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CLOSE TO HOME THE DISTRICT One more question for the candidates
Colbert I. King’s June 5 op-ed column posed a number of questions that candidates for D.C. office should answer. We would like to add one: What are the candidates’ plans for reducing the unacceptably high rate of poverty in our city? The District has weathered the recession better than most cities. During the past year, the city added 10,700 jobs. Its population grew, and once-neglected neighborhoods continued to transform into regional destinations. Yet for too many residents, being at the center of one of the nation’s healthiest metropolitan economies hasn’t made a difference. In fact, while the number of jobs in the city was growing, unemployment still soared to the highest rate ever recorded, and 11,000 residents fell into poverty last year. All told, the District’s poverty rate is estimated to have jumped
from 17 to 19 percent in 2009 — the biggest single-year increase since 1995. This means that one in five District residents lives in poverty, including one in three children. With unemployment at 11 percent citywide (and nearing 30 percent in Ward 8), it is likely that even more District residents will fall into poverty in 2010. All residents and businesses have a stake in addressing these shocking statistics. Helping the District’s low-income residents increase their education, literacy and job skills will enhance the quality of our workforce and make it easier for residents to qualify for employment with Washington’s businesses. It will also help D.C. children succeed in school, because families led by lifetime learners are better able to support their children academically. Increased work and wages among low-income residents will grow the city’s tax base, reduce high expenditures on social services and increase the number of residents patronizing Washington’s businesses. Just as important, reducing poverty will help reduce crime and bridge the sharp racial and geographic disparities that have long divided our city and region. A new campaign — Defeat Poverty DC — is bringing together residents, advocacy groups, businesses and faith communities to make this problem a high priority for elected officials this year. The goal is to use the 2010 election season to engage the District’s elected leaders and candidates in discussions of what can be done to address poverty. In particular, the campaign will expect leaders to offer their proposals to make work possible for low-skilled D.C. residents; to make work pay enough to support a family; and to make basic needs such as housing and health care affordable. All D.C. citizens and the businesses that serve them have a stake in combating poverty in the nation’s capital. Every candidate for office should have a plan for addressing it. Walter Smith and Ted Trabue, Washington
Walter Smith is executive director of D.C. Appleseed. Ted Trabue is president of the D.C. State Board of Education and executive director of the Green Builders Council of D.C.
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NEXT WEEK’S TOPIC What should D.C. do to address DWI convictions based partly on faulty breath tests?
NORA JEAN LEVIN WASHINGTON
Good fences make good neighbors — especially after you install a gate
The house we used to live in is for sale on the Hill. For almost $1.4 mil- lion, according to the Web site. We paid $55,000 in 1971, when Capitol Hill was a neighborhood much in transition, and Eighth Street around the corner was still consid- ered “fringy.” The Web site’s virtual tour displays many high-end features — and one historical anomaly. “The gate is still there,” noted my son in an e- mail. And so it is. That would be the half-dutch door cut in the wooden fence separating the back yard from that of the next- door neighbor’s. In Rob- ert Frost’s ironic poem “Mending Wall,” the neighbor comments that “good fences make good neighbors.” But Frost’s New Eng- land neighbors had not been for- mer bridge-building, California- raised, Peace Corps volunteers like ours had been. The door was cut so we and our small children could go back and forth freely to visit and play. And it was a half door. Our neighbors had a three- foot, ivy-covered chain-link fence that stood flush against the back of our fence, and the thick metal pipe that ran across the top of it limited how tall the opening could be.
When we moved in, in February
1972, our firstborn was 11 months old. Our neighbors hosted a small dinner party to welcome us. Their
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Some of the region’s best bloggers share work on the All Opinions Are Local blog. Below is one of last week’s posts.
