Mayor Adrian Fenty on Tuesday said he bore full responsibility for the chaos and mismanagement in D.C.’s summer jobs program, while forcing out the agency chief in charge and ordering nearly 5,000 youth removed from the payroll.
The Summer Youth Employment Program has sparked rare havoc for the Fenty administration. Paying more than 21,000 youths to work, including many who never did any work, the program could cost the city $31 million more than it budgeted. The total will top $50 million, including $20 million from emergency reserves.
“I’m personally at fault for the management issues we are announcing today,” Fenty, still jet-lagged from his trip to Beijing, said during a news conference in Southeast.
Summer Spencer, director of the Department of Employment Services, will step down next month, Fenty announced. She will be replaced by Tene Dolphin, the mayor’s chief of staff.
“With management problems this severe,” Fenty said, “it is necessary to make several changes.”
An internal review of the meltdown shows that Spencer’s team downplayed an impending disaster, and Fenty’s staff failed to ask the tough questions. Not until July, well after the chaos started, did City Administrator Dan Tangherlini shift into crisis mode.
“We put a lot of faith in the agency and the agency heads,” Tangherlini said. “The agency head puts a lot of faith in the people running the program.”
Kevin Donahue, director of Fenty’s CapStat accountability arm, led the internal review, the findings of which will be forwarded to the D.C. inspector general. Among the results:
— Contracts with job sites were not finalized until the week before the program started, leaving thousands of youths unclear as to where they should report to work on Day One. Many were paid to do nothing.
— The new time and attendance software system was started two weeks before the June 16 start date, leaving no time for training and little time for testing. Thousands of youths who participated in 2007, but not in 2008, were still being paid.
— As time and attendance problems mounted, the Fenty administration opted to pay all participants for the maximum allowable hours, rather than short kids on their paychecks.
— More than 200 paid participants were found to be non-D.C. residents. Another 100 or so were either too young or too old to participate, including a “few” who were older than 50.
In the last week, Fenty aides say, roughly 5,000 of the 21,000 original participants have been purged from the system ahead of the fourth pay period, many of whom were ineligible from the start. More are likely to be removed.
Ward 8 D.C. Councilman Marion Barry, who started the summer jobs program decades ago, commended Fenty for “not pulling any punches.” Ward 2 Councilman Jack Evans, meanwhile, was dismayed by the amount of money the District appears to have lost, comparing it to the $50 million tax office theft.
“That’s what Harriette Walters stole over 15 years,” Evans told The Examiner. “We lost it in three months.”
Fenty pledged to continue the program in 2009 “as long as we can provide a productive, meaningful experience.”
