Dan Snyder, still not coming back.

It's not news that Ward 2 Councilmember Jack Evans desperately wants the Redskins back from Landover, Maryland. In 2010, he proposed tearing down RFK Stadium and building a 110,000-seat replacement. Last year, he and the Mayor went to Tampa to check out a training facility, which could be built near RFK if the whole stadium was too big to handle.

But Evans hasn't let go of his dream of having the Skins play in D.C. again. In fact, he sees it as an inevitability. "It's not a matter of 'if' they come back, it's a matter of 'when,'" he told a gathering of the Dupont Circle Citizens Association last night, saying the conversations with the team were "ongoing."

Evans knows that having the city finance a new stadium would be unpalatable, after the battle to build a ballpark for the Nationals, and slower-than-expected real estate response around it. Still, he said, the Redskins are much more loved than the District's baseball team. "Everyone loves the Redskins," he said. "There is a sense across the city that they should be playing in the city."

But there's hope! Evans said. The National Football League has a fund for helping teams build new stadia, with loans that are paid off through revenue sharing on the team's club seats. The fund dried up in 2007, but was recently replenished under a new collective bargaining agreement, with loans capped at $200 million and contingent on how much the team's owner is willing to contribute (before, money went to larger markets, like New Jersey's Meadowlands stadium). Just last week, the league announced its first loan under the new regime: $200 million to the San Francisco 49ers. So that's what Evans is banking on to bring the Skins back to D.C.

Unfortunately—or not, if you think there are better uses for large tracts of D.C.'s land than football stadia—it's probably not in the cards. "They've got a stadium in the market that people view as a perfectly adequate stadium," says Andrew Zimbalist, a Smith College economics professor who studies professional sports. "It's not gonna happen."

Ah well. Barring some other multi-million-dollar cash infusion, looks like those of us who care about football will have to keep trekking out to FedEx.

Photo by Darrow Montgomery

Into the "dead zone," as they call it.

Every couple of months, I go to some event where Georgetowners agonize about how nobody likes their neighborhood anymore—commercial corridors around the city are attracting the exciting new retail and restaurants, throwing them into an identity crisis. That was supposed to be resolved by a new branding campaign, but the fretting continues.

Last month, it was a forum hosted by the Georgetown Business Association, where the moderator asked a panel of businessfolk and politicians whether Georgetown was still on the city's economic development radar; she wanted to know if the city would be willing to support a startup incubator or other incentives to lure businesses to Georgetown. Last night, it was a smaller panel on the Wisconsin Avenue corridor, which people seem to think is underperforming.

The Citizens Association of Georgetown decided to host the event in the now-vacant National Jewelry Center, which is seen as a "symbol of the decline of Wisconsin Ave." It was a dramatic setting, unlike almost any in Georgetown at the moment: All the furnishings ripped out but for the mirrors behind the booths, with low light and a few lonely signs still hanging on the walls. It was easy for the packed crowd to start thinking about how the former Georgetown Theater could be reborn. 

The core of Georgetown residents' dissatisfaction: The kind of tacky retail represented by the former Jewelry Center and the mens clothing stores that still cluster on that block of the avenue, between the chains on lower Wisconsin and the cute boutiques towards Book Hill. Sure, they're worried about less-than-immaculate buildings and lingering vacancies, but some businesses that appear to be doing O.K. just don't fit what they think the high-class image of Georgetown should be.

"What's with all the suit shops?" asked Councilmember Jack Evans. "Who buys a $15 suit? I get asked that every day. That's the dead zone."

It's hard not to notice the class and race implications of all this. Wealthy white Georgetowners don't shop at those stores—where suits go for $99, not $15—and they think they don't contribute to the neighborhood. They're the remnant of an earlier time,* when not all the retail was Calvin Klein and H&M. But instead of viewing them as small independent businesses that Georgetowners say they love, the kind of diversity that keeps the place from becoming entirely an outdoor suburban mall, they're seen as seedy and therefore undesirable.

