I Guess Congress Won't Be Happy Until D.C.'s Citizens Finally Elect A White, Republican Mayor To Get Rid Of All The City's Lower Income Black Residents.
Hey I'm Just Saying.
Washington Mayor’s Missteps Cast Harsh Light
When Vincent C. Gray campaigned for mayor last fall, he promised to bring character, integrity and leadership back to the District of Columbia.
But 100 days into Mr. Gray’s tenure, he is battling the perception that his administration has brought anything but, mostly because several staff members have been accused of helping their children get jobs in his administration and of receiving inflated salaries.
Mr. Gray’s supporters say that the allegations are overblown, and that salary caps were exceeded by small amounts and involved only a few people. But they nevertheless have cast a harsh light on the city just as it has become a target for Republicans in Congress over abortion and school vouchers.
This is all bad news for a city trying to overcome its past, Mr. Gray’s critics say. They argue that the headlines created by his missteps are reviving bad memories of the 1980s, when the city, under Mayor Marion Barry, bungled its affairs so badly that it was taken over by a federally appointed control board.
“The leadership of our city has been diminished and embarrassed, and that undercuts our ability to make the case about why we should govern ourselves,” said David A. Catania, a member of the District Council who has been critical of Mr. Gray.
But others reject that argument. Mr. Gray may have stumbled out of the gate, they say, but the charges, which involve a handful of people, represent a simple staffing mistake, not endemic corruption. He is ultimately a man of integrity, they say, who bears little in common with Mr. Barry aside from race.
“The fears that he was some type of modern-day Marion Barry were totally off-base,” said Tom Sherwood, co-author of “Dream City: Race, Power and the Decline of Washington, D.C.”
“But these early stumbles have allowed that impression to set in,” said Mr. Sherwood, who is also a television news reporter for NBC4 here. “He has to fix that.”
The trouble for Mr. Gray started in February with reports in The Washington Post and on the public radio station WAMU asserting that salaries of certain members of his administration were higher than those of their predecessors and exceeded city salary caps. Reports also surfaced of the children of staff members getting jobs with the city, some with little or no vetting.
To make matters worse, a former competitor claimed he was paid by Mr. Gray’s campaign to remain a candidate in the mayor’s race last fall, a charge that few seem to believe and that Mr. Gray’s office has strongly denied.
Criticism mounted, and by April the Council began holding public hearings.
Mr. Gray’s supporters say that it is natural for elected officials to hire their allies, and Mr. Gray had a certain number of positions at his discretion. Most of the allegations concern a small group of people, including Gerri Mason Hall, Mr. Gray’s chief of staff, whom he has since dismissed.
“Children of five people in relatively junior positions in a 35,000-person government doesn’t strike me as something to rerun the election over,” said Gregory McCarthy, deputy chief of staff under former Mayor Anthony A. Williams.
Mary Cheh, the council member who has conducted the hearings, said that just one of the five children’s jobs appeared to have been an actual instance of nepotism. Still, she said, the administration’s attitude toward assigning jobs and salaries appeared cavalier and tone-deaf when the city is wrestling with a $400 million budget deficit.
“These were not big violations, but in politics, appearances can be more important,” Ms. Cheh said. “It made it look like there was an irresponsible party going on.”
At the heart of the criticism is the fear that Mr. Gray, a 68-year-old native Washingtonian who has worked with the poor and the disabled as a city administrator for most of his life, has brought with him the aging but powerful system of patronage that prevailed in this city for years.
“It was about who you knew, not what you knew,” Mr. Catania said. He added: “I believe Gray to be honest. My quarrel is not with him. It’s with the individuals in which he places so much trust.”
People on both sides of the debate say one problem is that Mr. Gray, a relative newcomer to elected politics, is not well known, so people jump to conclusions, including that he will not continue past reforms. In fact, he has kept several key officials from the previous administration, including Kaya Henderson, the deputy of Michelle Rhee, the polarizing former schools chancellor.
The city has also changed demographically in recent decades. Blacks are now 50 percent of the population, down from 70 percent in the 1970s, as more Asians, Hispanics and whites have moved in.
Marshall Brown, a longtime political operative who is black, was quoted in The Washington Post recently as saying that white newcomers “want doggie parks and bike lanes,” and threaten the identity of Washington as a black city. (He was fired from a political campaign for his remarks.)
Mr. Gray, who is also black, prefers to emphasize the things that city residents have in common. In his inaugural address, for example, he acknowledged divisions, but said, “There is far more that brings us together than there is that drives us apart.”
The real question, Mr. Sherwood said, is whether Mr. Gray will evolve from the council president he once was into the leader of a vast bureaucracy that is at once city, county and state.
“People are waiting to see whether he can grab the reins of city government,” he said. “He has the capacity, but whether he will do it is an open question.”
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Sources: Fox News, NY Times, Zimbio, Youtube, Google Maps
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