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Articles
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| Signs of the times . . . |
VOICE writes, "Somebody got canned this week. A famous person was appointed to a new job. And, as we expected, District citizens showed up in droves at the new Bloomingdale's to send sales-tax revenue to Annapolis.
But let's not get ahead of our selves.
Mayor Adrian Fenty and school construction czar Allen Lew showed up at Hardy Middle School on Monday to announce the city was firing the contractor and reassigning city workers in charge of the over-budget and overdue renovation there.
The construction joint venture — Arrow/Schlosser — said it likely would seek millions in unpaid fees before abandoning the job. A spokesperson blamed horrendous school management and "change orders" for all the problems. "
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Fenty and Lew didn't really dispute that, but they clearly wanted a clean slate.
Fenty said it was a "watershed" moment to support "aggressive" efforts to do construction jobs better and faster and maybe for less money sometimes.
The real watershed will come when the D.C. Council gives both Lew and schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee more power to hire and fire their own staffs.
The mayor had said he'd introduce such legislation in mid-September when the council came back from summer recess. But fine-tuning the legislation has taken more time.
It was nice last week that a certain big newspaper in town also finally noticed that Chancellor Rhee is talking about coming up well before January with a list of schools to close. She's been publicly responding to questions for months.
The mayor confirmed again this week that he and Rhee will soon begin a community-relations effort to explain the expected closings. School shutdowns are always some of the most contentious issues. Watch for a list well before Thanksgiving.
• Alice Rivlin returns. It's not quite the same as the all-powerful D.C. control board that she once chaired, but Alice Rivlin is turning her attention again to city governance issues. She's always been involved in this or that city project, but now she's going to help the D.C. Council better understand the policy decisions that often lie behind the legislation it passes.
Council Chairman Vincent Gray appointed Rivlin as head of the new "Policy Advisory Council," which will advise the elected council members. She'll work with a new Office of Policy Analysis that Gray is establishing. He said its "mission is to provide comprehensive, nonpartisan and objective research and analysis."
Congress has the Congressional Research Service, and most state legislatures and big cities have nonpartisan research offices. Now, the D.C. Council will have one, too.
It'll be good if the new policy office gets balanced information to the council members. But it'll be bad if it becomes a dumping ground for council member requests that go nowhere.
In the worst case, a council member could get credit for asking the policy office to review something and then not be blamed when the review gets lost in the shuffle.
Rivlin wouldn't let that happen. Let's hope the distinguished Brookings Institution scholar and former federal official has the time to give to this important project. We're betting she will.
• Bloomie's booms. We crossed Western Avenue last Sunday to see for ourselves what Bloomingdale's has wrought. It's a cool store with a lot of high-end aspirations. But the garage and multiple parking levels riveted us.
There was a steady stream of vehicles with District license plates. We lost count at 100 and had hardly begun.
The Notebook is all for having such fine stores, but we say again and again that the tax money collected at Bloomingdale's won't benefit the District. The sales tax money will be shipped to Annapolis for Maryland to spend.
Had the popular department store been built on the District side of Friendship Heights, the millions in tax dollars would have gone to the city. Friendship Heights is a bustling commercial and residential center. While no one wants downtown-style development, too much of the bustle is occurring on the Maryland side of Western while the D.C. side endlessly argues about what may or may not be built.
• Security watch. From time to time, we like to let ordinary readers take a stab at gleaning information about the efforts to keep our nation secure, quoting verbatim from news releases from entities such as the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.
Here's part of a new one on something called the "Stand-off Radiation Detection System" or SORDS.
"SORDS was initiated to explore new technology that may autonomously determine the location of distant radiation sources while maintaining sufficient energy resolution and sensitivity to reliably discriminate between normally-occurring radioactive materials, background, and potential threats. The objective of the SORDS approach is to develop vehicle-sized radiation detectors with the capability of determining the direction, flux, energy, and isotope of detected radiation, as well as the location of the radiation source. Another objective of systems developed under SORDS is a very low false alarm rate to minimize interruptions of day-to-day security operations."
Tom Sherwood is a political reporter for NBC 4.
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Posted on Oct 11, 2007 20:25pm.
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