“I had a first year like none other,” D.C. Council Chairman Kwame R. Brown recently told me. That was, of course, an understatement. The turbulence inside city hall has been at Category 5 hurricane velocity: Key council staffers decamped; the government faced a multimillion-dollar budget shortfall and near-depleted reserves; there was record unemployment and multiple investigations of multiple legislators.
Brown promised in his inaugural speech to raise the standard of government. Then, he became embroiled in an ethics controversy surrounding his demand for a tricked-out luxury sports utility vehicle, modeled after the mayor’s.
“The name Kwame Brown will always be synonymous with ‘fully loaded,’ ” said Paul Craney, executive director of the D.C. Republican Committee, referring to the moniker the media and others stapled to the chairman.
“How could one SUV story last 11 months?” Brown asked.
Voters who had bought Brown’s finely packaged political persona of a man driven by serving the people — not the trappings of power — were stung by the revelation. It offered a disturbing and contradictory portrait.
A palpable blend of arrogance and vindictiveness exacerbated Brown’s problems, said some residents, citing his decision to strip Tommy Wells of the chairmanship of the transportation committee. The move was seen as payback because the Ward 6 legislator had investigated the SUV controversy, exposing the fact that the government had leased two vehicles for Brown at taxpayers’ expense.
“The media have spent more time on my SUV than on issues related to the government,” said Brown, asserting everyone, including Wells, has been better served by the committee reorganization.
The situation worsened when the Board of Elections and Ethics referred an audit of Brown’s 2008 campaign to the U.S. attorney for criminal investigation. The whole ethics thing, as Linda Leaks called it, overtook everything.
“I’m not saying that was bad. But our concerns and our issues were put on the back burner,” added Leaks, a senior staffer with the nonprofit Empower D.C.
“Our mayor and our chairman are better known for what they haven’t done than what they have done,” said Craney.
“Unfortunately, there is no great civic purpose for the D.C. government at this moment,” said civic activist Terry Lynch.
“It’s not like the council hasn’t been moving forward,” defended Brown.
The legislature has been working: It moved decisively to begin restoring the city’s reserve fund; established a commission to reform the city’s tax codes; created a health insurance exchange; approved a policy to combat residency fraud; digitized more than 600,000 documents; began efforts to improve middle schools; passed personnel reform legislation; and approved a comprehensive jobs bill.
But those actions haven’t captured the public’s imagination the way former Mayor Adrian M. Fenty did with his education reform movement or as then-Council Chairman Vincent C. Gray did with universal prekindergarten.
“There’s no great civic enterprise,” said Lynch.
Except ethics reform. Brown should get some credit for that. It was major plank in his legislative agenda. But its passage only reminds residents of the dark side of 2011: politicians behaving badly.
Jonetta Rose Barras’ column appears on Monday and Wednesday. She can be reached at [email protected].
