With so many millions of dollars walking out the door in Jimmy Choos, etc., courtesy of the tax scandal, you’d figure D.C. Gov would be totally into recovering millions of other dollars it’s rightfully owed by the Corrections Corporation of America (CCA).

You’d figure that. But you’d be wrong. In a classic case of buck-passing between the Office of Property Management (OPM) and the Department of Corrections (DOC), the utility bill for steam used to heat the Correctional Treatment Facility—located right next to the D.C. Jail and privately operated by the Nashville-based CCA—has gone unpaid for years. What’s owed is up for negotiation. Last March, former OPM director Lars Etzkorn (who has since lost his job over that unfortunate police department relocation fiasco) testified before the Council that OPM was “collecting monies owed.” To wit: “For example, last month OPM presented to the Department of Corrections the analysis for it to recover $5.7 million from the Corrections Corporation of America…”

OPM didn’t take over collecting the money, mind you, it presented an analysis of how to collect the money. And this was after At-Large Councilmember Phil Mendelson figured out in the 2006 budget process that DOC was actually being billed for the steam rather than being paid for it. A year after OPM was informed of that, a year after Etzkorn’s testimony throwing around “$5.7 million,” none of the money has been collected. And $5.7 million could be way underselling it.

To be fair to the CCA, the folks in Nashville didn’t know how much steam they were using in D.C. until OPM installed a meter last March; a bill didn’t even go out until a few months later, in June. According to the bill, the meter shows that in six months—from June to December of 2007—the Correctional Treatment Facility used more than $450,000 in steam. When you do the math, and take into account that the CCA, according to its lease, has been responsible for paying utilities on the facility since 1997…. well that’s somewhere around $10 million to $11 million in danger of—poof!—evaporating.

The DOC, by nature of its relationship with the the jail, the next-door Correctional Treatment Facility, and the CCA, has been the agency ostensibly in charge of the lease with the CCA. But—and you’ll have to try and follow this alphabet soup—the DOC thinks it’s the OPM’s job to get the CCA on board. Beverly Young, spokesperson for DOC, e-mailed that succinct response to me this week: “The Department of Corrections is not responsible for the collections. The matter is ultimately an issue between OPM and CCA.”

Mendelson agrees. The DOC, he says, never should have been in charge of the lease in the first place. “The only agency that should administer a lease is OPM,” he says, and further: “They (OPM) screwed around last year with invoicing and not getting payment….They’re very slow to act and wer’e talking about millions of public dollars.”

At a hearing last Friday, OPM’s interim director Robin-Eve Jasper (after being jousted by Vincent Gray) faced Mendelson on this front:

Mendo: “We should get answers without having to think of every angle to ask the question. So I get the bills, but it turns out we’re not getting the pyament…”

Jasper: “I’m going to have to get back to you. We are billing currently, but the first bill didn’t go out that long ago…and I don’t believe it was as high as $11 million….I will get back to you with a detailed response.”

Mendo: “What I was last told at our last hearing on this was that the Office of Property Management was talking to the Department of Corrections. I’m not sure why that makes sense. Why doesn’t the OPM talk to CCA or to the CFO’s office?”

Jasper: “I can’t answer that question…I can’t answer why we were in discussion with the DOC rather than sending out a demand note and just proceeding on that basis.”

Mendo: “When you get back to me, can you also go into what was going on prior to June 2007?”

Jasper: “Yes, I believe we’re trying to establish a baseline of a full year at this point and…establish prior payments.”

Mendo: “I’ve yet to receive any evidence that anyone has talked to CCA, so this would all be a surprise to them when we send them a bill. That would kind of help, I think, to talk to them.”

Hey, it’s a start.

OPM’s spokesman, Bill Rice, did not return three phone calls. Stay tuned!

The saga of the Market 5 Gallery continues.

This morning a gallery employee discovered that the historic arts space’s locks had been changed. This latest drama centers around back rent and other fees the city and its minions claim the Eastern Market gallery owes. It’s the city’s second such eviction push in seven years. You can read the gallery’s own narrative of the disputes here.

Gallery Executive Director John Harrod says he received an eviction letter three weeks ago. The letter stated that he had to be out of the gallery’s North Hall space on Dec. 31. Another letter followed, he says, claiming that he owed $12,000. He says although that figure is in dispute, he quickly wrote a check for $9,000 of the $12,000.

Harrod had planned to take his fight over that sum to court. He says that the figure included bogus maintenance fees and snow removal fees–which the gallery takes care of on its own.

Now, Harrod has another court battle–one that he didn’t anticipate. “It’s obviously illegal,” Harrod says. “You can’t just lock your tenant out. You have to go through the courts.”

“Here we go again,” says Donald Temple, the gallery’s lawyer. “Wrong is wrong. It’s documented that Market 5 Gallery is making a historic contribution.”

The gallery and Harrod have spared with the city over just about everything. Still, the gallery had managed to hang on.

Last spring, Eastern Market went up in flames. But the gallery’s North Hall location had been miraculously spared from the damage.

Now there’s the new locks on the doors.

“We have a couple of performances coming up this week. There’s a tango event on Thursday,” Harrod, 60, says. “I’ll try my best to resolve this before then.”

At around 11 p.m. on Nov. 26, Ronald Thornton was watching a home improvement television show when he heard what sounded like a truck smashing at high speed into a building. Then he felt the floor tremble.

