In a Rush to Build, Fenty Neglects to Lay the Foundation of Public Support

They're coming out in force now, the professional anti people, shouting "land grab!" and "giveaway!" and "sweetheart deal!" They're staging protests, demanding rights and claiming a sudden, deep, abiding love for decrepit wrecks such as a sadly neglected neighborhood library that they don't even use.

In the matter of D.C. Mayor Adrian Fenty's move to give a fancy developer half a block of city-owned land in exchange for a new fire station and a new library, tenants' rights advocates, library lovers and anti-development types are pronouncing themselves shocked, shocked that the new mayor is, gulp, doing what he said he would do in his campaign.

Fenty and his staff made a deal this month to sell a bunch of city land. Assured by the mayor's minions that this was an "emergency," all but one of the D.C. Council's members approved a no-cash deal in which Anthony Lanier -- the Georgetown developer who built the city's two Ritz-Carltons, the Georgetown movie complex and a slew of other high-end projects -- would be handed a prime cut of downtown land along L Street NW between 23rd and 24th streets. In exchange, Lanier's EastBanc firm would build the District a library to replace the faded, inadequate West End branch, a fire station to take the place of an outdated one on M Street nearby and at least 60 units of affordable housing within a larger residential project, most of which Lanier would sell at market (meaning sky-high) prices.

Of course, lots of people don't like the idea of selling off city property. They think it's short-sighted, a violation of future generations' need for public spaces. But a debt-laden city such as Washington, with a proven record of mucking up its own building projects, has discovered that the intense desire of many people to move into the city dovetails with the District's huge stockpile of neglected public properties.

"The District is going to dispose of lots of properties during this mayor's four years," says Deputy Mayor for Economic Development Neil Albert, who argues that the move was not designed to pull one over on the neighbors but "to break the deadlock on a deal that's been languishing for years" -- since the Marion Barry era, actually.

As it turns out, the city has good reasons to do this deal now and to do it with Lanier, rather than taking the generally preferable course of asking other developers to compete for the land. Lanier has just recently been able to put together enough parcels to build one big project across an entire city block. So he's the only developer who could build the high-end housing to generate money to build the public facilities.

But in their haste to be men of action, Mayor BlackBerry and his band of municipal dynamos failed to make their case to the city at large. The protesters are wrong about the city and developer having shoved this through without talking to the neighbors -- EastBanc met with several local groups, some of them multiple times -- but that outreach was limited to the immediate neighborhood. City land belongs to all the people, and the argument must be made openly and widely.

The plain truth is that there was no emergency. Some city officials were hawking a story about how the council had to move now or else Lanier would not be able to acquire a missing link on the block, the Tiverton apartment building on 24th Street. This is simply not the case, as Albert now concedes.

This land deal sounds pretty decent for the taxpayer, though language in the bill guaranteeing a big slice of the project to four secretly selected minority contractors is another bit of favoritism that desperately needs a dose of sunshine. But Fenty and friends failed to do the political groundwork that could have won popular support.

Plenty of reasonable people in the West End/Foggy Bottom area see the need for new facilities. "How can you argue against a new library?" asks Susan Haight, president of the West End Library Friends. "In this city?"

"Maybe there's some merit to what EastBanc is proposing, but it's getting lost in the process," says Michael Malloy, president of the Tiverton/Square 37 Tenants' Association. "We were used to justify the emergency."

Process is a big deal in this town; that can't come as a news flash to Fenty. But it's also true that Washingtonians elected him hoping that the Mayor BlackBerry shtick would be more than a campaign gimmick.

If the way to get new libraries and fire stations is to coax developers into paying for them and the carrot dangled before those developers is another flurry of high-ticket condos, then get out there and sell the people on those policy shortcuts.

We just finished with a mayor who came up with creative, audacious ideas but then backed off when his failure to do the political sales job resulted in a loud backlash. (Remember Tony Williams's plan to move the University of the District of Columbia to the St. Elizabeths Hospital campus in Southeast?)

"We're trying to cut out some bureaucracy and get things moving at a much faster pace," Albert says.

That's fine, but first Fenty needs to do what got him here in the first place: campaign for his ideas.