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Appointments Spark Hearings
Mayor Adrian M. Fenty has made changes at UDC and a city trust.
(Bill O'leary - The Washington Post)
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After Greg Roberts, who had been executive director of the trust since 2001, announced his resignation, some board members expected to conduct a search for a replacement.
But Fenty had selected Millicent Williams, head of a D.C. government volunteer program, to succeed Roberts.
At a board meeting last month, Hill and Bernstein said they wanted a national search. The next day, the two were told that their services were no longer needed, and Fenty named replacements. The day after that, the reconfigured board approved Williams.
Clark E. Ray, director of the D.C. Department of Parks and Recreation, and Lisa Simpson, who works for AARP, replaced Hill and Bernstein. In the spring, Fenty had named Reinoso and James Carter, a mayoral budget analyst, to the board.
Board member Peter Gallagher, founding chief executive of a nonprofit started by Gen. Colin L. Powell, resigned after the changes, saying he had joined the board to work with Hill and Bernstein. He had recently joined the board as a council appointee.
"It was just an entirely different situation from what I had signed up for," Gallagher said in an interview. "I was particularly attracted to the opportunity to work with them."
Sources on the board and within the administration said the tumult partially grew out of Fenty's concern that the board was not spending wisely and had failed to attract many private dollars.
Hill, who said his and Bernstein's official terms expired several years ago, said, "I think the mayor has the right to have who he wants to serve on the board." Bernstein did not return calls seeking comment.
Williams works for the mayor as head of Serve DC, an AmeriCorps-style volunteer effort. She said that she did not seek the trust job and that Reinoso told her of the opening. "I don't know if there was a search or names submitted to the board," she said.
Reinoso said he thought a national search was unnecessary.
"It was in the strategic interest of the organization to have a candidate the mayor could get behind," he said, adding that the administration hoped to increase transparency in the trust's operations as well as boost private contributions.
