D.C. Council Chairman Vincent Gray successfully spiked Mayor Adrian Fenty’s nominee to serve on the Metropolitan Washington Airports Authority board, preserving the critical seat for a friend and former council member.
Earle C. Horton III, a D.C. lawyer and chair of Fenty’s affordable-housing transition team, was nominated for the airports authority board in late January. In a letter delivered then to Gray, Fenty asked for “the council’s earliest consideration of this nomination for confirmation.”
But Horton’s nomination was never taken up by the council, which now is in summer recess. Instead, it was left to die in legislative limbo.
“I’m still hopeful,” Horton said Tuesday. “I’m willing to serve the citizens on the District of Columbia, happy to serve.”
The problem for Horton, however, is that Fenty sought to install him as a replacement for H.R. Crawford, a former Ward 7
council member. Gray, also a former Ward 7 council member, and Crawford “have been friends for quite a while,” Crawford said Tuesday.
“Ultimately it’s up to the council who they’re going to have hearings on and who they’re going to vote on,” Fenty said. “We certainly respect that authority as a separate but equal branch of government.”
Crawford is the incoming chairman of the airports authority, the board charged with oversight of, and contractual authority for, both major Northern Virginia airports, in addition to extending Metrorail to Dulles.
With a D.C. resident in a position of power, Crawford said, he can “make certain that the District of Columbia participates in jobs. After I serve as the chairman, and gets some things done for D.C., I’ll probably submit my resignation and move on,” he said.
A source in Gray’s office said the issue came down to preserving Crawford’s chairmanship, but “you can’t set aside that they’ve known each other for a long time.”
