for his concern for their safety - after all, studying on top of a potentially explosive potential-superfund site might be more hazardous than studying in Anacostia.

We have long stated that UDC, suffering deep financial troubles in recent years, should join forces with the equally-troubled District Schools, and specialize in supplying the technical skills desperately needed in the present economic boom, which would remain valuable skills in the event of an economic downturn. UDC, while offering courses in the technologies, has consistently pursued expansion in the less-demanding liberal arts. Williams' budget and proposal would provide for a such a partnership as we have proposed, developing a technologies Magnet School along with a new UDC campus, providing Anacostia with a first-rate educational opportunity from 8th grade to Batchelors of Science degree.

Moving right along, Mayor Williams' proposed budget would bring the District towards the modernizing trend seen in many other cities. The budget includes a proposal to have several city agencies and departments compete against private outfits to see who can do the most cost-effective job of providing certain services, such as street cleaning. The Mayor also proposes that some of the budget be directed into training city workers, many of whom are generally considered to be either unqualified for their jobs, or insufficiently trained in management specialties directly applicable to their particular positions. The Mayor also is seeking greater authority to hire and fire, in particular in middle-management. We note here that reduction in layers of management and reduciton of the general size of middle management has been considered one of the major factors in the revitalization of the greater national corporate economy.

Predictably, the Labor Unions comprised of city employees are not entirely happy with this idea. One of Williams' first acts - when he first came before the public eye back in the days of the Districts impending fiscal implosion - was to fire nearly 500 city workers, in an effort to reduce the total deadwood which had been foisted off onto the public coffers due to Barry-Cronies(tm) patronage deals and Union pressure.

To offset Union concerns, the Mayor has proposed incentive bonuses for effective workers and timely management.

1999 April 26
It's been a busy month in Washington, as you may well imagine - when Washington goes to war, the place changes from a sleepy southern town to a hotbed of intrigue, military planning, patriotic speeches, and public demonstrations. Yet despite the escalating Federal Factor, life goes on. When the war is over, the District will remain, and return to being a sleepy southern town desperately in need of repair for the damage wrought by two decades of managerial incompetence, entrenched political corruption, and Congressional neglect.

Congress is being rather less negligent about Washington these days. Among other actions, legislation has passed the House which would make it much more difficult for District agencies to take action against whistleblowers who point out shortcomings and wrongdoings by District employees and managers to Federal oversight boards and Federal investigators.

Congress is also working more closely with the City government, and the City government has, in some regards at least, pledged to do more to work with Federal agencies. The Congressional authorities responsible for interfacing between the DCFRA Control Board and the assembled Congress point out the need for a functional unity of the DCFRA, the Office of the Mayor, and the DC Council.

Noted in passing, the Executive Director John W. Hill Jr. has announced that he will be leaving his post to work with Arthur Anderson & Company, consulting for local and state governments. He will be sorely missed but we can't keep him all to ourselves.

One example of how disunity and disorganization have hurt the District is a repeated failure of the City to sufficiently pursue, acquire, and then police Federal block grants. It is, however, a mark of progress that in this year only $22.3 millions in Federal grants were lost. Predictably, most of the losses of funding were for programs which benefit the most desperate and needy in the District, the homeless, near-homeless, and the mentally-ill.

Improvements have been seen, however, in the City's management of group housing for the severely-retarded. A huge furor erupted towards the middle of March when abominable conditions and abuse of the retarded District residents hit the pages of the Washington Post, resulting in the closing of two residences run by one Rollie Washington, who was not even licensed to run a business in the District.

Unity is a definite issue which must be faced squarely by Mayor Anthony A. Williams. Criticized widely for operating in isolation (the polar opposite of his predecessor Marion Barry, a notorious schmoozer), the Mayor has managed to offend a wide variety of student activists, middle management, and many of those who so-ardently supported his run for office. His habitual lack of consultation with the wider community evidently led to his first major faux pas, wherein he proposed that the University of the District of Columbia - under-enrolled and often categorized as producing nothing but the most leftist and alienated of liberal-arts graduates - should be moved into a proposed City Government Center in the District's southeast Anacostia ward. This proposal was greeted with the predictable and anguished cries of the UDC student body (one of whom compared the Mayor to the Devil in a song), the UDC staff and management, all playing the "race card" and muttering about how this was just a move to keep Upper Northwest Washington "whites-only". This preposterous allegation was countered by a certain amount of hope and cheer in Anacostia, which is one of the poorest and most "business-free" zones in Washington. A coalition of citizens' groups and neighborhood activists have formed to fight for the relocation of the UDC to Anacostia. Also proposed was a Technology Magnet School in Anacostia, which would certainly be a boon to both the neighborhood and to the city itself. Specialty public education in the hard sciences is direly needed in the District, which historically has tended to steer the best and brightest into the liberal arts.

