Two months into his official
term as mayor of Washington, D.C. — and five months after energetically
defeating Adrian Fenty for the job — Vincent Gray is offering
a glimpse into his style of governing. It isn’t
pretty.
Last week, it was revealed that
one of Gray’s campaign supporters, Cherita Whiting, gained a sweet
job as a special assistant in the city’s parks and recreation
department reporting only to the agency’s chief of staff. The fact
that Whiting got the job outside of the normal civil service hiring
process — and that 200 other administration posts are being filled
the same way — merely adds to a growing perception that Gray wants
to run city government like a jobs program.
Gray’s other appointments
haven’t exactly given residents confidence that he’ll stay on a
government reform-oriented course. In December, he appointed as
fire chief Kenneth Ellerbe, a former city fire commander who had to
formally quit his job two years ago after it was revealed that he
was also serving as head of the fire department in Sarasota,
Florida (and was still taking a tax deduction on his D.C. home even
though he was no longer a full-time resident). The move didn’t sit
well with the city’s firefighters union, which had backed Gray in
his run for office (and expected to have a vote over who would get
the job). He also created a new deputy mayor post, and revived
another spot — to oversee the city’s police and fire chiefs —
which Fenty left vacant; both spots will cost the city $370,000 a
year.
Meanwhile Gray hasn’t exactly gotten down to the
most-pressing business facing the District: Dealing with an
expected $575 million shortfall in the 2011-12 fiscal year budget
coming on line in October. While Gray has talked vaguely about
spending cuts, tax increases, and a commitment to not using
“shortsighted
budget gimmicks,” he hasn’t laid out more-concrete plans. He’s
also done a lot of hinting about future announcements of new
initiatives on addressing public health and requiring contractors
to hire more city residents to work on government projects. And
that’s all.
By contrast, Gray has been
active on one front:
Dismantling the aggressive, often controversial, reform of the
city’s traditional school district begun by Fenty and now-former
chancellor Michelle Rhee. Last week, a transition committee Gray
convened on education recommended
that the district’s
teacher evaluation system — which uses student test-score data
to measure teacher performance — be overhauled because it
supposedly lacked “public trust” and was seen as a “sorting and
termination tool.”
Worse still, Gray is repaying
the American Federation of Teachers and its D.C. local — which had
long sparred with Fenty and Rhee and supported his election with a
$1 million ad blitz — by placing its new local president, Nate
Saunders, on the committee charged with finding Rhee’s replacement.
Declares Frederick Hess, the school reform guru for the
American Enterprise Institute, on his blog: “[School] reformers can
pretty much pack it in.”
On one hand, it’s too early to
conclude that Gray’s tenure is more likely to resemble that of the
infamous Marion Barry or Gray’s onetime boss, Sharon Pratt Kelly —
whose brief tenure was marked by fiscal mismanagement and an
ignominious defeat at the hands of her notorious antecedent — than
Gray’s more-recent predecessors, Fenty and Anthony Williams. One
can at least say that Gray lacks the arrogant posture of Fenty,
whose
jerk behavior towards foes and friends alike doomed what had
been certain re-election. More importantly, Gray, a technocrat
whose most notable achievement up to now was presiding over D.C.’s
dysfunctional city council, had been a backer of many of the very
improvements initiated by Williams and Fenty that have made D.C.
more attractive to (if not actually more livable for) middle-class
families.
But given the District’s fiscal
plight, the skepticism of young black and white professionals who
are now a major force in local politics (and who generally backed
Fenty and his school reform efforts), and the desire of his
campaign supporters among the city’s ancien régime to
return city government to the old corrupt order, Gray has little
room to maneuver. Add to the mix the presence of congressional
Republicans now back in control of the federal lower house, and the
Obama Administration’s own desire to ensure that D.C. remains a
shining example of school reform (and government management)
success, and Gray’s margin of error slips to almost none. Gray will
have to embrace the very reforms he criticized on the election
trail — and take even more-radical measures — to keep the
District from slipping back to the bad old days.