Apparently, though, the folks who own the properties don't see the problem with that retail mix. According to broker John Asadoorian, the success of M Street is due to landlords like Richard Levy and Anthony Lanier who figured out a vision for the strip and implemented it. Wisconsin has more absentee landlords who don't want to put in that kind of effort.

So Georgetowners think the public should help them out with Wisconsin Avenue. In fact, as Patch explains, developer and Georgetown resident Herb Miller thinks the city should take the $11 million left over from the $30 million downtown tax increment financing pool and spend it to catalyze development in Georgetown.

That's ridiculous. The city has already put millions of dollars into Georgetown, as Evans was quick to remind the audience, redoing the streetscape infrastructure to create an environment where businesses felt comfortable investing—and it worked, helping Georgetown come back as the mostly-luxury retail playground it is today. Tax increment financing, on the other hand, is supposed to be used in neighborhoods that haven't quite made it yet, and need something big to push them over the edge. It had a huge effect downtown. Now, that leftover TIF money should go to neighborhoods that seriously need the investment: Georgia Avenue, Anacostia, and Deanwood, which have little to nothing in the way of neighborhood-serving retail. Not Georgetown, where property values are already sky-high and unlikely to go higher.

Which isn't to say there's nothing to be done in Georgetown. You've got to feel for the foot traffic-starved P Street retailer who got up and talked about how tourists start on M Street, walk uphill for a couple blocks, and then turn around, seeing nothing further north to get to. That could be helped tremendously by wayfinding signage to tell people what kind of shops they can find where, or widening sidewalks to create a better pedestrian experience, like what's planned for Glover Park.

As far as bringing in the kind of retail Georgetowners say they want, filling in those vacant storefronts: It's not about the suit shops. It's about making Georgetown attractive to quality entrepreneurs. "Georgetown is seen as a hard place to do business," Asadoorian said. That's not just rent. It's the lack of robust public transportation, high real estate taxes, the risk of community opposition, extensive layers of architectural review. Eataly, which has been mentioned as a potential tenant for the old theater, told Asadoorian as much. Miller himself said that restauranteur Jose Andres wouldn't come to Georgetown because he'd have to spend tens of thousands of dollars to buy a liquor license.

Should the city use tax dollars to make up for the fact that Georgetown has made itself too expensive? I don't think so.

Someone will buy the old Georgetown Theater and turn it into something that will work—perhaps a collection of small retailers like Cady's Alley. Maybe that will help transform the shops on either side of it. But only if Georgetown residents proactively try to bring retailers in—Asadoorian recalled the tremendous campaign Logan Circle mounted to bring Whole Foods to their end of P Street, for example—rather than make it more difficult.

—

* Corrected from an earlier version, which identified the suit shops with the African American community that lived in Georgetown in the 50s and 60s. The suit shops came later.

1402 14th Street, Evans Ground Zero. (Lydia DePillis)

The red-and-white Jack Evans sign that appeared recently in the window of the Abdo Development showroom on 14th and Rhode Island Avenue NW isn't (necessarily) an expression of support for the Councilmember's 2012 reelection campaign. Evans will be renting the space for his base of operations heading into the April primary—at market rate, according to a reliable source.

That's a switch from last time around, when he went with a vacant Douglas Development space across from the Convention Center. Fourteenth Street is certainly the hip, with-it, longest-serving-councilmember place to be. And maybe landlord Jim Abdo will be kind enough to remove his website address from the front of the building, at least until it's essentially vacant again.

Fuss Budgets: Ed Lazere and the District's fiscal doves.

D.C. Councilmember Yvette Alexander was on her way into a Wilson Building meeting Monday afternoon when four members of the D.C. Fiscal Policy Institute waylaid her, brandishing fact sheets and legislative text. It was the day before the final budget vote. She granted them two minutes. Their concern: A last-minute amendment would boot parents off welfare for failing to attend parent-teacher conferences.

