jonetta rose barras: At-large DC Council member Anita Bonds’ redemption tour
Former DC Mayor Marion Barry often extolled the collective and generous forgiving nature of District residents. He said that helped fuel his post-prison comeback, which included elections as the Ward 8 DC Council member, a fourth term as mayor and later yet another round in the legislature. His success at tapping into public forgiveness triggered the use of redemption as both a term du jour and resuscitative vehicle by countless other DC politicians hoping to overcome their corrupt, scandalous or incompetent performance.
Not unlike their mentor, they presented themselves as victims of discrimination or some alternate force. Sometimes they admitted to making a mistake; that confession was invariably followed by a pledge to do better, to work harder at serving the community. In short order, however, things went back to the way they were.
For all intents and purposes, at-large Council member Anita Bonds began her own redemption tour after the release of the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development’s damning report on the mismanagement of the DC Housing Authority by its staff and board. HUD revealed, among other things, violations of local and federal procurement laws and the wholesale incompetence of key personnel, including DCHA’s executive director. Equally troubling was the fact that nearly 2,000 units sat vacant even as District officials and advocates rightly declared an affordable housing crisis in the nation’s capital.
While DCHA officials were blamed for the agency’s abysmal condition, Bonds didn’t escape criticism by the public for the findings reported by HUD. Her oversight of the multimillion-dollar operation has been charitably called ineffective. Many people, including DC Attorney General Karl Racine, have advocated for her replacement atop the council’s committee on housing when DC Council Chair Phil Mendelson makes recommendations for the upcoming term.
“She’s been there, but that’s it. Her oversight was very bad,” said one government insider with whom I spoke earlier this week.
“Let’s face it: Housing is not her strong suit. It would be one thing if she came in with a track record from the private sector. But she doesn’t have that,” said Terry Lynch, who has been involved with DC political and civic affairs for more than 40 years.
Calling the situation at DCHA dire, Lynch said, “It’s got to be a teardown or turnaround almost across the board: There needs to be a new board, new staff, and new and effective council leadership.”
Mayor Muriel Bowser agrees at least in part with Lynch’s assessment. This week she asked the council to approve emergency legislation that would create a new, temporary oversight panel for DCHA — a control board of sorts. Her proposal would disband the current Board of Commissioners, putting in its place a Stabilization and Reform Board for the next three years. According to a joint Bowser-Mendelson press release, Raymond Skinner will serve as chair, with the Rev. James Dickerson, Christopher Murphy, Melissa Lee and Jessica Haynes-Franklin as members. They will be joined by the director of the Office of Budget and Performance Management and the president of the DCHA City Wide Advisory Board. The city’s chief financial officer, Glen Lee, will be a non-voting member.
Mendelson is backing the mayor’s emergency legislation, which is slated for consideration at Tuesday’s meeting. Will he opt as well for new leadership for the legislature’s committee on housing?
“I know there is controversy around the housing committee, and I am giving it a lot of thought,” he told me during a telephone interview earlier this week.
“In the end, the reorganization has to be approved by members. Working with them is key,” Mendelson added.
That kind of tight-lipped, insular approach to committee assignments ignores the most important players: District residents. Having their trust and confidence that the person overseeing one of their most significant concerns is up to the job should count for something. After all, it’s the taxpayers who foot the bill for the government, including the salaries of council members and their staff.
Don’t expect Bonds to agree with Lynch and the others: “I think my stewardship of the housing committee has been very good,” she said when I asked her to evaluate her performance over the past eight years.
“You look at the votes that I got [in the November election]. That doesn’t indicate that people have lost faith in me,” she told me during an extensive interview on Sunday.
It’s true Bonds received 103,991 votes out of the 205,774 ballots cast in the general election — a bare plurality even as the Democratic incumbent. It’s important to note, however, that the combined total votes cast for independents Kenyan McDuffie and Elissa Silverman was 135,395. In the Democratic primary, more people voted against Bonds than voted for her.
Bonds’ November victory was mostly due to the fact that she managed to become the nominee of the city’s dominant political party. In DC, it’s rare for a Democrat to lose in the general election.
Over the past few months, she has repeatedly tried to present herself as a victim of past DCHA dysfunction: It’s the same argument Brenda Donald, the agency’s executive director, has used. While Donald has been at the helm for 17 months, Bonds has been the council’s housing committee chair since 2015.