Part of the new budget for Fiscal 2000 will also go towards a new junior-high school in Ward 7. There is some concern as to how well the once (and to some degree still) nonfunctional District Schools administrative division can handle the emphasis physical construction. So far, regarding the reconstruction of the academic services, the situation appears hopeful although many problems remain with the special-education division.

Particularly troubled is the supplies procurement process, which is plagued by a lack of communication with the city's procurements oversights office, which was only recently created as a failsafe intended to remedy the appalling corruption of the Barry-Cronies (tm) years.

Noted in passing, the "See Forever" School, also known as the Maya Angelou Public Charter school, reportedly will be purchasing and renovating the five-story Odd Fellows Building, perhaps singularly appropriately named, if retained by the school, which specializes in students who are lawbreakers or deemed significantly at risk of criminality.

Mayor Williams has been handling many of the highest-level posts in the District government all by himself, or leaving them essentially unhandled. His former Chief of Staff, Reba Pittman Evans, resigned with a record severance package which attracted a great deal of fire in the community. Her successor is one Abdusalam Omer, who arrived from Somalia in 1972, and whose subsequent career may be characterized as a genuine immigrant success story. He is by all accounts quite competent, and most-importantly, willing to deliver the truth as he sees it, and not shy about delivering the news or opinion. He was one of the first to predict the imminent collapse of the still-troubled District Schools.

Still, the City is having a great deal of difficulty attracting top-talent, even though the salaries being offered are more than competitive as are the benefits packages and the severance pakages. The record severance pay given to departing District high-level management has drawn a great deal of fire locally. However, it's probably necessary to counter the Fear of Washington which solidly permeates anyone researching the city in consideration of possible employment therewith.

Washington's political culture is infamous worldwide. The common comparison is to "swimming with sharks" though that is a gross oversimplification and in fact a gross understatement. The local political culture is of lesser infamy, but that's simply because it's overshadowed by the Federal reputation. Washington, simply stated, eats people. Chews 'em right up and generally swallows. Government management professionals seeking to advance their careers through a stint in Washington -  thereby to gather to their reputation the luster of glorious success - tend as a rule to flee the town with their metaphorical tails between their allegorical legs, often muttering for the rest of their lives something to the effect that a second American Revolution may be long overdue, though it might possibly be forestalled if the whole Metro Region were forcibly sedated for a few months. Those who survive any positions involving a high profile tend to do so because they're competent and unnoticed, or because they're completely in-cahoots with the culture of corruptors - in short, doing their level best to be a part of the problem instead of allowing any hopes or solutions. It is thus difficult for the city to attract functional top-management. Almost nobody wants to abandon their present administrative position only to gain the reputation of having been run out of Washington - it's not a good career move.

On the positive side, however, the City of Washington has at-last been awarded a "better than junk" bond rating from Standard & Poor's firm. the District's bonds are now rated "BB" instead of "BBB", the lowest possible rating. Concerns remain on Wall Street that there has been astonishingly slow job growth in Washington and considering the recent "veto-proof" decision by the DC Council to field a three-year, $419-millions tax-cut, it's really quite surprising that they raised the bond ratings at all. However, this may prove to be an economic boon as it would lower the District's residential income-tax rate from 9.5 to 6.5 percent. Mayor Williams opposes this on the grounds that while a tax cut would be good, it may be too early-on in the financial stabilization process, and we would tend to agree. Also firmly against a tax-cut for the District is the Deputy Chief Financial Officer, Natwar M. Ghandi, who says that the proposed tax cuts would create a deficit of about $30 millions as early as 2003, even if the economy continues at its present robust pace. No rational person can presume that the present economic boom can continue much beyond 2001, when "extreme readjustments" are predicted by experts, who commonly (if privately) express extreme alarm about over-extension of credit and a near-total lack of cash and metals in private savings.