Standing to talk over a cubicle wall, Ed Lazere, the think tank’s bespectacled director, launched into the reasons why yanking a family’s public assistance wouldn’t get parents to show up at school. Alexander seemed skeptical. “They’re not going to lose their benefits,” she said sternly. “You know that and I know that.” With an auctioneer’s graceful patter, Lazere pivoted to the next item on his list. But Alexander circled back to the welfare issue, apparently having a change of heart.

“I will agree this should be a separate issue to have a hearing,” she said.

“That’s what we thought, too. That’s the main point,” Lazere quickly concurred, as if that had been his argument all along.

After 10 minutes with Alexander, Lazere and company went hunting for their next target: Ward 4’s Muriel Bowser, who was still in a hearing. No matter. Pushing through the chamber doors, Lazere caught the councilmember’s eye, motioning for her to come talk. They ran through the same issues, and Bowser also agreed there ought to be a hearing on the welfare amendment.

Then Jenny Reed, another member of the squad, got an email from the budget office with good news: The amendment had been pulled.

“Great, well, that’s nice,” said Lazere, smiling ever so slightly. “Yup.”

That kind of thing could have snuck by unnoticed in the next day’s vote. But not much gets past Lazere, who for the last decade has run a rapid-response wonk team during budget season to push for progressive taxation and protect funding for social services. As city revenue declined over the last several years, DCFPI has become even more central to lobbying efforts, doing polling, organizing coalitions, and providing talking points to the groups that run programs for the poor.

In any other political landscape, DCFPI’s activism might put them in a box on the left. There might be another outfit that challenged their numbers, or put out statistics for a fiscally conservative agenda. In the District, though, DCFPI is the only budget analysis game in town—to the eternal gratitude of social-service organizations, and the intense annoyance of the D.C. Council’s fiscal hawks. They bring the numbers that help set the tone for debates; even if they don’t always win every fight, DCFPI manages to start them on friendly ground. They clash with big developers and their allies on the council, opposing cuts to social services and tax abatements for construction alike.

“Somewhere along the line, they became an advocate for raising the personal income tax to the exclusion of virtually everything else,” says an exasperated Ward 2 Councilmember Jack Evans, who chairs the Committee on Finance and Revenue. (DCFPI actually spends most of its time on other things.) “If we were to buy into their philosophy, we would be back to where we were in 1991, when we started having the highest taxes.”

At public meetings, Evans often holds up charts that tell a completely different story about the District’s budget than the ones Lazere holds up—emphasizing the decline in the city’s reserves rather than its fiscal health relative to the rest of the country, or the trend in dollars for social services rather than their overall share of the budget. In front of a crowd that doesn’t understand how the budget works, it’s usually possible to find numbers that support your point of view, and omit ones that don’t. In the end, it’s not about numbers, it’s about priorities—and the smaller-government side of things just doesn’t have much analysis to back it up.

—

If Evans has a problem with DCFPI’s advocacy, he only has himself to blame. Iris Lav, an official at the national Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, started the local D.C. branch of her State Fiscal Analysis Initiative in response to legislation Evans sponsored in 1999, which rolled back income tax rates to match Maryland’s and Virginia’s. The District’s Fair Budget Coalition, a group of social-service advocacy groups, ran a weak campaign against it under the banner “Keep My Share.”

“It was more of an emotional appeal than a sound fiscal argument,” says Patty Mullahy Fugere, director of the Washington Legal Clinic for the Homeless.

Lazere had arrived at the poverty-focused CBPP a few years out of college in the early 1990s, and pumped out reports finding growing inequality and shortages of affordable housing. Heading up the D.C. outfit was a natural fit. He was a presence in the Wilson Building from the start, but came upon his biggest fight over subsidizing the Nationals baseball stadium in 2004.

“We expected there to be a large organized effort to challenge the financing for the baseball stadium, and kept waiting for it to materialize, and it didn’t,” Lazere says. “We sort of jumped in.”

After marathon hearings and intense lobbying, DCFPI and its allies lost, and Nationals Park became one of the most heavily publicly financed sports venues in the country. Six years later, Lazere says he’d need to do more research to figure out whether the city had gotten its money’s worth. But he’s already put out studies preemptively making the case against public investment in a soccer stadium.

