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6:18 pm
Mayor Williams makes right call for voters to 'sober up'.
Rarely do I agree with D.C. Mayor Anthony A. Williams, but today I will make an exception.
"I think we need to sober up and really face what's at risk here," Mr. Williams said in a last-ditch effort to bolster D.C. Council Chairman Linda W. Cropp's crippled mayoral campaign.
Yet too many folks are recklessly suggesting that D.C. residents vote against their own self-interest come Tuesday's Democratic primary. Why else would they promote the mayoral candidacy of an unproven and, quite frankly, unqualified neophyte such as Ward 4 council member Adrian M. Fenty?
Knocking on doors from sunup to sundown does not a mayor make. Running a campaign and running a government require very different skill sets. Mr. Fenty has demonstrated he is great at the former; Mrs. Cropp is great at the latter, and the more important.
"This is a lady who has great respect in Congress, great respect in the city, great respect on Wall Street," Travelin' Tony said in response to the Other Paper's backhanded endorsement of Mr. Fenty. "Now how do you go from there to, 'Let's just throw a 90-yard bomb,' hope for the best and go through a couple of years of mistakes with an unproven candidate?"
The Bow Tie Bandit ought to know about "hope for the best." His learning curve was pretty painful, but at least he had managerial experience and a robust economy to mask his shortcomings.
Admittedly, I agreed with The Washington Times' editorial endorsement of former utility executive and community patron Marie C. Johns. She is bright, and she brings innovation, experience as well as passion to the head of the mayor's round table.
But if the choice is between the media-made front-runners, now is not the time to bet the mortgage money on a lottery ticket.
The mayor's office is not the place for on-the-job training. With the chief financial officer predicting a stagnant economy, a forerunner of unpopular budget cuts, this city will need more than a wing and a prayer for a hopeful future.
Mr. Fenty's popularity has a lot to do with the fact that he has not had to say "no" to anyone who asks him for anything. Those promises he passes out like lollipops are bound to come back and bite him.
Yes, there is a "chance" that the young, energetic Mr. Fenty could surprise those who think they know better, by settling down, focusing for longer than it takes to utter a pithy sound bite, put down his BlackBerry and pay attention, then miraculously metamorphosing into a financially capable leader. A slim chance.
Institutional memory is in short supply this election cycle, with more than 20 percent of the electorate having never cast a ballot in the District before. Thank Mr. Williams for the gentrification-driven change in demographics from which Mr. Fenty, not Mrs. Cropp, now benefits.
For all the gripes about Mrs. Cropp's 26 years of solid elected service, few look beyond the headlines or the collective failures of some of those wacky legislative bodies on which she was a member.
Despite the folly of those past boards, Mrs. Cropp provided a sane and steady hand, sometimes as the lone voice of reason. She was still able to carve out cogent initiatives and legislation. She must be credited for holding the fractious D.C. Council together after the deaths of Chairmen John A. Wilson and David A. Clarke.
"She shows up, and she works," one of her colleagues said.
With her trademark of consensus building, Mrs. Cropp transformed the council into a more powerful legislature with oversight authority, rather than the rubber-stamp body it was under Mr. Williams' predecessors. Those former mayors include Marion Barry, who came late to endorse Mr. Fenty.
Make no mistake, the astute Mr. Barry never does anything that is not, at its crux, in his self-interest.
Should Mr. Fenty win the primary -- as predicted and promoted oddly by folks who have insisted on fiscal responsibility in the past -- would you rather have the next mayor beholden to Mr. Williams or Mr. Barry? The latter is now a Ward 8 council member, awaiting a choice and powerful committee position now up for grabs. Or, an experienced mayor who can, and has, said "no" to Mr. Barry's predictable shenanigans as Mrs. Cropp has done from the dais.
"We don't do business like that anymore," she has said.
Mr. Fenty could not have chosen a more appropriate color to represent his campaign -- green. The color (also used by Mr. Barry) denotes inexperience more than a fresh face.
Mr. Fenty, who claims "to pay attention to details," has demonstrated just the opposite from his youthful missteps as a private lawyer to his failure to read the fine print on his own mortgage loan to his inattentiveness to follow through on populist legislation that he helped introduce.
A frustrated elected official -- not Mrs. Cropp -- worried about a fledgling Fenty administration told me in confidence, "We are so [in trouble]."
Indeed, Mr. Fenty gets flunking grades in Government 101. Let his record reflect that Mr. Fenty's initial attempt to introduce the school-modernization plan by tapping into (already committed) lottery funds was nixed quickly by the city's chief financial officer. In the end, it was Mrs. Cropp, and D.C. Council members Jack Evans and Kathy Patterson, who huddled privately to create the funding source and save the school-revitalization measure. Bothersome details?
At the height of the raging debate about financing the baseball stadium, I became disillusioned with Mr. Fenty because his opposition, while full of passion, lacked substance. I soon realized that he was out of his league when it came to making his case on the basis of knowledge of the necessary financial details.
Take a chance on a wing and a prayer? A vote for hope? Hope that the city doesn't "bomb," as Mr. Williams predicts, or go "Back to the [busted-budget] Future" for lack of an experienced leader at the helm? Puhleeze -- "sober up."