Mayor Williams has proposed that the DC Department of Parks, as well as the scattered employees and facilities that perform light vehicle maintenance, deliver internal mail, act as couriers and copiers, etc., should compete against private industry in an effort to increase efficiency and decrease costs to the City. As many of the City's workers are working for the City precisely because they're incompetent to find work in the private sector (another legacy of the Barry years), the City will provide additional training and increased resources so that succesful competition won't be impossible for the workers. the workers will be given some time to get up to speed, and demonstrate their worth, in which case they could get raises through "gains sharing", or they could lose the competition and start looking for new jobs.

Furthermore, in probably the most far-reaching step in the Mayor's program of a complete paradigm wrench being thrown into the broken gears of DC Government, the entire staff of the Department of Health and Human Services must re-apply for their own jobs.

Washington's much-touted "new police project", considered absolutely essential to District Revitalization, has run into a few snags. In the first place, where last year had shown a steady decline in crimes, particularly murder, in 1999 we have seen a rather amazing spate of killings over the early months. Homicide is up by nearly 20 percent this year in Washington DC. The "closure rate", which is a measure of whether or not the police believe they know the identity of the perpetrator, is down to a mere 25 percent, the lowest it has ever been and roughly one third of the closure-rate nationwide.

This worries Metropolitan Police Department Chief Charles H. Ramsey. There alarming intrusions of violence into parts of town which had been formerly considered "safe". For example, in this last week it proved necessary for the 3rd District commander, Jose Acosta, to put a bolstering force in the vicinity of trendy Dupont Circle. There had been a rash of armed robberies in the region in the previous fortnight, some twenty of which were carried out with knives, and some fifteen of which were carried out with handguns.

Also problematic, Dupont Circle was the area where missing INS attorney Joyce Chiang was last seen before disappearing 1999 January 9th. Sadly, her body was discovered April 1, partially clothed on a Fairfax county shore of the Potomac River. Earlier police searches for Chiang had turned up her ID and a jacket near the Anacostia, and divers searching the Anacostia found a body which it turns out was definitely not that of Chiang. No word has been issued regarding the identity of that body.

Suddenly slightly less-problematic are the troubled borderlands between the District and Prince George's County, Maryland. Longstanding non-cooperation between the different jurisdictions had left the eastern District Line a favorite haunt of "border-jumpers", criminals who would offend in one jurisdiction and flee into another. Nearly two years ago, the problem was so bad in tiny Mount Ranier Maryland that the small city's administration placed (and replaced, they were torn down the first few times) grates across all of the alleys and pedestrian passages between the District and Mount Ranier.

Recent coordinated operations between Prince George's County offices and the MPD, combined with deputizations from the US Marshall's Service and the DEA to permit transjurisdicitonal authority, have resulted in hundreds of arrests, primarily for drug offenses, on both sides of the eastern District Line.

We note with some satisfaction that the Metropolitan Police Force --  which became the laughingstock of the nation roughly a year ago due to public revelations regarding such embarassments as their decrepit vehicle fleet, the abominable disarray and non-security at the evidence room, and the dearth or inoperability of police telecommunications --  is now rather well-equipped with an almost-entirely new fleet, functional field telecomm, 180 remote data terminals for vehicles on order and some 300 installed.

Once again, Decentralization of Facilities is the order of the day, with three substations remodelled, with others possibly to be remodelled or re-outfitted in the near future. In any case, an extreme modernization effort is underway. Detectives have been largely redeployed to the district substations. Moving right along, the region's MetroRail subway system has been showing its age. About 20 years old in some parts, and still under construciton in others, MetroRail has indeed been rightly touted as an example of how to run a good subway system. Generally clean, safe, and timely, MetroRail has however been plagued with repeated escalator failures, with several fatalities attributed to people getting their clothing (and the rest of them or chunks thereof) sucked into the infamous comb-plates at the bottom of moving stairs.

Also recently there have been problems with the computerized control systems, forcing operators to manually accelerate and brake the trains, resulting in a high replacement rate for the brakes. Increasing breakdowns and safety problems have provoked massive public resentment, with one incident of passengers refusing to debark a semi-disabled train which attempted to dump them onto an overcrowded downtown platform in rush-hour. The Washington Area Metropolitan Transit Authority (WMATA) has pledged nearly $90 millions towards a rapid and massive overhaul of aging equipment.

Noted in passing, the computer systems at the DC General Hospital are said to be on the verge of complete collapse and are not expected to survive he Year 2000. Patients are said to be at extreme risk by year's end and the problem is not expected to be fixed on time.

Also noted in passing, few improvements have been noted at the District's Department of Motor Vehicles.

