More about the West End Library "land grab"

this has been discussed over the past few days on the historicwashington yahoogroup. Today, Marc Fisher of the Post wrote a piece about it, but I think it reflects what I think of as Marc's focus on people rather than systems and structures. If your (in this case the government's) processes of openness, fairness, and transparency are broken, that is the problem, and it might not matter if the last name of your Mayor is Barry or Fenty. See "In a Rush to Build, Fenty Neglects to Lay the Foundation of Public Support."

It's not merely a matter of Mayor Fenty not being out in the public and explaining why his administration is doing things the way they are. It's about:

1. A commitment to the public and public assets vs. merely looking at land owned by the government as something that can be sold for a one time gain.

2. A commitment to openness, transparency, and equity.

3. Recognizing that regardless of what you think, you are not likely to have all the answers (cf. Smartest Guys in the Room: The Amazing Rise and Scandalous Fall of Enron and The Best and The Brightest by David Halberstam and The Whiz Kids: The Founding Fathers of American Business - and the Legacy they Left Us, about Robert McNamara, Tex Thornton, and their legacy in American Business (the latter book) and with the Vietnam War).

Ann Hargrove, a long time community activist, wrote this on the elist, and I think it more carefully captures the issues that are involved here.

---------------Reprinted with permission---------------

Re: Truth about West End Land Grab

Tania Jackson is absolutely right when she says we could have public library facilities like those in London, and, for that matter, that exist in some US cities, where there are now theatres and performance space, small restaurants, special foreign language centers, a locus for neighborhood history, and sophisticated study halls, to go along with the more traditional uses of library space. Additionally, all of DC's public facilities that are renovated, expanded, or newly built, should also be "green" buildings and respect, where possible, the need for permeable green space on their sites. Providing for this kind of mix would be wonderful, but alas we don't have an adequate framework for assuring that this will happen in the normal course of dealing with city properties.

But all of this, to some of us, is largely an issue of availability of land now and in the future for needed public facilities, and the wisdom (or lack thereof) of the city's stewardship of its land and management of its financial undertakings. There is no free ride: if the quantum of land that is available for needed public facilities is chipped away project by project through lease or write-down sale, the city's future ability to use precious land for new public facilities, or for expansion or consolidation of existing ones, is progressivley diminished, and replenishing it at future land prices will be very expensive indeed. So even those deals in which the city gets fair market value for the land it disposes of have substantial built-in future costs.

We have at least four problems:

(1) The city lacks a complete and accurate inventory of all public facilities and lands, sorted according to characteristics relevant to present and future estimated citywide and neighborhood needs;

(2) The city has no operable capital improvements plan that includes facilities-need decisions and priorities, so we really don't know and have no way of knowing what or how much real estate should be landbanked or how much is "no longer needed";

(3) The city, for a variety of reasons. is approaching a point where it must be very conservative in the use of its long-term borrowing capacity; and

(4) The city has no standing, comprehensive and regularized process, no applicable criteria, and inadequate public participation provisions for making decisions about its lands. So decisions are made ad hoc and piecemeal.

Anyone who bothers to look at the economy of the Washington area will understand that the careful husbanding of real property assets is one of the first prerequisites to assuring a healthy future for our landlocked city, and understands that there is no substitute for adequate decision-making processes.

Under these circumstances, our public officials appear to have have become somewhat uncritically -- and wrongly-- enamored of the notion that our capital assets in the form of real estate can be used to induce private developers to do things "at no cost to the taxpayer" that otherwise would be financed by tax revenues or issuance of bonds. Already we have examples of such projects that do not adequately provide for what was received in return for the land. For example, after a lot of work by a community desperate for needed replacement of an overcrowded and highly successful elementary school, a new school was built, but it is too small and lost its playground to a very large apartment building. Naturally the community is thankful for the new school, but the result is insufficient.

While there undoubtedly are instances in which a public/private partnership is a good approach, any such proposal should be approached with great caution and healthy skepticism. The reason is that the very concept of public/private partnerships virtually guarantees that project decisions will be made not solely on the basis of what the public interest in the facility calls for, but rather on the basis of some compromise between the public's interest and the developer's (which is then, inevitably, trumpeted as a "win-win").

This is perfectly exemplified by the case of the school just mentioned, and also by the developer proposals for the West End site described in Alexander Padro's recent email. These show what this approach tends to mean in practice, especially if, additionally, the city encourages such notions as the idea that one size fits all when it comes to ground floor retail or large windowed retail and the like.

In any event, the incongruous proposal to do away with a recently refurbished freestanding library and replace it with one that may not be a good deal for the two primary user communities (the West End and Dupont Circle), is certainly not a shining example of how we can bring great improvement to a public facility already in usable shape.

Instead, the city should focus its energies and priorities on the pitiful state of unusable libraries waiting to be fixed or replaced. Using emergency legislation to rush through any disposition of public properties in this manner should be a no-no--period. There may be a time, perhaps even in the far future, that a re-look at the two public facility parcels involved could be undertaken, but certainly there is no justification for hasty action now.
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Speaking of the use of public monies, in the 1850s a wealthy businessman died and left a bequest to both Baltimore and New Orleans for the building of public schools. Baltimore immediately spent the money and built one school. New Orleans put the money into a bank account and spent the interest. Today, New Orleans has 20 schools remaining of the 30+ that had been built using the money earned from interest from the bequest of John McDonogh.

A quick buck isn't worth all that much in the end.