The scandals that have plagued the District’s top elected officials in recent weeks have undercut the city’s hard-won credibility with creditors and on Capitol Hill, where Republican lawmakers are itching to retake control of D.C., analysts and officials said. “The scandals involving the mayor, the council chairman and the president of the University of the District of Columbia have collectively damaged the District’s ability to move forward on all issues on Capitol Hill and have created a negative view of our decisions on Wall Street,” Ward 2 Councilman Jack Evans told The Washington Examiner on Sunday. Evans heads the committee on finance and revenue. “In the last two weeks, we have really hurt our ability to make progress.”
D.C. Council Chairman Kwame Brown is still dealing with the fallout from the two “fully loaded” Lincoln Navigators the city leased at his request and UDC President Allen Sessoms has been caught taking high-priced trips on the taxpayer-backed school’s tab.
But the biggest scandals have involved Mayor Vincent Gray.
The mayor may have taken his first missteps when he picked top members of former Mayor Marion Barry’s administrations for his transition team. Cellerino Bernardino was criticized for failing to remove trash from the city’s streets under Barry, yet Gray thought him a good pick to assess the city’s ability to do just that.
It was members of the transition team that Gray has said vetted Sulaimon Brown, a one-time mayoral candidate who landed a $110,000 job in the Gray administration after attacking Mayor Adrian Fenty on the campaign trail last summer. When the Washington City Paper revealed that Brown had a restraining order filed against him for stalking in 2007, the Gray administration fired him. Brown now says Gray fabricated the restraining order to sully his name, one of a string of accusations he’s leveled against the Gray administration, charges that now have Gray calling for an investigation into the campaign that got him elected.
“It just points out the fact the fact that people will say one thing, but they’ll bring that old school style of politics to win elections,” said Josh Lopez, a former Fenty campaign member who is now running for an at-large council seat. “They’ll mislead people instead of focusing on making the city a better place.”
Ron Moten, Peaceoholics’ founder and Fenty’s most outspoken backer, said the accusations against Gray don’t surprise him.
“It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to decide that no man is going to cater to another man like Sulaimon Brown without knowing something was going to come down the pipeline,” he said.
