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THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 9, 2010 Early 1990s were a challenging time for Gray gray from A1
a government bureaucracy. They were more responsive than the Barry administration and the ad- ministration after that,” saidDon- na Wulkan, who was an attorney in a class-action lawsuit against the District over conditions at juvenile detention facilities. “We were on opposite sides of the fence. . . . But I still felt he was advocating for the kids.”
An agency in trouble When he was appointed in
1991, Gray was the department’s 11th director in 12 years, and the agency he inherited was the city’s largest. It cost $1 billion a year to run the department, which em- ployed more than 8,000 people and had a far-reaching portfolio that included juvenile justice, fos- ter care, homelessness, AIDS and mental health. And the depart- ment was fraught with problems: 14 important functions had been declared substandard and placed under some form of federal court oversight. By the time Gray left, there would be two more. Gray’s undertaking was made
moredifficult by a recordnumber of homeless families, one of the country’s fastest-growing AIDS rates and a government payroll that had ballooned under Barry, now the council member for Ward 8. The deterioration of the city’s finances had begun before Gray and Pratt arrived, not be- cause of them, as Fenty has sug- gested. “She was handed this disaster,”
said economist Alice M. Rivlin, who helped orchestrate the con- gressional takeover of the city government as President Bill Clinton’s budget director after Pratt left office. But Rivlin noted that the financial situation under Pratt “did not getany better, that’s for sure, and by 1995, the city was in free fall.” Rivlin, who supports Gray’s
mayoral candidacy, said it would not be “fair to blame the disaster on Sharon, much less Gray.” But Rivlin said Pratt lacked the “strong political base” to lead a financial turnaround because “she wasn’t an experienced politi- cian.” Pratt, who also backs Gray, declined to be interviewed. But in a series of e-mails, she praised Gray for doing a “remarkable job of addressing entrenched, diffi- cult issues.” For his part, Gray points to
various accomplishments. On his watch, the city increased the number of social workers to shrink their caseloads; it shut- tered the long-troubled Forest Haven center and transferred de- velopmentally disabled people to community-based settings; the infant mortality rate declined. A list of achievements Gray provid- ed, which runs eight pages and ranges from the minute to the monumental, underscores the breadth of the challenges he faced. The structure of DHS com- pounded the problem. Six of its agencies were eventually spun off into Cabinet-level departments. Gray and Pratt knewat the outset that the agency’s size and scope were untenable. But they were unable to persuade the council to break it up. “It was well past the point
where something really signifi- cant was going to happen,” Gray said. “It was politics.” When Pratt called to recruit
Gray for the job, he was executive director of the the Arc of DC, a nonprofit organization that advo- cates for people with develop- mental disabilities. Gray initially said no. One of the people he called for
advice was Reginald F. Wells, then the head of what was the city’sMental Retardation andDe- velopmental Disabilities Admin- istration.Wells said he cautioned Gray that the bureaucracy lacked the flexibility of the nonprofit world he was accustomed to. “You’re going to win some and
lose some, and change is going to be very incremental,” Wells re- called telling Gray. Wells said Gray’s response was: “If he only got four years, he would at least get things started in a better direction, and he really made good on that promise.” Within his first 18 months,
Gray said, he realized that four years would not be enough time to fix a “severely broken” system. “In the time that was available, I don’t think it was possible to completely reform all of those agencies,” Gray said. “But if you go through every agency, you will find progress having been made.” Gray said he recognized the problems coming in, but not the extent of the deficiencies of an agency where child-welfare infor- mation was kept on 3-by-5-inch cards in files piled on the floor of an office on H Street NE. “It wasn’t as if the needs were going to stand still while you had to do
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this,” Gray said. “You were trying to create the bicycle and ride it at the same time. To Fenty’s supporters, for Gray
to say he was dealt a bad hand is no excuse. At the time, one of the leading advocates for people with mental illness was Peter Nickles, an attorney for the plaintiffs in a class-action lawsuit andnowFen- ty’s attorney general. Nickles re-
called visiting Gray in his tempo- rary office in a double-wide trail- er on the grounds of St. Eliza- beths, the city’s psychiatric hospital, to try to shake loose payments for the private provid- ers who were helping his clients. “It was a logjam. Nothing
seemedto happen,whether itwas procurement, personnel or pay- ing bills,” Nickles said. “It was
bad, and it didn’t get any better. The culture of complacency was not changed.” At the end of Gray’s tenure, a
court-appointed special master in what is now know as Dixon v. Fenty, wrote a scathing review of the city’s “persistent pattern” of failing to comply with an agree- ment to transfer patients from St. Elizabeths to community-based
housing. But Danna Mauch, the special
master, said in an interview that it would be too simplistic to blame Gray, given the scope of the challenge. In an interview, Claudia Schlosberg, who was staff direc- tor for the court-appointed moni- toring committee in the case, said: “Vince did what he could.
. . .There were forces larger than him at work.”
A varied record A 1993 report from the Wash-
ington Legal Clinic for theHome- less outlined the government’s record of “refusal and/or inability to administer its own social pro-
gray continued on A7
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