Brandon Todd faces challengers to his left as Green Team aims to hold onto Ward 4 council seat

Nine months after taking unpaid leave to care for her critically ill father in DC, Janeese Lewis George watched Brandon Todd, her Ward 4 Council member, vote against a landmark bill guaranteeing workers paid time off to care for relatives.

The 2016 bill passed 9-4 and its benefits are set to begin next year, but Todd’s vote fired up George to enter politics for the first time to challenge him in next year’s Democratic primary.

Todd and three colleagues had opposed the bill primarily because it established a new tax on businesses and extended benefits to non-DC residents working in the city. George was a juvenile prosecutor in Philadelphia when she took the leave in March 2016 to look after her father after a stroke. One month later, George quit her job at the Philadelphia District Attorney’s Office to move back to her hometown of DC and continue caring for her father, who died later the same month.

“How can you not understand the importance of this for our city, but more importantly for the families of Ward 4?” said George. She says Todd’s views are out of touch with a ward experiencing a baby boom, propelled by young families putting down roots.

These days Todd says he backs full implementation of the law, which in part provides eight weeks of leave for new parents and six weeks to care for sick family members. But Todd’s support is too late for many progressives — a political label that Todd himself embraces and one with an uncertain meaning in this solidly Democratic town.

The political makeup of the council is at stake in next year’s elections across four wards and in two citywide races. Mayor Muriel Bowser’s closest ally on the council, Todd first won office with her endorsement and benefits from her donor base, amassing a $338,800 campaign war chest for 2020. He backs many business-friendly proposals and even commands the committee that oversees key mayoral offices.

Depending on the outcomes of other races, George could swing the 13-member council further to the left, progressive activists say, opening the door for next-wave proposals like decriminalizing sex work and a “mansion tax” on homes worth more than $1 million. Todd opposes both measures; he has instead advocated a tax break for all homeowners.

A recent entrant into the Democratic primary race, Renée Bowser, is also vying for the votes of progressives, although many activist groups have already endorsed George. A longtime advisory neighborhood commissioner, Bowser said she has experience directly representing workers as assistant general counsel at United Food and Commercial Workers International Union, a job she retired from in August. 

Both challengers are using DC’s new public campaign financing program, which caps donations at $50 and boosts each contribution with a 5-to-1 match. George’s campaign reported having $98,000 on hand, according to filings with the Office of Campaign Finance submitted late Tuesday. In her campaign’s first filing, Bowser (no relation to the mayor) reported raising $6,600.

Both slam Todd for being too close to the mayor, his former boss — a relationship Todd contends he uses to produce results for constituents. Representing a growing ward, Todd says his support for Mayor Bowser’s initiatives has helped to improve schools and upgrade infrastructure.

George was most recently a deputy attorney general, and she counts former boss Karl Racine as a mentor. She backs more social services to fight violence and condemns over-policing, declaring at a recent forum that the city should “divest” from the Metropolitan Police Department and direct some of its funds to violence interruption programs. She promises a focus on improving health care in poorer parts of the city, expanding rent control, and prioritizing neighborhood public schools.

Renée Bowser is the chair of Advisory Neighborhood Commission 4D in Petworth and Brightwood Park. She considers housing affordability her top priority, supporting investments in public housing and passage of stronger rent control protections. Bowser has run for the Ward 4 council seat before, including the 2015 special election when she finished second to Todd by 20 points. 

“The difference between me and someone who can talk about issues is — I’ve worked on it,” she said, citing her involvement in campaigns like Initiative 77, a ballot measure to raise the minimum wage for servers overturned by the council, with Todd’s support. 

Bowser says she supports studying the “Nordic Model” for prostitution, where providing sex work is decriminalized but it remains a crime to buy services. She also backs fully funding the Birth to Three Act, which aims to expand early education offerings. “I’m viewing everything that I do through an equity lens,” added Bowser, who is able to campaign full-time now that she is retired. 

A fixture at community meetings, Todd has built the image of an aspiring ward boss, a throwback to DC lawmakers who bet their popularity on treating constituents’ concerns — with no pothole or complaint too menial to handle. Critics nail him for not drawing up sweeping legislation over four and a half years in office. But Todd points to concrete changes like infrastructure upgrades and helping to open two middle schools: the brand-new Ida B. Wells and the reimagined, modernized MacFarland, which had closed in 2013 because of low enrollment. It relaunched with a dual-language program.

“As soon as I got elected, I got to work,” Todd said. “And now we have two stand-alone middle schools.”

An adherent to the winning formula of his two predecessors, Todd says he’s still knocking on doors and showering neighborhoods with his green yard signs.

“I’ve won because I’ve been very focused on bread-and-butter issues,” Todd said.