Whom a BP boycott hits hardest Consumer anger over BP’s oil spill and rig disaster is being carried over into boycotts of BP stations. But if you refuse to buy BP gas, will Tony Hayward, BP’s embattled
CEO, get your message? Possibly not. The reason is that plenty of BP outlets are franchise arrangements owned by independent operators. If you shun their products, you will hurt the local owners, not the British energy giant. In Hampton Roads, for instance, Miller Oil Co. owns 16 BP
stations and supplies gas on a wholesale basis to 50 other small operators. The setup takes the BP brand a few levels away from the parent firm. Back in 1979, I did a newspaper story about the public outcry over high gasoline prices following the Iranian revolution. I was friendly with the owners of an Exxon station in Virginia Beach, and they explained the micro-economics of their business to me. They went over their books and showed me that they didn’t set the gas prices, although they had to factor in their needs by adding pennies to the higher prices per gallon to stay afloat. In fact, Exxon was squeezing them on other costs, and they were
having a hard time making whatever payments they needed to make to Exxon. The problem was exacerbated because customers were buying less of their gas because of the high prices. Indeed, they probably had more friction with Exxon than with their outraged customers. Given the way BP has behaved in its deadly Texas City refinery blast in 2005 and with the Deepwater Horizon disaster, I would expect that tensions between independents and BP are even stronger. Peter Galuszka, Bacon’s Rebellion
If you’ve heard that the District is tumbling headfirst toward an- other control board, it’s time to take a deep breath. The alarm bells have sounded because the District’s “fund bal- ance” has declined from $1.6 bil- lion in 2005 to $656 million in 2011. One can think of the fund balance as a community savings account. In this case, the account has two components: a “reserved” portion that the District must set aside for payment of legal obliga- tions such as debt service, and an “unreserved” portion that can be drawn down to spend on opera- tions. It is the drawdown of this unreserved portion that has set off the back-to-the-control-board talk. Now to complicate (well, clarify, one hopes) things, there is also something called a “budget re- serve” set-aside. This is another pot of money that functions as a rainy-day savings account, but un- like the fund balance, which
and a rocking boat. In May 1974, I went into labor with our second son while we were sitting on their back porch with cold drinks. I still remember how hard it was to bend through that half door so we could get to the hospi- tal.
NORA JEAN LEVIN
Danny Levin, front, Philip Reno and Jeremy Levin, back, play behind the Levins’ Capitol Hill home in 1977. The improvised gate is visible behind Philip.
son was six months younger. They were already almost done reno- vating their house. We had decid- ed to excavate the partially fin- ished basement to construct a le- gal one-bedroom rental unit with separate entrances front and back and a rear storage unit (now fea- tured as a “wine cellar”). The job was complicated, because we had no experience and a tight budget, and the dirt had to be dug and re- moved by hand. Over the next year the back- fence conversations between young parents became more fre- quent, and a two-family friend- ship blossomed. We had a brick patio. They had planted grass. We
had a fountain by the garage. They had no garage but a mulber- ry tree and dirt under their wood- en backyard porch, perfect for Tonka-truck projects beloved by little boys. And both young moth- ers liked to sing and play the gui- tar.
As the boys grew and the visits increased, the need for easy ac- cess became evident. But that fence was a problem. The fathers put their heads together and came up with the design and ex- ecution of the Rube Goldberg so- lution. And so it came to be. Years passed and the flow of
traffic increased. They bought a slide. We bought a climbing thing
When the mothers went back to work, we shared child care. Then holiday meals. Then vacations. Eventually the kids played on the same soccer and Little League teams. For many years they went to the same secular and reli- gious schools. By the ’80s, it was time to move. And so we did. Together. To houses on the same street in Northwest — no sense breaking up a good carpool. Our chil- dren grew up. Some
moved away, then came back. Our families remain entwined, cele- brating major occasions together. Our sons were best men at each other’s weddings, and to this day our children remain close. A few months ago our friends sold their house and bought a condo in Kalorama. We were not as sad as one might expect, be- cause, although we are not ready to downsize just yet, we know ex- actly where we will move when we do. Good fences make good neigh- bors, but one good half gate cre- ates a priceless opportunity. I wish whoever buys our old house the same good fortune.
SUNDAY, JUNE 13, 2010
ROBERT D. EBEL WASHINGTON Back to the control board?
grows on its own during boom times, the reserve is created through a line item in the annual budget. That is, for budgetary pur- poses, it is just another spending entry. The reality is that the District is
financially sound. Consider this: Whereas the District’s expected fund balance is 10.2 percent of its budget for 2011, two-thirds of the states’ balances will be below 5 percent. Maryland is at a respect- able 6.1 percent; Virginia is at 2.3 percent. Only eight states are do- ing better than the District, and five of those are oil states. Nonetheless, eyebrows have
been raised because of the decline in the fund balance. What to do? There are three options: The first is to fully reestablish the $50 million “budget reserve” that was abolished in 2009. If the city goes this route (again, remem- ber it is an expenditure line item), it can pay for it by increasing tax- es. After such an increase, the Dis-
trict would still have lower overall state and local taxes than Mary- land’s, though they would be a bit higher than Virginia’s. The second option is to enact a council-proposed rule to earmark 100 percent of any future surplus- es to replenishing the unreserved portion of the fund balance by about $650 million (it has gone from $175 million in 2005 to zero today). A good case can be made for giving the public’s savings ac- count first dibs on a surplus, but it would take an awfully long time to get to $650 million this way. More- over, such an approach would lim- it the flexibility the city needs to address unplanned “safety net” needs (or, as the Street Sense newspaper reminds us, “survival net” needs). If the goal is to send a signal to the credit markets that the District is well-managed fi- nancially, a lower earmark, say, of 50 percent, would suffice. But let’s give credit to the D.C. Council for coming up with this idea.
