Control Board Accused Of Hurting Home Rule
By David A. Vise
Washington Post Staff Writers
Saturday, December 20, 1997; Page B01
Norton said the board had pursued a misguided approach for the last 2 1/2 years by producing reports about problems rather than solving them. She also said the presidentially appointed panel has resorted to "crisis management" instead of outlining a clear set of goals.
Control board Chairman Andrew F. Brimmer countered that the difficulties were a result of Mayor Marion Barry's refusal to cooperate with the board and that the city's problems developed over a period of years and would not be turned around quickly.
During a wide-ranging hearing on Capitol Hill, Norton and Rep. Thomas M. Davis III (R-Va.) also criticized Barry's security detail, suggesting that the mayor should use his budget to hire private security guards instead of relying on 15 city police officers. Control board Vice Chairman Stephen D. Harlan agreed, saying the District does not have enough officers on the streets fighting crime.
Barry (D) said he is opposed to hiring private security and needs police protection. "Security is too important to be politicized like Tom Davis and Eleanor Holmes Norton and Steve Harlan are doing," he said. "They don't have any idea what they are talking about."
Norton, offering her most comprehensive criticism of the control board's performance, said the panel had neglected to target areas where rapid, high-profile improvements could have restored confidence in the city and stemmed the flight of taxpayers to the suburbs. She also said the board, charged with overseeing the city's finances and operations, neglected to focus sufficiently on mismanagement until it was ordered to do so by Congress last summer.
"Calls for management restructuring fell on deaf ears," Norton said during the hearing before the House Government Oversight subcommittee on the District. "In a democracy, elected officials must bear the responsibility, but in the District, elected officials also had a control board, in part, because they had failed at management."
The control board, she said, "therefore shares the responsibility as well for recent home rule losses. Instead of giving technical assistance in management to the District, the [board] engaged in studies that made recommendations to a government no one in the District expected to reform itself."
Norton's evaluation of the control board's performance is important because the three-year terms of the panel's five members end in June. The Clinton administration will ask Norton and other community leaders for their views on the board's composition before deciding whether to reappoint members.
Although Norton gave Brimmer credit for improving the city's financial outlook and speaking bluntly about continuing deficiencies in city operations, she said the panel had done a poor job forging a working partnership with elected officials. Norton chastised Brimmer for not consulting sufficiently with Congress before wiping out the city's lottery board and for not completing a study on the struggling University of the District of Columbia, which he had pledged to deliver last February.
She also said the board's initial emphasis on tackling the city's finances -- without simultaneously improving contracting, personnel and other areas of management -- created the opening for Congress to strip the mayor of power last summer.
After the hearing, Brimmer disputed Norton's contention, saying Barry was to blame for the loss of self-government in the city. Brimmer said the board tried to work cooperatively with the mayor and provide him with a strategy that would revive the District. The problem, Brimmer said, was Barry's "lack of responsiveness to our recommendations."
Although Brimmer said board-driven management reform efforts are underway, he cautioned that substantial difficulties accumulated over many years will not be easy to solve.
"We must report to you that the government and operations of the nation's capital remain in serious trouble," Brimmer testified during the hearing. "We have had only limited success in meeting the congressional mandate to improve the District fundamentally. . . . The list of problems still outstanding remains longer than the list of problems which have been fixed."
Davis, who is chairman of the subcommittee, praised the board for balancing the city's budget one year ahead of schedule but agreed that the pace of management improvements is too slow. "We need to keep the heat on," he said. "They are our only hope."
The hearing also produced some fireworks over the performance of the city's scandal-plagued police department. Acting Police Chief Sonya T. Proctor said that crime in the city is down 19 percent and that the the city will have fewer than 300 homicides this year for the first time since 1987. Harlan, the control board member with responsibility for public safety, said the department deserved high marks for its success fighting crime and putting more officers on the streets but only a grade of "C to C minus" for its efforts to reduce the fear of crime.
He also said the reputation of the department had suffered enormous damage from allegations of overtime abuses, cronyism and other misconduct. The police department's efforts to establish trust and respect in the community, he said, merit a failing grade.
"Citywide, I'd give us an F," Harlan said.
Davis said he was outraged that four members of the mayor's police security detail had logged 68 hours of overtime last summer meeting Barry and his wife at Newark International Airport when they returned from a trip to South Africa. Davis said it overshadowed progress fighting crime, and he characterized the incident as "criminal" and indicative of "rampant corruption."
"It wipes out good things happening in the city," he said.
© Copyright 1997 The Washington Post Company
