Fenty Team's Stern Stance A New World For Activist

Why Brizill has taken city government on as a full-time, unpaid job -- and why she keeps going at such a pace -- are central to her character. A native of Queens, N.Y., she was the daughter of a transit worker and a homemaker who were active in their civic association for many years.

"My father was a very stubborn man, and I think most of my relatives would say I'm my father's daughter," she said. "But what I've tried to couple it with is something he didn't have, which was an education."

Brizill's husband, Gary Imhoff, believes another influence was at work. "One thing about being children of the '60s that we have maintained is, 'Don't worry about the money, don't worry about the career -- worry about doing what has to be done,' " he said.

Imhoff, 61, said he has "a modest inheritance" that enables the couple to pursue their interests. In 1995, they started an online magazine, DCWatch, that includes opinion columns and unedited city documents; lately, they've been keeping close tabs on Fenty's ambitious schools takeover, which both oppose.

It was in 1975, after graduating from Queens College in New York and receiving a couple of master's degrees from Columbia University, that Brizill moved to the District. She worked at the Brookings Institution and as a special assistant to then-Deputy Secretary of State Warren Christopher, and she gave no thought to local affairs. "I didn't even know where city hall was," she said.

That changed the day she returned to the Columbia Heights home the couple had bought in 1982 and noticed all the drug activity on the street. Drug dealers had virtually taken over two apartment buildings, she learned.

As she would do in every battle to come, Brizill worked the system, researching records to find out who owned the buildings and discovering that both had numerous city housing-code violations. In an early public outing, he embarrassed a city official who said he could not locate one of the building's owners; Brizill offered then and there to share the owner's phone numbers for work and home.

As Brizill took on myriad community and citywide issues, she made headlines and sometimes adversaries.

In 2002, she led an effort that forced a highly embarrassed Mayor Anthony A. Williams to run for reelection as a write-in candidate in the Democratic primary after she found that 8,000 of the 10,000 signatures on his nominating petitions were fraudulent. In a successful 2004 battle against a proposal to legalize slot machines in the District, she and others prevailed until the Board of Elections and Ethics fined the initiative organizers $622,000 for election-law violations. In another anti-slots campaign last year, Brizill argued the case, which was won on appeal, when there was no money to hire a lawyer.

"I'll say this for her: She's an equal-opportunity attack dog," said Tony Bullock, Williams's spokesman from 2001 to 2004. "She goes after everybody with an equal level of enthusiasm."

In 2004, Williams said "sometimes I want to jump over the podium and strangle her." But he added that Brizill provides a service: "The city is better off overall because of that kind of citizen oversight."

Thelma Jones, president of the Fairlawn Citizens Association in Southeast, worked with Brizill on the 2006 slots fight and saw a different side: "She was very friendly, very nice, and if you had questions, she didn't hesitate to tell you she would go and do some research," Jones said.