Also evidently a lost cause is the city's War On Rats. Adams-Morgan is one of the most infested areas. The city is begging the residents to do a better job of controlling their trash, which nourishes the rats until they are easily the size of a smallish cat. Cat owners have expressed their fear of permitting their felines to go outside.

One suggestion was that the District government should offer a bounty on rats, though the immediate countersuggestion was made, in all seriousness, that at a penny a rat it would still bankrupt the City.

The City of Washington DC still remains grossly negligent in matters of addressing the needs of the poorest, the most desperate, those who might well benefit society if only there was outreach.

It should be noted that rather than address the need for effective community outreach and case management for the homeless and in-particular the mentally-ill homeless, Washinton's policy-makers have moved themselves farther into line with an already widespread and appalling trend. Rather than provide any additional support to the practically nonexistant outreach and case-management system, the police are rounding up the city's mentally-ill street people and are jailing them, generally for nonviolent offenses such as public urination or sleeping on the streets.

Half of the city jail's mental health services referrals have been arrested withn the last week. The responsible officials have not yet been identified, and the office of the Mayor is officially distancing itself. It may well develop that the Downtown Business Improvement District (BID) or the Dupont/Golden Triangle are simply moving beyond their original mission of cleaning up the region (and incidentally referring the homeless to service providers) and are simply aiming patrol officers at the homeless to remove them in that manner.

Noted in passing, the city's pitifully small addict rehabilitation program is scheduled to be privatized, and expanded in October as Medicaid coverage of addition treatment is extended to roughly 100,000 low-income residents. The District, with a population of less than 600,000, has an estimated 65,000 substance-abusers, slightly more than one in ten. It was recently noted that a truly massive percentage of the arrests and convictions in the District are directly related to substance abuse problems.

Mayor Williams has proposed an extension of health coverage to nearly 40,000 residents who are childless adults (and thus not coverable under the present system) and to close to 10,000 immigrants. Much of this would be funded by decreased financial support of the Public Benefits Corporation, which DC General Hospital, which is from many reports the hospital of last resort. There is considerable concern that the private hospitals, some of which have world-class reputations, would be reluctant to treat the poor.

The DC Department of Human Services continues to undergo a long-deserved shakeup. Deficiencies have abounded, as have abuses. As noted above, several group homes for the severely-retarded wards of the city have been closed, the relationship with the vendor terminated, and the head of the Mental Retardation and Developmental Disabilities Administrations, one Francis Bowie, has been removed from control of that agency. Also, one A. Sue Brown was placed on administrative leave pending completion of an investigation of possible unethical conduct in conjunction with the Income Maintenance Administration, which is intended to be a Welfare-to-Work assistance program, and then later fired, along with Deputy Director of Human Services.

The United States Marines have agreed to purchase the moribund Arthur Capper complex in southeast Washington. Located quite near to the Washington Navy Yard, the 13-acre four-tower complex was once one of the most decrepit eyesores at the heart of the most loathsome centers of poverty and despair in the failed Welfare Culture of Public Blight. The Marines are said to intend to build a barracks on the site as well as recreational facilities which will be shared with the surrounding community. The towers will presumably be imploded, as the DC Housing Authority had declared them uninhabitable last year.

The Petworth/Columbia Heights neighborhood, most recently newsworthy as the home of a suspected serial killer, is finally egtting the streets patched up as Metro closes up after years of epic construction that had left the neighborhood looking like a warzone and which practically destroyed most local small businesses.

The area around 14th Street and Park Road NW will be getting a major facelift, and a Revitalization Nexus, probably in the form of some mid-income housing, several stores, possibly a mall, a park. Roughly two million square feet of development potential is available in this area.

1999 May 20
Greetings once again, and "Welcome to Washington". Spring has well-and-truly sprung. The famed charry trees bloomed on time and without a hitch, and for the first time in years were entirely in synchrony with the Cherry Blossom Festival. There was a minor mishap with a couple of beavers, who were promptly relocated as soon as they could be apprehended. As you might expect, the absolutely perfect, if rather dry, weather has reduced a sizable segment of the city's residents and visitors to sneezing and sniffling due to the record pollen counts, mostly assorted tree pollens, which approached (and remain at) record levels.

