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2 Years Late, Courts Chief Moves In
Previously the court's deputy executive officer, Wicks took the job after her predecessor was forced out amid investigations into poor management and wasteful spending in the courts.
Paid $165,200, Wicks is the only court employee, aside from the judges, who must reside in the District -- a requirement that she said she was aware of when she applied for the job in 2000. Wicks's salary and benefits are comparable to those of the judges. Many city leaders are required to live within the District. The law covering Wicks required her to move into the city within 180 days of her appointment. It has no specific penalty.
  Anne B. Wicks recently moved to the NW house she bought in 2004. (Bill O'leary - The Washington Post) |
But she didn't comply with it after she got the job in January 2001. For more than a year after her appointment, she continued to live in Virginia, only moving to the District in June 2002 after closing on a house in the Chevy Chase neighborhood of the city.
Wicks and her family wanted to live in Palisades and continued to look for a home in that neighborhood, she said. When one came up in 2003, they bid on it and put their Chevy Chase home on the market.
Their house sold in October 2003, but the house they wanted in Palisades went to someone else, Wicks said, and so they moved back to their house in Arlington, which they had never sold.
Washington, who became chief of the appeals court last year, said he did not know that Wicks was not residing in the District.
King was appointed chief judge of Superior Court in September 2000, a few months before Wicks was selected as executive officer. King said that until the letter from the inspector general and the subsequent meeting with Wicks, he did not know that she had taken more than a year to move into the District and that she had since moved back to Virginia.
Wicks said she told Washington and King in their recent meeting that a host of issues had complicated her plans to move into the District, among them the poor condition of the house she purchased and uncertainty over whether she would be able to see through the plan to build a new house.
"She offered explanations," Washington said. "We heard her and listened to her, and at the end of that conversation, we indicated that, while we understood that she had had some difficulties, she has to live in the District of Columbia and that she has to reestablish residency."