“It might be good for the culture of the city to have a soccer team and nice stadium,” Lazere says, “but not necessarily good for the city’s economy.”

Give DCFPI credit for taking the heat: They often trash pork for popular projects that might not need help, from tax breaks for businesses around a Metro station in Ward 8 to incentives for a Whole Foods near the Navy Yard, and this year helped pass a bill that will finally subject such giveaways to developers to more rigorous scrutiny. They’ll also go to the mat to tax popular services like yoga and gym memberships, a proposal that raised a storm of resistance during last year’s budget season and was ultimately killed.

“It made us realize, what is an effective advocacy strategy?” muses Elissa Silverman, a former Washington City Paper columnist who came to work for Lazere after a stint at The Washington Post. “It’s not getting 40 emails, it’s getting 4,000, basically having council staff say, ‘Stop sending us emails, we can’t get work done.’”

Other research groups are just that—research groups, which put their reports on a website and hope somebody will do the advocacy for them. The Brookings Institution, for example, will testify at hearings and offer policy advice when asked, but stays away from rallies and doesn’t join advocacy coalitions—mostly to preserve an aura of impartiality, even if their non-profit tax status doesn’t disallow it. Lazere, confident that his analysis stands up to scrutiny, has no such reservations.

—

DCFPI was useful to social-service advocates when they needed help maintaining spending on their programs during boom times. When tax hikes became part of the equation, they became essential.

For the 2012 budget, DCFPI knew it had to do something more than show up for rallies and bring poor people down to the Wilson Building to testify. That’s when they came up with doing a poll, by the respected (and expensive) pollster Hart Research Associates, to see what D.C. residents thought about paying more taxes. It was a risk: Lazere says they had no idea what such a poll would say, and might have buried the results if they weren’t favorable. But they were. When offered a binary choice, 70 percent of residents polled thought maintaining public services should be a higher priority than holding taxes down, and 85 percent supported a new tax bracket for residents making more than $200,000.

The poll energized advocates, who cited the statistics again and again in their testimony during budget hearings. Jews United for Justice, which has focused on mobilizing higher-income people, had 60 Ward 3 residents sit down with Councilmember Mary Cheh and ask her to raise their taxes, knowing that most of their neighbors agreed.

Ultimately, the poll failed to win the new income tax bracket, which now tops out at $40,000. But on most other matters, DCFPI and the other advocate groups were victorious: The council agreed to get rid of a tax exemption on out-of-state municipal bonds, force corporations to file income taxes in D.C. rather than shifting them out of state, and restore tens of millions in cuts to social services.

What really helps them make their case, though, is the lack of any similar group on the other side of the debate. Though research suggests that rich people won’t leave the District if their taxes go up, Evans worries that high taxes might keep individuals and businesses away in the future—but only has anecdotal evidence to support it. The Chamber of Commerce, for example, didn’t do much more than offer hearing testimony.

“They are knocking the socks off the Chamber right now,” said one council staffer who’s less sympathetic to DCFPI’s message. “The Chamber is supposed to be the one with money. They could pay for a poll. They could go out and ask, do you want higher taxes or more Lincoln Navigators…but it just never occurred to them. ”

For his part, Evans feels like he’s in a lonely fight.

“The business community’s woeful!” he yelped. “They’re not even on the table! They don’t even register! Board of Trade, Chamber, Federal City Council, I mean, they’re just nowhere to be heard. So they have not been a good counterbalance the DCFPI. We don’t hear from the business community, all we hear from Ed is raise taxes. So there really is no outside group that can do a thorough analysis of the budget and come to us with good ideas.”

What Evans means by “good ideas,” of course, are proposals that would reduce spending, which isn’t DCFPI’s mission, and which most politicians have failed to offer (one councilmember’s “waste” is another’s essential service). Lacking a critical mass of fiscal conservatives who actually care about local government, the District hasn’t yet birthed a DCFPI of the right. It’s a side that could use more intelligent defense.

Jack Evans has HAD IT with raising your taxes.

