Jack Evans • May 23, 2011

-Last week, we lost two giants of Ward 2.

While most people have probably heard the news, I want to take a minute still to recognize and remember the lives of Charles Bermpohl and Miles Groves.

Charlie is best known around town for his seven-year stint at The Current, covering the ins and outs of Georgetown. He loved reporting. He loved his job. That’s more than many of us can say and for that we should count him lucky.

One look at Charlie and you knew right away that he was a reporter. Why? Because he looked like one. The Columbo trench coat, the fedora, the pad and pencil — the quintessential reporter.

Anyone who knew him knew that he was much more than your regular newspaper man. He was insightful, fair-minded, he asked good questions, and most importantly — he cared. He used these attributes, which I don’t see in most reporters these days, to get at the heart and truth of a story. With the Internet and the 24-hour news cycle, this doesn’t come as easily as it used to.

50 years of reporting in New York, Florida, and the District means that we aren’t the only ones missing Charlie today.

For those who would like to pay tribute to Charlie, an “Irish wake” will be held in his honor on April 24 from 2 to 4 p.m. at McLean Gardens Ballroom.

Miles Groves lived downtown since the mid-1990s and through the founding of the Downtown Neighborhood Association four years ago, is credited for bringing together downtown residents and business owners on key issues that affected the neighborhood.

Miles was instrumental in several projects and initiatives in and around Downtown. From negotiating ABRA agreements to fighting crime to addressing a broad range of quality of life issues, his accomplishments were many. Miles not only witnessed the transformation of Chinatown and the downtown, but was instrumental in making the neighborhood what it is today. For this, we are all grateful.

Community members, leaders, and activists will gather on March 24 at 6:30 p.m. at the Calvary Baptist Church to honor Miles and his great contributions to the District and downtown.
Our thoughts and prayers go out to the family, friends, and the countless number of District residents who were touched by the lives and work of Charlie and Miles.

They are truly missed.

The author is a city councilmember representing District Ward 2.

Jack Evans •

-The anticipation at the Verizon Center last Wednesday night could not have been greater. The Washington Capitals, our great hockey team with the best record in the National Hockey League, was playing in Game 7 of the first round of the playoffs against the Montreal Canadiens.

The Caps, after losing the first game at home, ran off three straight wins and led the series 3-1. They then lost one at home and one in Montreal. We all knew the Caps were the better team and looked forward to a great victory at home. It was not to be and we lost 2-1. Thus another disappointing end for a Washington team, a city that hasn’t had a championship in the big four since the Redskins won the Super Bowl in 1992.

Washington has now gone longer than any other city without a championship in a major sport. (As an aside, kudos to Mark Ein of the Kastles and D.C. United — both teams have brought championships home to the District.)

So where is the future of Washington sports headed? Actually, to a very promising place.

The Capitals will be back next year just as good and hopefully advance to the finals. The Redskins appear to have a good coach, a new quarterback, and a new outlook. We will all have our fingers crossed come September. The Wizards franchise may have a future. Ted Leonsis (of Caps fame) now owns them and we hope he can bring his winning ways to our lackluster basketball team. Good luck, Ted.

Finally, have you been to a Nats baseball game this year? Go. The team has a winning record and is off to its best start since their first season in 2005. It’s probably too early to tell but we may be in for an exciting summer.

So here’s to the future of Washington professional sports. The day will come when we again bring home a championship.

The author is a city councilmember representing District Ward 2.

Jack Evans •

-Next week on Wednesday, May 26, the D.C. council will vote on the fiscal year 2011 budget. The District’s next fiscal year runs from October 1, 2010 through September 30, 2011. The current budget was prepared by the mayor beginning in October 2009 and submitted to the council on April 1, 2010.

By law, the council has two months to hold hearings and pass a budget. It is then sent to the mayor for his veto or approval. If approved, it is then sent to Congress for their approval by October 1, 2010.

Because of the slowdown in the economy, the city’s revenues are no longer increasing and, as such, reductions need to be made in our spending. The mayor’s FY 2011 budget is balanced and relies on significant spending cuts and increases in a number of fees and penalties. It also relies on spending additional money from our fund balance, i.e. our savings account.

I have analyzed the mayor’s budget carefully and have the following observations.

The cuts he recommends are painful but necessary. The amount the city spends has increased significantly the past 10 years and now it is time to reduce spending. Tough choices need to be made.

The fee and penalty increases are problematic. Our residents and businesses are tired of being nickeled and dimed to death. People don’t want to pay this government any more money. Thus the proposal to increase parking meter fees and charge more for basic licenses, etc. should be reversed.

Finally, spending more from our savings account to fund agency operations is bad policy. In 2007 our fund balance was $1.6 billion. It is currently $920 million and would be $600 million in 2012. The city would have spent $1 billion of its savings, which will really hurt our position in the credit market.

If the council does not accept the mayor’s increases in fees and does not wish to spend from the savings account, it must identify additional funds to balance the budget. In addition, many members of the council want to add back the mayor’s cuts and unrealistically fund new programs. This also takes new money.

