Punting on the hard decisions

Today's Examiner has a commentary by Henry Jaffe on "A School plan that might work," which highlights a proposal by DC Chief financial officer Natwar Gandhi, to create a separate "DC School Construction Authority" to develop and execute a plan for rehabilitating DC's school buildings.

Government agencies have to satisfy so many different constituencies that often, decision-makers avoid hard decisions and making substantive choices and focusing, spreading around money all over a city, but diminishing the power of this money to achieve critical mass improvements.

So a way to get around this, but a method that tends to limit the amount of public input and oversight, is to create separate government authorities.

Baltimore's incredibly powerful Baltimore Development Corporation is one, DC's National Capital Revitalization Corporation or the new Anacostia Waterfront Corporation are other examples. (Recently, while on appeal currently, a Maryland judge ruled that the BDC is exempt from State of Maryland open meeting requirements, despite the fact that the organization has control over city-owned property and monies.)

So too are local community development corporations, although many such entities have never accomplished all that much, in DC or elsewhere. (See Randy Stoecker's paper, "The Community Development Corporation Model of Urban Redevelopment: A Political Economy Critique and An Alternative" for an explanation of why this often is the case.)

Robert Moses.

I don't know if it started with Robert Moses in New York, but he certainly was one of the leading utilizers of such corporate structures. (See Robert Caro's The Power Broker.)