Other coverage of the DC election

Yesterday's New York Times, in "Councilman Is Positioned to Become Washington’ s Youngest Mayor" and Sunday's Philadelphia Inquirer, in "Young candidate has post position," subtitled "With an energetic campaign, big endorsements and a lead in the polls, Adrian Fenty, 35, is poised to run Washington." have also reported on the DC election and the victory/likely victory of Adrian Fenty and what it could mean.

Interestingly enough, the articles that talk about the crop of new and/or young reform-oriented mayors (such as Cory Booker in Newark and Antonio Villaraigosa in LA don't mention Kwame Kilpatrick of Detroit).

I was talking to a public adminstration professor neighbor this morning about the election, and we both agree that:

1. This election represents another point in the "transformation process" that continues to be underway;
2. That Mayor Williams has been coasting for a few years;
3. That what really matters is who run the agencies; that those appointments are crucial;
4. That not every agency head deserves the boot.

She made an excellent point that I hadn't thought of so succinctly. Because Mayor Williams was a bureaucrat, not ever an elected official before, his focus on "customer service"--what I frequently criticize as looking at us as customers not citizens, rather than "engaging citizens" and the somewhat weak sense of accountability, comes from his relative disconnection from citizens out of his agency head mindset. She said that

5. As a result, it's likely that under a Fenty Mayoralty, the focus on accountability will be much higher, and under-performing staffers are likely to get the boot relatively quickly (say within 18 months) rather than being allowed to hang on, and then put off to pasture in other high paying sinecures.

One other area we talked about in depth is the schools, and Fenty's desire to push forward change. This will be difficult, because of the way the Home Rule Charter is set up, the school system is pretty insulated from the regular DC Government.

We talked about the positive deviance model and other things that I write about seemingly all the time, as well as yesterday's announcement of the Master Facilities Plan, see "Upgraded Facilities, Academics Part of 15-Year Plan" in the Post, which is supposed to be about 1,000 pages! but apparently very good-even the normally hyper-critical (and I think too often mis-focused) parent advocates are saying good things about this plan.

Apparently there are CDs floating around with the MFP on it.

Index Keywords: urban-revitalization