By Sue Hemberger
Published by The Mail
You’d think that a mayor announcing a major construction project that would rebuild a neighborhood’s library and expand and modernize its award-winning but overcrowded elementary school would be eager to share the news with the community. So why did Mayor Fenty fail to publicize his decision to select LCOR as a development partner for the Janney School/Tenley-Friendship library site? Why did he change the day and time of that announcement as soon as he discovered that residents knew of the event and planned to attend? And why did Ward 3 Councilmember Mary Cheh, who was standing by Fenty’s side on Thursday morning, also neglect to inform the community that such an announcement had been scheduled? The short answer: both knew that this decision would be greeted with outrage rather than applause.
Here’s why: 1) it means that the reopening of our branch library (whose design had just been completed and whose construction was slated to begin next fall) will once again be delayed for at least two more years. 2) It means that instead of athletic facilities, there will be apartments on Janney’s soccer field and that the exterior facilities (playgrounds and a multipurpose sports field for physical education) DCPS’s educational specifications mandate for an elementary school campus of 550 students will not be provided as the school’s capacity is expanded and its facilities modernized. 3) It means that the mayor ignored both the community’s wishes and his own promise not to go forward with a public-private project unless the there was strong support for one. It also means that Deputy Mayor Neil Albert reneged on his oft-repeated commitment that the community would see the proposal chosen by the selection panel and have a chance to comment upon it before DMPED forwarded any recommendation to the mayor.
These were the predictable sources of outrage, but there were also a few surprises in store for the approximately fifty angry residents who made it to the press event after its existence and time change was leaked (by a non-governmental source) to a few community members who quickly spread the word. We learned that while both Fenty and Cheh endorsed the selection of LCOR (which entailed pulling the plug on DCPL’s reconstruction of the library), Fenty hadn’t bothered to look at DCPL’s design for our library before making that decision and Cheh hadn’t seen LCOR’s best and final offer before endorsing it. We also learned that there were no more concrete details available — no site plan, no timelines, no financials — than were provided to us four months ago, when LCOR’s design was rejected as unacceptable by the ANC and the Janney S IT, as well as by all but two or three of the one hundred and twenty some individuals who submitted written comments on the proposals to DMPED.
And finally, we realized, though not immediately, that apparently the lesson that the Fenty Administration has drawn from the West End debacle last July is not “go to the Council earlier” but “avoid the Council altogether.” In Tenleytown we have the spectacle of a mayor asserting his unilateral authority to offer public land for private development without any council input regarding that land’s surplussing or disposition.
It’s time for this scofflaw administration to be reigned in. This isn’t a feudal monarchy where the sovereign can dispose of public land as he sees fit as long as he can induce the local lord to stand loyally by his side. It’s a democracy in which the rule of law is supposed to govern the decisionmaking and in which elected officials (both the mayor and the council) have a fiduciary duty to protect public assets which are owned by the public, not by the (temporary) head of state. The deal Fenty wants to strike with LCOR is a disaster from a public facilities standpoint. Tenleytown will get less attractive facilities, later, and at greater public expense, than we would have if the government had proceeded with separate publicly funded modernizations of both school and library, using the capital funds already budgeted for the two projects (rather than turning thos e funds over to LCOR).
Will Fenty get away with it? I guess it depend in part on whether the media (and the citizenry) wake up and stop believing that decisions that engender vociferous and sustained dissent are presumptively “bold and visionary” rather than stupid and ill-conceived. It also depends on whether the council stops playing the role of enabler and starts acting like a check on the power of the executive. Stay tuned. Because your school, library, or fire station may be next.
LIBRARY
DYNAMOS