Committee on Finance and Revenue chairman Jack Evans rejected a host of the Mayor's proposals on Thursday, calling it "inconceivable" that the District could raise taxes while proposing a $10.82 billion budget–the largest in its history. Offering deep cuts to social services as the only alternative, he said in yesterday's committee meeting, was a false choice.

"I don't know whose in charge, but whoever's in charge is doing an abysmal job, that we are spending that amount of money and being presented with these social issues," Evans said, calling the hike-taxes-or-put-homeless-people-on-the-streets narrative a "Washington Monument" strategy:  "Put the worst things out there, scare everybody, and maybe they'll do what we want. I find that to be a very very unprofessional approach."

Accordingly, his committee's report–which passed over Councilmembers Marion Barry and Michael Brown's objections–does the following:

• Rejects the Exemptions and Abatements Information Requirement Act of 2011, which would require an economic analysis of all proposed tax breaks and an annual report detailing the progress of the developments that received them. Groups like the D.C. Fiscal Policy Institute have argued that this is the only way to make sure tax incentives are well-spent, but Evans' committee says the bill's benefits aren't worth the $1.15 million it would cost to implement over four years, which bill sponsor Michael Brown thought was ridiculous. Evans plans to introduce a Tax Commission that would look at incentives as well as "revenue enhancements."
• Repeals combined reporting, if sufficient money can be identified in next quarter's revised revenue estimate to cover the $22.6 million in new taxes the budget anticipates to collect by requiring multi-state corporations to pay income tax on the revenue they make in the District, rather than shifting it around. Which is odd, considering that Evans was for the measure in March.
• Rolls back parking meter increases, an increase in the parking garage tax from 12 percent to 18 percent, limitations on itemized deductions, a new income tax bracket for those making more than $200,000, a six-percent tax on live theater ticket sales, and employer standard deduction withholding (read the report if you want to know what that is). Getting rid of all these taxes would cost $119.48 million*–out of the $127 million total package of proposed hikes–and is subject to revised revenue estimates that show an increase of at least that much.
• That said, the committee was fine with imposing a 36-cent-per-pack wholesale surcharge on cigarettes, a franchise tax, and a few other things that aren't worth explaining.
• The committee also wants to restore the Ballpark Community Benefits Fund and the Neighborhood Investment Fund, and keep the Circulator fares at $1 per ride.

All this will get hashed out in a televised Council roundtable session on Monday morning–tune in!

* Updated to reflect repeal of parking garage tax.

To the extent that management can demonstrate its ability to structurally balance its budget, replenish its fund balances, and manage risks associated with the United Medical Center (UMC) and its capital improvement plan over the long term, we could raise the rating. Factors that could place downward pressure on the rating include the district's failure to reverse its current trend of declining fund reserve and achieve structural balance on a generally accepted accounting principles basis, increased costs and liabilities associated with the district's recent purchase of UMC; and continued capital pressures.

Which makes it crystal clear why Gray booted UMC board members who were opposed to turning the hospital back over to the private sector: He needs to show the rating agencies that he's serious about getting it off the District's books.

Evans has been playing this game for longer than anybody, and thinks that one of former mayor Adrian Fenty's biggest mistakes was promising the rating agencies that he wouldn't dip into the District's savings account, and then doing it anyway. "I said 'what are you doing, you said you weren't going to do that!'" as Evans recalled the conversation last week.

Here's what Evans asks the guys in the room who give D.C. its letter grade: Rate the District with Boston, Chicago, and Denver–which typically get high ratings–and not Baltimore, Cleveland, or Detroit. The BCDs, get it?

Photo from flickr user michaelaston.

Battleground. (Aerial photo courtesy of Georgetown University)

I'm a bit late to this, but thought it worth re-pointing out that in its campus plan submission to the Zoning Commission, Georgetown University dropped two major things in response to community concerns: Additional graduate student housing on the "1789 block," between 36th and 37th Street, and a proposed 83-foot-tall "chimney extension."

