Top Fundraisers Feel The Heat in Ward 4

Muriel Bowser, above, and Michael A. Brown, the race's financial front-runners, have come under fire from other candidates. Bowser has raised $371,000, and Brown has raised $183,284. (Photos By Ricky Carioti -- The Washington Post)

Toward the end of a Ward 4 political forum Wednesday night, a campaign volunteer, Vanessa Dixon, stepped up to the lectern and addressed the underlying anger often directed at the two best-financed candidates in next Tuesday's special election.

Dixon said candidate Muriel Bowser, an advisory neighborhood commissioner, accepted campaign funds from a development company and supported that company's multimillion-dollar project. Dixon also reminded the audience that Michael A. Brown had pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor election law violation a decade ago.

"If they can't be trusted in small matters," she said, "how can they be trusted with the larger responsibility of being a Ward 4 candidate?"

Dixon, who is backing Graylan Scott Hagler in the 19-person race, said it was time to raise in a public forum issues that have circulated in private and on the Internet.

Bowser, of Riggs Park on the ward's eastern side, received a $500 contribution in January from a Rockville firm, Ellis Denning Construction and Development, according to filings with the D.C. Office of Campaign Finance. She also received at least seven other contributions through limited liability corporations related to the company. Company officials could not be reached for comment yesterday.

In an interview yesterday, she said that at a February meeting of her Advisory Neighborhood Commission, she introduced a resolution recommending that the D.C. Board of Zoning Adjustment approve a variance in her neighborhood for the developer. The company is planning a $300 million project, known as the Dakotas, with high-end condominiums and a supermarket and other stores.

"I have not accepted any money to give anybody anything," Bowser said. "I'm on record as supporting this project long before I became a candidate."

Bowser, addressing about 150 people at St. Paul's Episcopal Church on Wednesday, defended her support for the project.

"This project is good for our community," Bowser said during the forum. "This developer is working with our community to bring positive change. Yes, I voted for that and would vote again."

Kathy S. Williams, general counsel to the campaign finance office, has said that publicly disclosed contributions are exempt from the District's conflict of interest law.

Brown's election law violation has been raised before. He pleaded guilty in 1997 to a misdemeanor count of making a contribution above the legal limit to the 1994 reelection campaign of Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.).

"I made a mistake," Brown said during the forum. "I took my medicine, but nothing was like the medicine I had to take from my father when he found out. . . . I took responsibility." He is the son of the late Ronald H. Brown, who was commerce secretary in the Clinton administration when he died in a plane crash.