Downtown, at the end of April, Washington was host to the 50-year anniversary of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. Security was extremely tight, and the affair went off without any significant hitches. In the secured areas, businesses were all closed and goernment workers in the afected area were given the day off. Washington was treated to a sight not seen here since perhaps the early days of the Second World War, to wit, large demonstrations in support of military action overseas. Only about 50 individuals showed up to protest the Balkan airstrikes aimed against the genocidal regime of Serbian leader Slobodan Milosovic. Most of these demonstrators appeared to be professional provacateurs, and they were rapidly shouted down by hundreds of outraged ethnic-Albanian demonstrators. Police protection was needed by the ani-war demonstrators, not the pro-bombing demonstrators.

However, police protection was apparently quite lacking for the street people who ordinarily call that part of downtown their living-room. Allegations surfaced that ,prior to the NATO summit, the police had for some six weeks been arresting the mentally-ill homeless of Washington, primarily on charges such as public-urination and disorderly conduct, and had been jailing them in the city's criminal lockups. It should be clear to anyone that throwing the insane into jail with criminals is a bad idea, as many of the mentally-ill homeless are almost-totally unable to fend for themselves and quickly fall as prey to those who are mentally-competent, yet criminal in character. Police spokesmem denied the allegations, yet the mental-programs admissions officer of the city jail can point to the records, which indicate that her programs were essentially inundated. The only other explanation is, of course, that a plague of madness is sweeping through the underclasses.

The underclasses, comprised of the homeless, the working-poor, and the former recipients of Welfare, remain under-served, of course. As a rule, they pay little or no taxes, and -- when there were still functional government programs in the District doing outreach -- disproportionately consume public resources. In short, they are a drain on the coffers of the city, still staggering back from near-total financial collapse. Washington is, after all, not a city of the poor and powerless; it is instead a city of the rich and the powerful. The rich and the powerful pay lots of taxes, although they may get much of that back with the aid of a good tax-specialist. The only way to get everyone in the District to pay something into the coffers is to use the only egalitarian tax system known: the sales-tax.

The District has, in recent years, had some of the highest taxes in the United States. With a sales tax of nearly nine percent, the cost of purchase of anything over-the-counter is about five percent higher than the cost of doing business in neighboring jurisdictions. Clearly, District businesses are affected by the high tax rates: they must lower their pre-tax prices so that their prices can remain competitive -- and this reduction in profit margin is added to the redutions already required to attract customers leery of unavailability of parking, street safety, and other such concerns.

Politically the story for the last month in the District has been the sad and sordid tale of Tax Cuts, to wit, a tax-cut over three years, lowering the District's sales taxes to roughly 7.5 percent. We've said it before and we'll say it again, this was madness. It would have been nice if it would have been simply a nice egalitarian cut in sales-taxes, across the board, however this combined Mayor Anthony A. Williams' proposals for tax-relief and tax-credit relief for small businesses and working-poor families with the DC Council's package which was characterized as a Tax Cut for The Rich.

A report from the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities, entitled Rags to Riches to Rags? gives lots of insight into this Coucil-proposed tax cut. Note that the cost to the District is estimated to be at least some $420 millions once fully implimented.

Thankfully, this astonishing 31-percent tax cut didn't make it into law. Mayor Williams denounced it as "grotesque" and we personally would have used much stronger terms... unless there's no single word which simultaneously means "perverted, insane, and recklessly spendthrift".

Apparently, the District of Columbia Financial Responsibility and Management Assistance Authority (DCFRA "Control Board") agreed with the opinions of both Mayor Williams and myself (doubtless all unknowing in the latter case). A compromise budget was reached, which included:

• "Managed Competition" for provision of services to the public
  Many of the services presently (barely) provided to District residents by various District government agencies will essentially be up for bid. The agencies and their employees are to be given a certain amount of time to get "up to speed" and then the various agency and department heads will give the city an estimate of cost for given services. If a contractor can offer better deals, the city should and probably will make that contract. Note that at Health and Human Services, on 1999 May 19th, employees who had been advised that they must re-apply for their own jobs (if qualified) decided to take off of work and go demonstrate against this.

  Slashing tax revenue by some $300 millions over a five year period

  This is still the largest tax cut in the history of the District. It must be noted that the property and income taxes will be competitive with adjacent Maryland rates, but not quite as low as Virginia's tax rates. However, in terms of attracting residents as opposed to attracting businesses, Virginia still has the hated personal property tax.

  Extend time to pay the city's roughly $400 millions in debt

  Extension of Medicaid to more persons than are presently covered

  However, the Mayor had intended to expend roughly $70 millions on outreach, especially to the children of the working-poor, but the compromise solution leaves only some $6 million in additional funds for such pruposes.

The District's poorest residents in all real terms, which is to say the workin