The organized opposition's greatest objection to the university's plan, of course, is increasing graduate enrollment without building more on-campus housing. Neighbors' aversion to more temporary residents–i.e. students–is so great that they wouldn't even stand for 120 graduate student apartments on university land located outside the campus gates. So now the plan has less housing, and the same number of students.

Then there's the chimney extension, which had been planned in order to better prevent emissions from the heating and cooling plant from re-entering air at the human level. Surrounding residents worried that the University would instead use it to increase emissions, despite pledges to the contrary. But Councilmember Jack Evans apparently got his way, and there will be no smokestack. I wondered what the university planned to do to protect the campus' air quality without a heightened chimney; they haven't figure that out yet.

"The short answer is that we're going to continue to work with our consultants to investigate alternatives for managing re-entrainment," wrote University spokeswoman Julie Bataille in an e-mail. "The chimney extension was a practical and recommended way to respond to the issue but we intentionally removed it from our campus plan in response to community concerns."

On to the Zoning Commission!

Some history then: Evans helped create the National Capital Revitalization Commission back in 1998, modeled on the Pennsylvania Avenue Development Corporation, which Evans characterized as generally successful (with the notable exception of the FBI Building). But the NCRC, he says, "never worked."

"What makes these things work or not work is good people," Evans said. "And we never had good people. It became this giant collossal thing answerable to no one."

As Fenty was coming into office, Evans pushed legislation to fold both the NCRC and its sister organization, the Anacostia Waterfront Corporation, into the office of the Deputy Mayor for Planning and Economic Development.

"And it worked," Evans says. "It worked a lot better than having those two entities and their boards of directors."

So there you have it, ladies and gentlemen. Evans abolished the old redevelopment authorities, and he thinks bringing anything like them back would be a terrible idea.

(Washington Speakers Bureau)

For the last several months, Ward 2 Councilmember Jack Evans has been running around the city, waving graphs that show the city's historical fiscal surplus turning into a deficit. Yesterday, while the Council was debating whether to raise taxes or cut more services–they opted for the latter–Evans read off headlines from the 1990s, to illustrate how then-Mayor Marion Barry's refusal to rein in spending had finally prompted the feds to take control of the District's finances. Councilmember Kwame Brown also jumped on the Control Board bandwagon, warning everyone watching that if the Council didn't make tough decisions, Congress would step in and "make them for us."

Evans' rhetoric spawned one of the best Twitter hashtags to come out of a marathon budget hearing ever. And it made me wonder: Is he totally full of shit?

Well, he's at least being hyperbolic. Brookings scholar Alice Rivlin, former head of the Control Board and current member of Vince Gray's transition team, says there are quite a few differences between 1995 and 2010.

"I think all cities at the moment are in some serious financial straits because of the recession. D.C. is no exception," she began. "However, it's nothing like the '90s. The city is in much stronger shape than it was in the worst year, which was 1995. The population has grown, there's been a lot of economic development, the tax base is stronger than it was then. We have now a 12-year history of balanced budgets. And we built up a substantial balance in the general fund. So I don't think the city is in any danger of the return of a control board. Unless we do something extremely stupid, and I do not think the new mayor and the new council will do that."

Plus, District government itself is nothing like it was 15 years ago, especially in terms of its reputation on the Hill.

"The Congress in the 90s had very little confidence in the city, and was doing a lot of meddling with the D.C. budget making process," Rivlin said. "And that's been much less true, in part because of the succession of mayors. [Former Mayor Anthony] Williams and Fenty have established good relationships on the Hill. And the other difference is the existence of a Chief Financial Officer. We didn't have that in 1995. That was a creation of the legislation to put the control board in place, and it was a good one."

How did the Council do on closing the budget gap this time around?

"It's a pretty good compromise, because they had to do something by the end of the year," Rivlin says. "Next year, they're going to have to close an even bigger gap. And then I think some tax increases will have to be seriously considered."

She declined to pontificate on what types of taxes would be appropriate. But if we raised them, it's fair to say that the our Congressional overlords wouldn't try to step in and take over.