A NATIVE OF THE DISTRICT and a
George Washington University graduate who was one of the first
blacks to join the Jewish fraternity Tau Epsilon Phi, Gray got his
start lobbying for the mentally retarded. He first became a player
in D.C. politics in 1991 when then-Mayor Kelly appointed him to
head the city’s oft-mismanaged Department of Human Services; he
left three years later as Kelly was heading to defeat against Barry
(whom residents returned to office despite his 1990 conviction for
cocaine possession).
By 2004, Gray won a seat on
D.C.’s city council by taking advantage of the anger directed at
incumbent Kevin Chavous for backing the now-shuttered D.C.
Opportunity voucher program and charter schools. He moved up to the
presidency of the city council, taking control of a body better
known as a political clown college than as a deliberative body. A
colleague of Fenty’s on the council, Gray initially backed many of
his efforts as mayor, including his takeover of D.C. Public
Schools, whose abysmal graduation rates and low levels of student
achievement made it the Superfund Site of American public
education.
But by 2009, Fenty and Gray were
barely speaking thanks to the mayor’s penchant for squabbling with
the council. The fact that Fenty rubbed everyone else (including
Barry and other corrupt old-school politicians) the wrong way,
snubbed Dorothy Height (a doyenne of the city’s black elite), and
wholeheartedly backed Rhee’s Churchillian school reform efforts
(which offended the AFT and old-school politicians long used to the
school district serving as a jobs program) also gave Gray an
opportunity to advance his career. Backed by the city’s most ardent
foes of reform, the city’s public employee unions and the AFT
local, Gray defeated Fenty in a
racially tinged mayoral campaign in which he declared that he
would roll back the most offensive of his opponent’s
initiatives.
But now, Gray is in a bind. The
very government and school reform initiatives that Gray criticized
during his campaign (despite initially supporting them) are the
ones that have helped D.C. become a better place to live — and why
the city’s population increased by 5.2 percent in the past decade
after a 50-year decline. While the city is becoming less of a
Chocolate City, it is also becoming more middle class and more
affluent. Given its fiscal problems, the affluence (along with
better schools) will be needed more than ever.
Gray has already declared that
he wants to avoid tax increases. But cutting spending may mean
layoffs of the very public employees who supported his election.
Nor is he getting much help from his former colleagues on the
council, who can’t seem to agree on whether the city in fiscal
trouble in the first place. Some of the
solutions may lie with the very school reform tools Rhee has
put in place. Thanks to a new contract with the AFT which all but
ends the use of reverse seniority in layoffs, and most notably
IMPACT, the teacher performance management system Gray wants to
disassemble, the city can save money by handing walking papers to
expensive laggard veteran teachers and poor-performing new
hires.
Gray refuses to offer anything
concrete on what he will do in the coming days. He scoffed
at Washington Examiner columnist Jonetta Rose-Barras
demand that he offer a plan for his first 100 days in office,
saying: “Why don’t we have a 200-day plan?” He may need something
more than that. Besides the short-term fiscal problems, there is
the city’s defined-benefit pension funds, whose costs are spiraling
out of control. The city is expected to shell out $130 million to
keep up pension payments this year, a nearly two-fold increase over
2010; given that the valuations
for the pensions were last updated in 2008 (just as the financial
markets collapsed), the $103 million surplus will likely turn into
a deficit.
Gray will face his biggest test
in the coming months as the District searches for Rhee’s fulltime
replacement to run the such district. Given how he essentially ran
Rhee out of the job, few reformers will want to take her place. The
candidate most likely to continue Rhee’s efforts would be her
protégé, Interim Chancellor Kaya Henderson, who has already been
backed for the job by U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan and
many school reformers. But given Gray’s need to keep the AFT in his
corner (and the wrongheaded decision to put new union president
Saunders on the search committee), keeping Henderson may not even
be a possibility.
Gray may turn out to be as good
as Williams, if not better. But chances are that even Gray’s
supporters may long for Fenty by the time Gray’s tenure is
over.
