Bureaucratic Inertia: Tale Of 2 Hinges
Long Wait for Repair of Park Gate Stokes Anger

By Paul Schwartzman
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, September 14, 2006

How long does it take the District government to repair two hinges on a busted gate?

In the case of an Adams Morgan playground, would you believe a week?

Six weeks?

Try 10.

And that wasn't the end of the ordeal: 48 hours after the repair, the gate broke again, and workers were dispatched for another repair.

Anyone questioning that chronology need only check with Mindy Moretti, the advisory neighborhood commissioner who harangued the Department of Parks and Recreation with e-mails about the broken gate from June 21 through Aug. 31, when the first repair was completed.

Her persistence embodies tenacity in the face of bureaucratic inertia.

"It is simply incomprehensible to me how your Department can fail to fix something as vital as this gate to the children's area," Moretti wrote in one e-mail. "I have no idea what it requires to be properly fixed, but it absolutely must be fixed and fixed NOW."

John Webster, a parks spokesman, agreed that the repair took too long.

"We need to be more conscientious and copious," he said in a telephone interview.

Webster said he could not fully explain why the repair took 10 weeks, except that the agency's attempt to hire a welder became bogged down in the bureaucracy. He said officials ultimately turned to a parks employee with "some welding experience."

The delay, Webster said, was unusual for an agency that oversees 308 parks and 67 recreation centers. "To my understanding, this is not the rule, this is the exception," he said.

But Moretti said she had struggled to get the agency to respond in the past. In one case, she said, the department permanently shut off a water fountain that wouldn't switch off. Two years later, despite her prodding, the fountain remains out of service.

Moretti said she bought mulch for the children's playground instead of waiting for the agency to provide it. She also shopped for a $10 bag of cement to reinstall a bench after a parks staffer told her that no money was available to make the purchase.

"At the end of the day, we do a lot of things ourselves," she said. "We clean the park ourselves, and when we have the money, we fix things ourselves. A lot of times it's easier to do things yourself."

In the case of the broken gate, Moretti sent her first e-mail to the parks department June 21 as a follow-up to a conversation about the problem that she had had the night before with Johnel Bracey, a deputy director for maintenance and operations. She sent a copy of the e-mail to Kimberly Flowers, the department's commissioner.

"Staff will be there tomorrow," Bracey wrote back. "Will keep you updated."

The gate was removed two days later. On July 2, in an e-mail to Bracey, Moretti asked for an update. She got no reply. A couple of weeks later, after residents insisted that they needed the gate to prevent their children from drifting out of the playground, parks workers put it back, still not repaired. The gate was wired shut.

On July 17, Moretti wrote again asking for a status report. When no reply came, she repeated her request in an e-mail the next day. Again, no response. Moretti left the country for a month. When she returned at the end of August, she found that the gate was still broken. She sent another inquiry, with copies going to Flowers, D.C. Council member Jim Graham (D-Ward 1) and The Washington Post.

"I cannot stress how unacceptable this is," she railed.

A few hours later, Flowers wrote to Bracey: "Please advise if the broken gate can be fixed TODAY."

That night, Bracey wrote back that the gate was being repaired and should be reinstalled in a couple of days. The following day, Bracey wrote that the gate was fixed.

"Great to hear," Moretti replied.

But two days later, on Sept. 2, Moretti was back at her computer, firing off another e-mail informing the parks department that the gate was broken again "because the repair job was hastily and poorly done."

Webster said the gate broke because "there were individuals swinging off the fence." On Sept. 6, he notified Moretti that the fence was repaired. Moretti was pleased but not exactly in the mood to celebrate. "Will it stay fixed?" she said. "I'm taking a wait and see attitude."