Thornton and his neighbors in Mount Vernon Square filed onto Ridge Street NW to see what had happened. Across from Thornton’s home, part of an abandoned two-story row house had crashed to the ground. Bricks lay scattered across the street. Some had tumbled against a home nearby. A side of the building was gone.

The collapse was the end of what neighbors say is a storied history at 460 Ridge St. NW. Neighborhood lore has it that the boarded-up house, which is owned by the District, has sat vacant since 2002, when crack smokers accidentally set it on fire.

It was “demolition by neglect,” says Cary Silverman, president of the Mount Vernon Square Neighborhood Association.

The fallen house is one of more than 100 vacant buildings in a seven-block radius in the neighborhood, many of which are owned by the District, Silverman adds. “All of these properties are a danger,” he says.

In April, the city announced it would be moving police headquarters from its longtime home in Judiciary Sqaure to a old printing plant on Virginia Avenue SE. Also planned to be part of the move were various other units, including violent crimes and evidence control, and the 1st District headquarters, currently at 4th and E Streets SW, which needs to clear out to make room for a long-planned crime lab.

Today, though, the city’s Office of Property Management announced that those plans have fallen apart because they were, according to a press release, “too expensive for the District.” But OPM spokesperson Bill Rice says plans for the crime lab are still “full steam ahead.”

“The mayor’s committed to it,” he says, “Everybody’s committed to it.”

That means the 1D headquarters still need a new home by early 2009, and Rice says a search for what will likely be a “swing space” is underway. Central headquarters and the other units will remain in their current homes indefinitely, he says.

Full press release after the jump.

Read the rest of this entry »

One of the favored myths of D.C. officials is that the Frank D. Reeves Center, which opened at 14th and U Streets NW in 1986, resuscitated the area. According to this fantasy, it was the government office building—not the 1991 arrival of the Green Line, nor the expanding gentrification of the Dupont Circle, Logan Circle, and Adams Morgan neighborhoods—that brought clubs, restaurants, and other businesses to the U Street corridor.

The Reeves Center legend is so popular, in fact, that it’s used to justify moving other government offices to ever more remote locations. Following his predecessor’s lead, Mayor Adrian Fenty has even proposed forcing Metro, a regional agency, to relocate its Judiciary Square headquarters to the vicinity of the Anacostia Metro station.

Yet even as the Reeves fable is used to justify further decentralization, the city’s Office of Property Management is seeking to redeem the fairy-tale building. On Tuesday evening, OPM Director Lars Etzkorn convened a public meeting to discuss ways to save the structure that supposedly saved U Street. “Finally, I can actually do something about this building,” Etzkorn announced.

Actually, the parley was called only to discuss the building’s first floor, a retail graveyard that currently holds a convenience store, a gallery, a bank, a D.C. Lottery redemption center, and lots of unleased space. Other problems, such as the perennially leaking roof, were not on the agenda.

Etzkorn was followed by consultants, two retail and one architectural, and then a OPM staffer who led an “audience participation exercise.” Unlike most such drills organized by D.C. government agencies, this one was not structured to drive people toward a preordained decision. The discussion was so free-form that the approximately 15 attendees, most of them from the neighborhood, were free to offer ideas that were largely detached from reality.

They proposed adding a supermarket, a “food hall,” or an Apple Store. People suggested that the revamped Reeves should resemble Philadelphia’s Reading Terminal Market or Seattle’s Pike Place Market—both of which are much bigger than the center’s first floor, and in far more heavily trafficked and architecturally attractive locations.

A “food hall” would be possible in Reeves only if, at considerable expense, the entire first floor were converted to retail and the entrance and security-clearance functions for the offices above were somehow moved to the second floor. Much simpler, and just as a beneficial to the adjacent streets, would be to reconfigure the existing retail space so that it’s more conspicuous and appealing, and make all of it accessible from the street. That, plus a cafe or other outdoor business on the U Street side, would be enough to fix what local resident Scott Pomeroy called “the major dead zone” the building creates.

Ironically, though, the Reeves Center shows more urbanistic promise than the other government centers planned to disperse city functions to far-flung locations. But more on that later.

In the John A. Wilson Building, when it rains, it pours—right into the office of Ward 3 Councilmember Kathy Patterson. The trouble began in June, when the heavy rains that left much of Washington flooded began seeping through the building’s northeast corner, into and through Patterson’s first-floor office, leaving a trail of peeling paint from the ceiling to the floor. To collect the falling water, Patterson set empty trash bins against the wall.

The Office of Property Management (OPM) sent in workers to fix the leaks in a building that was renovated five years ago. In Patterson’s office, their work included removing three large panels from the ceiling, leaving a dark, gaping hole in her office corner. Patterson figured the problem had been fixed.

When the rains returned last week, however, so did the drip—and Patterson’s bin collection. Nor were the ceiling panels that had been removed in June ever replaced. “I’ve talked to [OPM Director] Carol Mitten,” says Patterson, “and she thought it had already been taken care of.”

Mitten says that the water that spilled down from the building’s roof was the result of a cracked drainpipe. Mitten herself was called out of bed in June, she says, when overloaded pumps in the Wilson Building basement flooded the building’s main electrical room and set off its alarm system.

Now, work on the roof is underway, Mitten says. “The temporary roof work did not prove adequate to prevent further water infiltration,” she says by e-mail, “but we are optimistic that the more comprehensive permanent fix will do the trick.” Once her office deems the roof fully repaired, she says, “the cosmetic work to the northeast corner of the building will be completed.” —Isaiah Thompson