“I don’t think they can say, ‘Anita did this,’” she told me, emphasizing that many things went wrong “before I even came on the council.”
Truth be told, the HUD report is only partial evidence of a devastatingly poor committee stewardship. Under Bonds’ watch, the DC Department of Housing and Community Development misspent $82 million from the Housing Production Trust Fund — money that was supposed to go to provide affordable housing for some of the city’s lowest-income residents. During Bonds’ tenure, the city’s rent control law has languished without any substantial changes that address the concerns raised by tenants.
Also during her tenure, a group of first-time Black homeowners were swindled out of their hard-earned investments and forced to live for years in a dangerous, substandard development until media reports spurred the city to act belatedly. Under Bonds, the Bowser administration was allowed to ignore citizens’ efforts to bring real mixed-income housing near a critical transit hub in Ward 3.
Further, hundreds of the District’s most vulnerable residents were subjected to slum landlords. The Office of the Attorney General eventually decided to take on their cases, but that came after tenant lawyers had already spent years battling alone without the city’s help.
The HUD report may be the proverbial straw and camel story.
That helps explain why Bonds appears to have been conducting a quiet offensive to retain her committee. It began during the final weeks before the general election with grand pronouncements before crowds of people. She issued a call for a post-election citywide affordable housing summit — something she could have sponsored any time during her council tenure. “I am [still] going to hold one,” she told me during our interview.
She also announced that she was preparing to hire a “forensic technician” who would help her dig deep into DCHA’s dirt and mismanagement to provide details about the public housing debacle. This week she held a public roundtable on DCHA in which testimony was limited to its Board of Commissioners and Donald. They presented their response to HUD’s assessment and their plan to repair the agency’s many failures, including its management and building conditions for tenants.
Oddly, there was no mention of the creation of a DCHA oversight board during that roundtable. Nor was there any mention of when Bonds would hold a forum for public housing residents to share their concerns.
However, the pièce de résistance of Bonds’ redemption circuit may have been the marathon public hearing last week on the Green New Deal for Housing Amendment Act of 2022, championed by Ward 4 Council member Janeese Lewis George. The bill’s name echoes the Green New Deal resolution introduced by national progressive fave Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, which attempts to capture the energy and vision of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal.
More than 150 DC residents, advocates, plus finance and housing experts testified at Bonds’ hearing. Despite that enthusiasm, the proposal appears to do what the city already is empowered to do: use its own land to develop housing for residents at the lowest income levels and use the District Opportunity to Purchase Act to buy apartments and other facilities that could be converted to affordable rental housing, among other things. Perhaps more alarming is that the overall effect of the law, if approved as written, would be to set up another public housing operation, including a separate Office of Social Housing Development.
But who cares about any of those inconvenient facts?
Bonds is focused on landing in the good graces of those likely to oppose her reappointment as housing committee chair — many of whom are among the city’s most vocal residents. Given the response from those in attendance, including their praise for her willingness to sit through more than 10 hours of testimony, she may have collected a chit or two — although it appears she deliberately delayed the hearing, ensuring there wouldn’t be a vote this legislative period on the bill.
According to council rules, the last call is Dec. 6, the date of the penultimate legislative meeting of Council Period 24. Given the complexity of the GND for Housing and its redundancies, it seems impossible to iron out all the kinks by that date. Lewis George has promised to reintroduce the bill during the next legislative period, which begins in January 2023.
The GND was introduced in April, however. Bonds could have conducted the hearing months ago. Instead, she induced what might be described as a legislative coma — further evidence of her malpractice as housing committee chair.
jonetta rose barras is an author and freelance journalist, covering national and local issues including politics, childhood trauma, public education, economic development and urban public policies. She can be reached at thebarrasreport@gmail.com.
I find your reporting to be totally off the mark. And this isn’t the first time. You continue pick and choose facts as you like.
Glad Bonds is no longer lead. BUt honestly I did not want her re elected. Nor did I want Bowser.
Bowser keeps appointing her friends and campaign donors instead of qualified experienced persons.
Look at how the family shelters went to her donors, and they were shoddily built. Had problems from day 1!
Recall Muriel Bowser.