It’s the playbook of a political dynasty — known as the Green Team — that hasn’t been beaten in Ward 4 since the beginning of this millennium. Since a fresh-faced Adrian Fenty upset political matriarch Charlene Drew Jarvis for the seat in 2000, the ward has hewed to a familiar pattern: mayors endorsing proteges to take their seats. When he became mayor, Fenty successfully campaigned in 2007 for Bowser to take the office. And Bowser as mayor endorsed Todd, who had been her constituent services director, for the seat in a 2015 special election.

“We have the tradition of ward heeling,” said Takoma Park resident Paul Schwartz, referring to the Green Team passing down the seat from one ally to another. 

Unimpressed with Todd’s constituent services operation, Schwartz says he voted for the incumbent before but is now undecided.

“Fenty just seemed to be able to shake the tree of government for his constituents when he was Ward 4 council member,” said Schwartz, who frets that Todd’s office didn’t do enough to resolve answer recent concerns he raised about lead pipes in the area.

Since launching, George’s campaign has raised $112,400 in about three months with the help of matching public funds, according to Tuesday’s campaign finance filings. Left-leaning groups endorsing her include the local chapter of Democratic Socialists of America, Black Lives Matter DC, Jews United for Justice Campaign Fund, and DC for Democracy.

Todd’s campaign has easily outraised opponents with the help of longtime donors. He raised $196,800 this cycle alone, between Aug. 1 and Dec. 10. His contributors include politically connected developers and contractors, and even one-time foes like David Catania, a former independent council member who ran a bitter campaign against Bowser for mayor in 2014.

Absent grand policy victories to capture headlines, Todd’s name has appeared instead in the kinds of stories that supply his critics plenty of ammo to attack his ethical record. In May, Todd paid a $2,000 fine for improperly using his council office’s list of constituent email addresses in an attempt to help an ally in her ultimately unsuccessful run for the State Board of Education.

In 2017, Todd was fined $5,100 for not reporting the source of $83,000 in campaign contributions to his 2015 special election bid. His 2016 campaign responded to problems raised by the Office of Campaign Finance by returning thousands of dollars in excessive contributions. Asked how he would avoid a repeat of shoddy bookkeeping, Todd said, “We put a lot of internal controls in place to make sure it doesn’t happen.”

George says she’s unsure what motivated Todd’s political career. “What motivates me is the fact that I worked as a tipped worker, so I understand that people need livable wages,” noted George, who worked as a waitress when attending Howard University School of Law. She said she holds U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York — who notably worked as a bartender in the Bronx — as one of her heroes.

“I don’t know that he has a vision for the ward,” she added.

Todd rejects such criticism and says housing affordability is a top priority for him in the gentrifying ward. He also defends his focus on responding to residents’ quality-of-life complaints. It’s what families who are new to the city expect, he says, if they are accustomed to small-town politicking — when an eager phone call to a municipal office is met in kind.

“He’s the perfect city legislator,” said Michael Behm, a resident of Barnaby Woods, a small patch of Ward 4 on the west side of Rock Creek Park. “He’s a retail politician. This guy’s in the neighborhood all the time. And it’s not just on our side of the Rock Creek.”

In February, Behm and dozens of neighbors in the affluent residential neighborhood rallied to resist the installation of nearly 30 rain gardens on street curbs. Many denounced the gardens — meant to reduce pollution into the nearby creek — as unattractive, saying the District Department of Transportation ignored their criticisms about implementation. They turned to Todd, whose office said DDOT scaled down the project. (DDOT did not return multiple requests for comment on the project’s status.)

“He got involved because DDOT barged into our neighborhood like a bull in a china shop and tried to jam these things down our throats,” said Behm. The episode showed Todd balancing his role as a legislator and elected official “who is sensitive” to constituent worries, added Behm.

Progressive groups — many of whom endorsed George early on in hopes of jump-starting her campaign — are raring to win the seat, demanding faster progress on enacting progressive measures to fight social ills. They plan to target voters for George.

“Brandon Todd has often stood in the way or opposed important reforms that we think would really help working families in the District,” said Matthew Hanson, director of the DC Working Families Party, which advocated for the paid leave law and has endorsed George. 

Todd says, however, that he has an open mind and has been swayed by advocates before on issues they’ve pressed. For instance, Todd notes that he voted to decriminalize Metro fare evasion in January and supported overturning the mayor’s veto. “I thought it was the right thing to do,” he said.

Bill Lightfoot, a former council member who has advised Todd and chaired Bowser’s mayoral campaigns, says Todd is “making an effort to expand his base. He’s not sitting on his base, which is primarily viewed as Upper Northwest.” Lightfoot dismisses criticism from activists who want to tilt the council further to the left.

“There is a vocal minority that supports a certain agenda,” he said. “But it’s an agenda that doesn’t seem to motivate voters.”