Several council members want to raise taxes to pay for this spending. Nothing could be worse for the city. Increasing taxes in a recession is bad policy because it allows the spending to keep increasing, forcing us to increase taxes again the next year. The proposals put forward include, among other things, a raised income tax, new taxes on tax-free bonds, and extending the sales tax to services. Given that the District is ranked 51st in tax burdens, it is very counter-productive.

I will continue to work hard to balance our budget without further burdening our residents and small businesses.

The author is a city councilmember representing District Ward 2.

Jack Evans • May 18, 2011

On April 30, I celebrated my 20th anniversary of being elected to City Council representing Ward 2, and on Friday, May 13, I will celebrate my 20th anniversary of being sworn in, which makes me the longest serving current councilmember. When I finish this term I will be the longest serving councilmember in history; it’s a good time for reflection.

The first Ward 2 Councilmember was John Wilson, who took office in January 1975 and served until December 31, 1990. He was sworn in January 2, 1991 as Chairman of the Council, creating a vacancy, which had 15 candidates in the special election. I won the election with 2,926 votes, 360 more than Jim Zais. Bill Cochran and Clarene Martin each received 1,050 votes.

Sharon Pratt had just been elected Mayor and had taken office in January 1991. The finances of the city were not bleak and two weeks before my swearing in, there were three days of riots in Mt. Pleasant after a rookie police officer shot an Salvadoran man.

Things in the District went from bad to worse. Mayor Pratt, Chairman Wilson and the Council did not have a good working relationship, which meant legislation was hard-pressed to get passed. Then in 1993, Chairman Wilson hung himself in the basement on his Washington home, rocking both the political arena and citizens who had found hope in his leadership. By 1994, the District’s finances had further deteriorated and Mayor Pratt approval ratings declined drastically. The Mayor’s election in 1994 saw the return of Marion Barry as mayor. By the end of 1995, Congress imposed a Control Board, which gave Congress the power to override all financial decisions made by the mayor and city council.

They were turbulent days. The turning point came in 1996, when we saw a resurgence of life come to D.C. With Mayor Williams’ election in 1998, he joined Chairman Linda Cropp, with myself as finance and revenue chairman and chief financial officer Natwar Gandhi to lead the city in a comeback in both business and population. As I look back, I remember great challenges and great progress. Our city stands today as one of the most dynamic in the country, with strong finances and a AAA bond rating, a measure of how financially stable an institution is.

I was 37 years old, single and living in a condo in Dupont Circle when I was first elected. My mother died on Mother’s Day in 1993 and my Dad in 1996. I married Noel, my first wife, in 1994 and moved to 32nd Street in Georgetown. We got a dog in 1995 and then had triplets in 1996. We moved to P Street in Georgetown and I was reelected in five subsequent elections.

In 2003, Noel died of cancer. Kayla died in 2007, a year after getting another dog. I married Michele, the woman I am still married to, in September 2010 and am running for re-election in 2012. I just celebrated my 40th high school reunion.

Life as a city council member does not always lend itself to working eight hours a day or normalcy in the traditional sense, but I wouldn’t trade any of it. My identity as a politician and family man has defined my life. There is still much work to be done and I look forward to a great future.

Jack Evans • September 22, 2010

-In my last column, I addressed two challenges (education reform and fiscal responsibility) which will face the next Council and Mayor. This election season we will elect a Mayor, Council Chair, two at large Members of the Council, and four Ward Councilmembers (Wards 1, 3, 5 and 6). The city faces five key issues which the Mayor and the Council will have to confront after all the speeches are done and the buttons and signs are put away – and these are my thoughts on the final three:

3. Creating an investment environment. Too many of our neighborhood commercial strips have languished over the past 40 years. Elected officials in town talk a lot about helping small businesses, but I’d point this out — small businesses pay the same outlandishly high tax rates as big businesses! I believe this has greatly discouraged investment in our neighborhoods. Three years ago, the Chairman and I authored legislation which reduced the commercial property tax rate from $1.85 to $1.65 for the first $3 million of a building’s value, which was quite helpful in our neighborhood commercial areas. But even the $1.65 is far higher than the surrounding jurisdictions – we’ve priced ourselves right out of competition with our neighbors, all while we hemorrhage retail spending across our borders. The business income tax rate at 9.975% is among the highest in the country, and we tax unincorporated businesses which our neighbors do not. If we are really serious about changing the business climate in DC – often ranked among the nation’s worst — we need to look long and hard at these rates if we are ever to bring more jobs and opportunities to our neighborhoods, and retain the spending power of DC residents right here in the city where it belongs.

4. Public Safety. We have made great strides over the past decade in implementing community policing, utilizing new technologies, and pinpointing resources at data-identified problem areas. We have much to celebrate — the murder rate is the lowest in 40 years. But we have a ways to go on continuing to lower robberies and theft – and we face particular problems with juvenile crimes and dysfunctionality of the juvenile justice system. These are the next areas we will need to focus on.

