By Sue Anne Pressley Montes
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, July 3, 2007
For 20 years, community activist Dorothy Brizill has been a stubborn presence at D.C. city hall -- sometimes scolding, always asking questions, often getting results.
Former mayor Marion Barry used to cut short his news conferences when she showed up demanding answers, hoping to silence her: "I don't let one person dominate," he said recently. Former mayor Sharon Pratt said she knew to "fasten your seat belt" if Brizill was around with an urgent issue.
But through all her protests over crack houses and campaign fraud, slot initiatives and official appointments, Brizill had never been arrested. Until recently.
The June 13 arrest for simple assault took place at Brizill's second home, the John A. Wilson Building, headquarters for the mayor and the D.C. Council. An aide to Deputy Mayor for Education Victor A. Reinoso says Brizill grabbed the ID badge she was wearing around her neck; Brizill says she only leaned forward to read the woman's name. Arrested 2 1/2 hours later and led away in handcuffs, Brizill spent five hours in jail. A hearing is scheduled for today in D.C. Superior Court; prosecutors have filed a motion indicating that the charge will be dropped.
But Brizill, 59, is still angry about the accusation. That kind of thing was never her style, she said.
"On the street, they can tell you: I've had cause to want to smack somebody around, and I've never lifted a hand," said Brizill, who led a successful effort in the late 1980s to rid her Columbia Heights neighborhood of drug dealers.
Brizill is the increasingly rare kind of citizen watchdog, willing to sit through long, dry government meetings, research the most obscure points of city law, and publicly -- even stridently -- confront dodging officials.
Her unfolding relationship with the new administration of Mayor Adrian M. Fenty (D) is in the spotlight now, and the months to come could show both the extent to which Fenty tries to control his image and whether Brizill can continue to operate as she has in the past.
Already, Fenty has served notice to Brizill in a way no previous administration had. In a Jan. 10 letter, Fenty's general counsel, Peter J. Nickles, asked Brizill to "observe the same rules of respect and candor that we observe here," saying she had treated some administration staff disrespectfully.
Brizill fired back, saying she had "difficulty understanding" what Nickles meant. "Are you complaining that I am asking questions that are too difficult or for which Mayor Fenty and his staff are not prepared?" she replied in a Jan. 15 letter. "Are you disturbed that I continue to try to get information that the Mayor's Office of Communications does not provide in a timely fashion, even after repeated requests?"
Typically, she listed in the letter to Nickles "six items of information" she was still trying to get, including the names and salaries of Fenty's transition team and "a detailed accounting" of the cost of his November birthday party.
"I'm a big girl," she said recently. "I don't mind taking the heat because this is what I have chosen."
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.
With the Fenty administration, Brizill faces a young, dynamic mayor equally determined to create change. She said she found Fenty as a council member "more about PR than substance," and she wonders if as mayor he can handle criticism. She said she has heard that she is on a sort of "enemies list" because she raises so many inconvenient questions.
Nickles, Fenty's general counsel, says there is no such thing.
"That's a lot of baloney," he said last week. "We don't use our valuable time dealing with enemies lists. I'm sure she'd like to believe she's on an enemies list -- it gives her more notoriety. We're going to treat her with respect despite some of these incidents."
Tara Bridgett, the executive assistant who was involved in the June 13 incident, said that Brizill insisted on getting information from her office even after being told repeatedly that, as a news reporter, she had to go to the communications office. Because of DC Watch, Brizill keeps a desk in city hall's newsroom.
"She asked my name, and I said I didn't have to tell her that," Bridgett said in an interview. "She went to grab my ID from my neck, and my shirt as well, and yanked me towards her."
Bridgett, 33, who has worked in the D.C. government for 16 years, said she went to a hospital later to relieve tension in her neck. "I wouldn't say her pulling me injured me. It was the stress," she said.
Brizill, who strongly denies that she touched Bridgett, said she has since taken to wearing a tape recorder around her neck to avoid any future problems sorting out what happened.
"Henceforth, in the Fenty administration, I will be wired," she said. "I am wired for my own protection. That's a horrible thing to say about your government."
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