9:14 pm
Forest Hills Citizens Association Says Nah To Cheh
I was puzzled when the Washington Post and the Northwest Current endorsed Professor Mary Cheh, a newly minted, self-styled "civic activist." For the many of us who spend several days and nights each month on civic affairs in Ward 3 and across the city, it is discouraging to see someone with so little interest or past experience in Ward 3 affairs touted as best for our neighborhoods. At the Ward 3 Dems forum on Wednesday night, Professor Cheh readily admitted that she had never belonged to her citizens association or attended a meeting of it, and had never even attended a meeting of her local ANC. Are those prerequisites for running for the Council? No, but her 20 year lack of interest in the civic affairs of her neighborhood until she decided to run for Council speaks for itself. She did not disagree when one of her
supporters added that citizens associations are very parochial and are only interested in protecting property values. (Yes she has done commendable volunteer work on constitutional law issues that relate to her job, but I'm talking about a broader interest in community affairs. She has said that her only civic activism involved her daughter's soccer playing.)
This lack of understanding of Ward 3 affairs was proven that same night when she said that she thought that the new Comprehensive Plan of the Mayor should be enacted by this Council because the Office of Planning stated it had been "fully vetted" at a meeting at UDC, before anyone in the community had even been shown the part of the Plan affecting Ward 3. She did not realize that ANCs 3C, 3D, 3E, and 3F have each passed resolutions asking that the plan be considered by the new Council so that its many flaws can be corrected. That same position is supported by the citywide Federation of Citizens Associations (disclosure – I am President) and the Committee of 100 on the Federal City (disclosure – I am a Trustee), the Cleveland Park Citizens Association (via letter), and other ANCs and associations in other Wards. As one who has attended dozens of meetings about the Comp Plan, testified about it before
the Council, and spent hundreds of hours on the subject, I can
attest that it is a very neighborhood unfriendly document.
Professor Cheh also did not know that her employer, George Washington University, wants to do away with the requirement in the current law for campus plans which protect neighborhoods across the city, including around American University in Ward 3 (this requires Council approval). But she does not think that she has a conflict
of interest on any issue involving GW because she does "not have an ownership interest in it." But it is her employer, the employer who will let her teach less than a full-time load and retain her tenure so that she can sit on the Council and vote on issues directly affecting GW (let's forget about how she will pick between teaching a class and attending a Council vote when the times for them conflict). She says she will recuse herself "if necessary," but don't we want a full-time councilmember who will vote on issues that are important to Ward 3 and the entire city?
At the forum held by three citizens groups last Tuesday night, Professor Cheh admitted that she had never been involved in any way in any development project implicating so-called smart growth principles in Ward 3. Nevertheless, she endorsed almost word for word the unusual definition of smart growth used by the Washington Regional Network for Livable Communities, which also believes that "transportation policies should put walking, bicycling and transit first," and that our transportation dollars should be used for these purposes instead of road repair. The push to adopt
the current draft of the Comp Plan is co-chaired by one of the City's most prominent development lawyers and the head of WRN. The leader of WRN has also told the Comprehensive Plan Task Force that as families diminish in size they should move out of their "too big" houses to make way for more and smaller condos. WRN's head has also said that 85-year-old District residents should bicycle around town because "It's done all the time in Europe." Is that the vision for Ward 3 or the City that you want your Councilmember to espouse?
Professor Cheh is a very capable constitutional scholar, but the residents of Ward 3 deserve someone who has some practical knowledge and experience with the issues as seen by the residents, not just special interest groups. And they should have a Councilmember who thinks our neighborhoods deserve interesting and complimentary neighborhood serving commercial areas, and not the intense development in a half-mile radius around each Metro stop
(including several blocks in off the Avenues) called for by GWU, the Washington Regional Network, and the Mayor's Comp Plan proposal.
George Clark
President, Forest Hills Citizens Association*
1:58 am
Mary Cheh, A Trojan Horse
1) Mary Cheh, a full-time tenured professor at George Washington University, desires to represent Ward 3 in the city council; this scares me. How can she represent residents of Ward 3 when issues arise between the community and the Mt. Vernon campus of George Washington University, which is located on Foxhall Road in Ward 3? 2) Mary Cheh has a child at Georgetown Day School. How committed can she be to our public schools if she does not even send her child to public school?
If Mary Cheh wins the Democratic primary to be the Ward 3 council representative and Kathy Patterson loses her bid to be the Democratic candidate for chairman of the city council, I hope that Kathy Patterson will save us residents in Ward 3 from self destruction by running again for Ward 3 council representative as a write-in candidate. Kathy Patterson is an asset that our city council and Ward 3 cannot afford to lose.
7:34 am
Good for you, Mayor Williams! I'm so glad he's endorsing a successor who will stand up for education.
For Washingtonians like me who are concerned about the quality of education their children are getting in the DC school system, Linda Cropp is the person who can reform our school system and ensure EVERY child is prepared today to compete tomorrow.
Ms. Cropp is a former educator. She served as President of the DC School Board and is credited with creating Banneker High School, one of the top 50 high schools in the country according to Newsweek.
Ms. Cropp’s education plan is focused on making sure our schools are safe and foster learning. Linda Cropp is clearly the best candidate for mayor of the District.
11:13 am
FYI, the odious so-called Ward 3 candidate Rees posted the anti-Cheh posts above. He merely cut and pasted a post from a Forest Grove link and passed it off as his own.