5. Self-determination. This area is one in which there can be either incremental or large steps. I believe a two pronged strategy will be needed to obtain statehood for the District, and/or any of the steps along the way. We will need a Mayor and Council that has a good working relationship with the Congress. Statehood ultimately is but a majority vote in the Congress, but there are issues, particularly financial ones, to address along the road to statehood. Smaller steps could be such things as budget and legislative autonomy for the District. Budget autonomy in particular would allow us to conduct a more rational budget process every year rather than the “hurry up and wait” that we suffer now as we wait for the Congress to approve our spending of our own locally-raised funds.

I believe we can achieve these things, but like many things, we’ll all have to wait until the dust settles after the election to get back to work on many of the pressing issues facing our city.

Jack Evans • August 27, 2010

-It truly is the dog days of summer! Or, in the words of Nat King Cole, “roll out those lazy, hazy, crazy days of summer!” In this kind of heat and humidity the best thing you can do is do nothing, move as little as possible and have a cool, frosty drink nearby.

Oddly enough, those recommendations notwithstanding, we’ve been doing quite a bit in the council office lately. First of all, we’ve continued work on the Georgetown Waterfront Park, and I am happy to announce we have received a commitment from Pepco for a donation of $50,000, which fills an important gap in moving the remaining parts of the project along.

Logan Circle was busy this past weekend with the 11th annual “Dog Days” sidewalk sale events, with participation by both retailers and community groups. And just recently we helped the neighborhood secure funding from the District to help design a marketing plan for the 14th Street corridor.

In Shaw, we celebrated the grand opening of the brand new Watha T. Daniel Library, a great community resource for the neighborhood and city. As you may recall, the previous library was a big heap of unattractive concrete, often compared to a prison or a wartime bunker, which was neither inviting nor very functional. I am very proud of the hard work of my staff, the D.C. Public Library, and community stakeholders in making the new library som

In Shaw this past week, we celebrated the start of a $31 million rehabilitation of the Gibson Plaza Apartments, which will renovate the 271-unit affordable housing building with a variety of green building features, and will be funded by federal HUD funds. I am happy to report that not a single resident will be displaced by this renovation.

Whew — after all that, I think we better slow down a bit! Actually, I love getting things done and it is gratifying that we’ve been able to move forward on a number of projects in the past week or two.

Don’t forget the upcoming elections. One thing is for sure: it is going to be a very interesting month and a half.

Jack Evans • August 25, 2010

-Our long hot summer will soon enough turn the bend of Labor Day and the September 14 primary which will select the Democratic nominee for Mayor, Council Chair and a number of races down the ballot. As many of you know, I have endorsed Mayor Adrian Fenty for reelection, but regardless of the election’s outcome, the city faces 5 key issues which the Mayor and the Council will have to confront after all the speeches are done and the buttons and signs are put away. We’ll talk about two of them today:

1. Schools. This continues to be one of the central issues facing the city, and historically has broken down like this: “rich” kids go to private or parochial schools and “poor” kids are stuck in run down schools with no future. Over the past 30 years the city has hemorrhaged middle class people, but good schools are key to retaining middle class families in the city and improving outcomes for low income kids. Mayor Fenty has made some pretty big changes, starting with authoring the Schools Facilities Modernization Financing Act as a Councilmember, and of course, as Mayor, implementing the takeover of the school system and installing Chancellor Michele Rhee as its head. As a result of the first legislation and a lot of hard work by Allen Lew and his facilities team, our school construction and maintenance efforts are the best they have been in a generation, by far. At some point credit is due to the Mayor for this. The other changes have been somewhat more controversial, but I believe Fenty and Rhee are on the right track by trying to bring more accountability into the system. My observation over the years has been this: for years we had a performance evaluation system where almost by magic no one was ever fired for lack of performance, but our schools were at the same time among the worst performing in the nation. Fenty has quite correctly identified this as fundamentally problematic and has sought to change old ways of doing business.

2. Fiscal responsibility. As Chair of the Council’s Committee on Finance and Revenue, you’ve seen me write about this topic often, and it continues to be a concern of mine. Fortunately, the District has the relative stability of the federal employment base, but in the FY 2011 budget cycle this spring, I expressed a number of concerns which all go back to this one notion: we can’t live beyond our means. For the last several years we’ve spent down revenue from our fund balances, which were once over $1.5 billion but which now are down to about $500 million. I believe the decline in our revenue — chiefly in the realm of commercial property — is not likely to return in the near term. A certain amount of our economy through the 2000’s was built on the shaky foundation of irrational exuberance. Yet the size of our government has not been restrained in proportion to the shrinking revenue. Using our fund balance the past three year has allowed us to paper over the problem, but I believe the next mayor and council won’t have this luxury — and I’ll note I was the only Member of the Council to vote against the budget this past year.

Those are the two biggest issues we’ll face next year. Next column we’ll talk about three more.

The author is a city councilmember representing District Ward 2.