Imagine you have cancer in your left pinkie. You are right-handed, it’s a slow-growing disease, you have more pressing physical problems. You ignore it.
The cancer advances to your other fingers. You pretend it doesn’t exist. After a year, the pain becomes unbearable, and you decide to treat the problem. You call in a team of accountants.
The accountants count your fingers; the cancer grows. And grows. Fixing it might require a year and millions of dollars.
Gruesome as it might sound, the fictional cancer debacle matches up well with the way Mayor Adrian Fenty has dealt with the Public Employee Relations Board. As it became sick and withered, he ignored it; when the pain it was causing forced him to act, he called in people with thin qualifications.
All of these shenanigans should be on full display today when Councilwoman Mary Cheh holds an oversight hearing on the Public Employee Relations Board, or PERB. Don’t be put off by the acronym, which does sound a bit like a disease you would rather not get.
PERB is a little-known but crucial part of the District government. It hears and rules on disputes between the government and its employees. It handles unfair labor practices, pay issues, interpretation of contracts and applications of labor law.
For the past year, it has been out of commission. Its five-member board is down to one. The backlog of cases is 60 and counting. Millions of dollars in back pay are at stake.
Fenty has nominated replacements, but the council hasn’t taken them up. With good reason: Fenty’s nominees don’t measure up to the letter of the law. The law clearly states members must have “an expert knowledge of the field of labor relations,” and even “experience in public sector labor relations.”
Fenty’s four nominees include an ad man, a government contractor from Atlanta, a telecommunications contractor and a lawyer — with zero labor law experience.
Cheh asked the nominees to detail their labor law qualifications. “It’s not what I would call robust,” she tells me. “That’s an understatement. It does make the situation more complicated.”
Cheh, who represents Ward 3 and chairs the government operations committee, has not played ball with Fenty’s nominees. Cheh recently forced Fenty to withdraw Lori Lee, his nominee to chair the Public Service Commission. In general, the mayor has tended to dismiss longtime board members and appoint his cronies, most recently on library and fine arts commissions.
“All boards are not the same,” Cheh says. “PERB is a quasijudicial body. It’s a minicourt.”
And right now, it’s a dead court.
The wrangling over Fenty’s nominees might not become cancerous, but it is symptomatic of how his government operates. The boards and commissions are part of the governing process, which takes time. Fenty bridles at time and process; they are his enemies.
But D.C. is a democracy, not an autocracy. Democracy is messy. People need to be heard — or the government ceases to function — as if it did have a cancer.
E-mail Harry Jaffe at [email protected].