Third — and now take that deep
breath — the city could simply choose not to replenish the un- reserved portion of the fund bal- ance, especially if the line-item “budget reserve” were reestab- lished. Why? Two reasons. First, what the District must do is en- sure that it has enough money set aside for the reserved portion of the savings account. And we are good on that. Second, the inde- pendent office of the chief finan- cial officer serves as a safeguard to keep the financial accounts trans- parent and honest and balanced, as a record of 14 consecutive bal- anced budgets attests. So, a budget reserve tax-and-
save strategy? Yes. A new fund bal- ance strategy? Not needed. A re- turn to a control board? Nope.
The writer is a professor of economics at the University of the District of Columbia. He was chief economist in the D.C. Office of the Chief Financial Officer from 2006 to 2009.
SAMIA FAM AND AVIS E. BUCHANAN WASHINGTON Sursum Corda has rights, too
According to The Post’s June 10 editorial “Poor Judgment,” the D.C. Court of Appeals judges’ in- sistence on following the law in the case of In re T.L. was “unfortu- nate, probably naive and quite possibly damaging.” But that statement better describes the editorial than the opinion, which correctly interpreted the District’s disorderly conduct statute and upheld the Constitution. This case involved bedrock con- stitional principles, and it was dis- turbing that the editorial made no attempt to discuss the court’s opinion as the legal judgment that it is. Instead, the issue was cast as a question of “who does the court side with” — the police or a teen- ager who is discovered to have drugs after an illegal search? This focus obscures what really mat- ters here, fidelity to the rule of law and equality in its application.
The principles that undergird- ed the court’s opinion derive from the Constitution and the District’s statutes, not the judges’ “siding” with one party or the other, which judges are sworn to avoid. In plain words, these legal principles are: (1) the legality of police searches and seizures must be judged by objective standards, not a police officer’s say-so; and (2) the Dis- trict’s disorderly conduct statute does not authorize an arrest merely because a child verbally — albeit loudly — protests a police officer’s illegal seizure of his mon- ey by calling out for his mother. Such conduct cannot be a crime, both because the legisla- ture that passed the disorderly conduct statute did not make it a crime and because the First Amendment guarantees the right to peaceably protest police mis- conduct. These principles are es-
sential to the concept of ordered liberty that is the cornerstone of our democracy. The court’s opin- ion should be applauded, not con- demned.
But there was an even more deeply troubling aspect to the edi- torial that needs to be addressed. It appeared to imply that in poor
ply because the officer has a hunch that the money was ill- gotten. Fortunately, our “naive” Court of Appeals thought other- wise in holding that this teenager had the right to protest such a clearly illegal police seizure. The Framers of the Constitution must have been naive, too: The Fourth
T.L. was depicted as “a minor camped out at a corner in the middle of a winter night in a high-crime area.” But another way to describe him is as a teenager hanging out with friends in his mother’s neighborhood.
neighborhoods, civil liberties are too much of a luxury and should be suspended in deference to the police’s need to bust crime. It sug- gested that it is good police work for an officer to “impound” cash possessed by a teenager in a poor, crime-ridden neighborhood sim-
Amendment requires probable cause to believe that something is evidence of a crime before police can confiscate our belongings. Ev- ery judge in the land is bound to hold that a hunch is not enough — even in places like Sursum Corda. Only by depicting T.L. and the
residents of Sursum Corda who were in attendance on the night of T.L.’s arrest as dangerous mem- bers of the criminal element could the editorial support its conclu- sion that the officer involved “made a reasonable call in a po- tentially volatile situation.” The editorial described T.L. as “a mi- nor camped out at a corner in the middle of a winter night in a high crime area.” But another way to describe him is as a teenager hanging out with his friends in his mother’s neighborhood at the time that the officer illegally seized his money. According to the officer’s testimony, summarized in the court’s opinion, T.L. “was friendly and cooperative” up until the moment the officer illegally took his money. And while the of- ficer made the self-serving claim that the 10 to 15 people who emerged from neighboring homes
in response to the commotion were potentially “very dangerous,” there was no suggestion of danger in evidence, as the court’s opinion recognized. Instead, the evidence demonstrated that they acted like ordinary people who just came out to see what the ruckus was about. Implicit in the court’s opinion is the recognition that the law must be applied even-handedly, wheth- er the police are working in Sur- sum Corda or upper Northwest. This principle must be held invio- late, and cannot be called naive or damaging.
Samia Fam is deputy chief of the Appellate Division of the Public Defender Service for the District of Columbia, which is representing the 16-year-old identified in court records as T.L. in this case. Avis E. Buchanan is director of the service.
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