jonetta rose barras: The DC Council’s fall fight

They’re back — almost. DC Council members won’t officially return from their recess until Monday. The heat and controversy are already building over the public policy and political issues that await them. Unfortunately, based on their recent track record, they are likely to become bogged down in the weeds, failing to see the need for broader action.

What, for example, will they do about a public land-use agreement that favors a private school in access to public athletic fields? Are they prepared to battle Mayor Muriel Bowser over reforms at the Department of Consumer and Regulatory Affairs after that Aug. 18 fire in an illegal rooming house on Kennedy Street NW killed two people? Do they have the political will to take on the charter school board over its refusal, documented by multiple media organizations, to enforce local laws at the expense of the safety of District children, including those at two overnight boarding facilities — the SEED School and Monument Academy? And, will the findings of that ethics investigation the council launched into Ward 2 member Jack Evans’ activities since 2014 fall short of the impeachment his critics want?

Undoubtedly, some political insiders will be in an uproar when they learn that results from that probe of ethics violator Evans apparently won’t be completed by the end of recess, as Chairman Phil Mendelson had promised.

Just before legislators walked into the summer sun, they approved a resolution authorizing the hiring of the firm of O’Melveny & Myers to determine what damage, if any, Evans had done to the council’s code of conduct. He already had been reprimanded earlier this year after press reports revealed that he had used government resources to send out employment applications to two law firms. The ethics committee of the Metro board of directors also found that Evans violated its code of conduct; Evans agreed not to seek another term as the board’s chairman and subsequently resigned from the board altogether. 

The council then stripped Evans of his chairmanship of the powerful Committee on Finance and Revenue. Subsequently, he agreed to pay a $20,000 fine, as a negotiated settlement, with the DC Board of Ethics and Government Accountability, although he made clear he was not admitting to any wrongdoing.

When I asked Mendelson last week whether he expected to meet that end-of-recess timeline he had pledged, he told me: “I’m keeping information about that close to the vest until the council reconvenes.” 

Unsurprisingly, sources familiar with the probe told me last week that the law firm investigators have had a difficult time getting people to speak with them. Investigators have indicated they may be forced to issue subpoenas. The council’s authorizing resolution anticipated that need, so why the delay by the law firm?

Evans couldn’t be reached for comment.

At-large Council member Elissa Silverman, who with several other lawmakers sought a full investigation of Evans earlier this year at the time he was reprimanded, told me she is troubled by the potential delay in the council’s investigation, when the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority’s probe was handled comparatively quickly and efficiently. “In six weeks, the firm that was hired by Metro was able to produce a report that shined a lot of light on Council member Evans’ approach at Metro,” she said.

“Given the chairman’s reluctance at every step, it’s worrisome to me that we may not have a thorough investigation,” added Silverman.

District residents are right to demand a clean and honest government, and Mendelson has the responsibility to move this Evans probe quickly and forthrightly. However, the policy concerns that face the returning legislature are equally significant in ensuring a well-run government free of waste, fraud and abuse.

“How we use public land is critical,” Silverman told me in our wide-ranging phone interview conducted while she was on vacation in Vancouver, Canada.

After learning that the Department of Parks and Recreation had renewed its multi-year lease with the private Maret School — giving it priority use of the playing field at Jelleff Recreation Center over public institutions like Hardy Middle School — Silverman asked DC Attorney General Karl Racine to review the agreement. She said that even if the agreement can’t be rescinded, she is hoping for a way to renegotiate the terms to allow for increased use by DC residents. 

“Our obligation is to provide a good quality of life for our residents,” she continued, adding that this should include access to the city’s parks and recreation centers.

Focusing solely on Maret obfuscates the larger policy problem, however. In the late 1990s, struggling to stay afloat financially, the government used third-party organizations to help it maintain its infrastructure and meet program service needs. The practice continued even as the District’s financial condition improved. These agreements resulted in organizations gaining priority use over that of taxpayers. For example, Georgetown University’s softball team claims Guy Mason athletic field as its home turf. I was excoriated years ago when I raised questions about three baseball organizations — Home Run Baseball Camp, Headfirst, and Northwest Washington Little League — that critics said acted as a sort of sports mafia, using Friendship Park fields as their private preserve, with the city government reaping little financial benefit; it was only when the two founders of Headfirst began fighting over profits of its multi-million dollar operation that District residents learned just how lucrative those businesses had been. And Silverman acknowledged that Howard University has an agreement that gives it extensive control of the Banneker Recreation Center tennis courts. 

“The DPR should disclose all deals, the terms of the contracts, when they are expiring, if there are extensions and [give] the community full transparency about this,” said Silverman. “We should be looking for a more global solution.” 

Nowhere is that latter comment more relevant than with public education, particularly the charter sector. “[The] main promise of charters was to deliver pockets of innovation and help strengthen DCPS,” Silverman said — but that hasn’t been realized. “I want a public education system,” she said. Yet evidence of a true system can be found in only one or two wards, producing a “game of chance” for parents and children elsewhere.

However, if the council continues its narrow focus on how transparent charter schools have or haven’t been — the subject of new legislation in the Committee on Education and the Committee of the Whole — it will bypass the larger concerns Silverman captured: Where is the citywide public education system? Are charters helping or harming traditional public schools? 

All of that matters because the District hasn’t focused on building a pipeline of professional talent for its workforce that relies on its current citizens, said Silverman, who chairs the Committee on Labor and Workforce Development. “We keep importing.” 

Silverman agreed with my assessment that the city and the council are facing tough issues. “Other cities are dealing with them. Instead of hiding from them or being divisive, we need to be honest about them,” she said.

Government failure across multiple agencies, as the public has witnessed over the past several years, are red flags signaling the need for more deliberate and comprehensive solutions. There hasn’t been a serious conversation about the need to re-engineer the government. The District has changed over the last 20 years in dramatic ways, not the least of which is a massive increase in its population, surpassing 700,000 for the first time since the 1970s. Government efficiency and innovation has lagged.

With the approaching 2020 census, which will instigate redrawing of ward lines, District leaders have an opportunity to abandon their divisive infighting and self-involved petty agendas. Instead, they could opt to be bold, choosing to create a commission that would recommend structural changes to the executive and legislative branches, including potentially increasing the number of political representatives.

“That is a [plan] you expect from the executive,” said Silverman, admitting that the District does “need that kind of resetting across the government.”

In years past, the DC Council established the Tax Revision Commission to review the District’s tax structure and make recommendations for appropriate changes; there is nothing to stop Mendelson from creating a similar body to survey the current government structure and propose not just a facelift, but a full-body makeover. The Budget Support Act passed in the spring does call for an “expenditure commission,” but it seems more focused on money than underlying government functions. The only thing impeding the kind of global policy work in which the council should be engaged is politics.

Four of the six council members up for re-election — Vincent Gray (Ward 7), Trayon White (Ward 8), Robert White (at-large) and Brandon Todd (Ward 4) — have formed campaign committees for 2020 or said they will run. The two others — David Grosso (at-large) and Evans — have not yet announced whether they intend to seek another term. Residents can expect a lot of pontificating and posturing over the next nine months until the June primary. The incomplete Evans probe probably will exacerbate all of that.

It will be all trees and no forest, once again, in the John A. Wilson Building.

This post has been updated to specify that Jack Evans first agreed not to seek another term as Metro board chairman and then resigned his seat on the board.

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jonetta rose barras is an author, a freelance journalist and host of The Barras Report television show. She can be reached at thebarrasreport@gmail.com.