Government
Mayor Gray must refute mediocrity, or fall victim to it
Members of Vincent Gray's administration have been both quoted and sourced on background as being unhappy with a city employee going above and beyond the call of duty on the job. The mayor must explicitly quash such thinking if he doesn't want to send a signal to all other city employees not to work very hard.
Lon Walls. Image from Twitter.
Lon Walls, the communications director for DC's the Fire & Emergency Medical Services (FEMS), gave Mark Segraves some revealing statements regarding the ongoing saga of Pete Piringer, who ran the DC Fire & EMS twitter feed (@dcfireems).
Walls told WTOP, "We had a discussion, I told Pete he was going out of his lanes in terms of other agencies." One of those "lanes" apparently included tweeting about fallen trees and crime scenes. It seems other agencies were miffed that @dcfireems was tweeting about things slightly outside their core competency, and that was "making [other agencies] look slow and unresponsive."
Washington Life Magazine listed Walls as one of the "Titans of PR" last year. He ran Walls Communications prior to becoming the head of communications at FEMS. (It appears that the regular website of his firm has been scaled back, with a more detailed site residing here.)
The site boasts of "transforming [communications] challenges into successful and measurable results." Is less communication with residents the kind of results the city is looking for? (Incidentally, Walls is on Twitter, but he doesn't appear to have mastered use of it as a communication forum.)
Put simply, Pete Piringer ran a fantastic service while working at FEMS. I'm one of the three people who worked on compiling the Struck in DC (@struckdc) twitter feed, and we relied on timely information from @dcfireems to keep people aware of how many pedestrians and cyclists had been victims of incidents involving vehicles in the city for over a year. Without the information that Piringer supplied, our service has withered on the vine.
In September, the feed went silent. Concerned reporters and blogs initially thought Piringer had just gone on vacation, but officials later revealed that they'd stopped the feed.
Walls told DCist, "I'd rather be slow and right than fast and wrong," and, "Social media is for parties. We ain't givin' parties." Instead of a sneering, derisive taunt, Walls should be able to see, as a communications professional, the value of actually "communicating" with citizens.
In response to objections, the Mayor promised on September 22 that @dcfireems would not be "filtered" or "silenced." This temporarily assuaged frazzled nerves, but the goodwill was short-lived. The @dcfireems feed has not mentioned a single struck pedestrian or cyclist since August 29. While it would be wonderful if no such crashes have occurred since then, we already know that's sadly not the case.
Since September 22, @dcfireems has tweeted more about the fire chief's weight and pictures of the mayor with McGruff the Crime Dog than the information it was known for prior to September 1. That's a shame. A valuable service is gone.
Meanwhile, Piringer has been moved to work for the Office of the Secretary of the District of Columbia, where he will work on publicizing things like ceremonial documents.
Because Pete Piringer was busting his butt, he got busted down a notch (contrary to what Lon Walls would like to have us believe). Instead of other agencies stepping up their game to try to match his, we instead get the lowest common denominator. It's depressing to think that might be official policy from the executive branch.
Members of the Gray administration have essentially declared that those who perform above and beyond the call of duty will be punished for their hard work. If Mayor Gray himself does not see this for the "buck stops here" situation that this is, we can only assume he condones such thinking. If I were an ambitious employee looking to make my name as a civil servant, I certainly would look somewhere besides the District of Columbia to ply my trade.
Cross-posted at The District Curmudgeon.
 | Geoff Hatchard is a geographer working for the U.S. Census Bureau. He lives in DC's Trinidad neighborhood. The opinions and views expressed in Geoff's writing on this blog are his, and do not necessarily represent the views of his employer.   |
Comments
- Successful speed cameras require fair speed limits
- VDOT ignores own data, pushes widening I-66
- DC's divide need not be black and white
- Preservationists ask to shrink 3rd Church replacement
- Live chat: Matt Yglesias, Wednesday at noon
- Half-hour Metro headways are not acceptable
- "Degree density" maps show region's east-west divide
by Jacques on Oct 14, 2011 10:04 am
by Redline SOS on Oct 14, 2011 10:12 am
by RL on Oct 14, 2011 10:16 am
by Alan on Oct 14, 2011 10:35 am
Now that the same people are back in office, I'm not sure why reporters and voters expected anything different.
by ahk on Oct 14, 2011 10:39 am
by Joe W on Oct 14, 2011 10:56 am
After reading this, the first question the same one left almost unanswered way up top. That is, was Pringle tweeting about things which were outside his purview. GH does say that it was "slightly" outside their core competency.
To me, it seems fair to debate that point alone. Even thought the information may have been "transparent," if the relevant agency responsible for disseminating the information was not dcfireems, then shouldn't we be instead trying to make sure that the responsible agency does this and not turn this into an unecessary indictment on Gray's management?
How does it possibly benefit this administration to "not" post crime info and other things like fallen trees? Is this really an issue of process rather than inefficiency?
by HogWash on Oct 14, 2011 11:27 am
by HogWash on Oct 14, 2011 11:28 am
To boil my point down to its essence, one of my core beliefs is that "information wants to be free." In other words, the more information that is out there, the better. Should information that isn't directly related to FEMS be tweeted by someone else? In a perfect world, sure. But since no one else was sharing some of the information that FEMS was, I'll take it any way I can get it.
The end result of what has happened in the last month and a half is that information that used to be shared with the public is not shared anymore. That's a net loss for all of us.
by Geoffrey Hatchard on Oct 14, 2011 11:33 am
by ahk on Oct 14, 2011 11:39 am
I hope Pete finds a good job in the private sector soon; he certainly would be well qualified for any number of PR positions.
by Phil on Oct 14, 2011 11:48 am
It was an eye opening experience, working on the "inside" after being on the "outside" and telling people for years how they should do their jobs.
While for the most part, all the things I said over the years about how people should do stuff were "right," the reality is that government employees are a lot more constrained in what they can do than I realized.
First, generally, agency PIO functions all go through the Executive Office (there, the County Exec., here the Mayor's Office). So I couldn't send out a press release. It had to go out through the Executive's comm. dept. I still wrote it and shepherded it through... But then, I did additional press contact afterwards, which is why it got picked up by some outlets, while most agency people don't do that.
Second, the agency directors toe the line that the Executive lays down. I "goaded" the planning director to ask for the transpo. planning functions to be returned to OP from DPW. He pushed it and got slapped back.
Third, planning documents are reviewed inter-agency wise before they go out to the public. So e.g., anything in the Master Plan that called for spending more money was excised by the
(Fourth) County Administrative Officer, who in my opinion ended up being the most powerful person in the local government, because the Exec. is term limited to 8 years, and the Administrative Officer has been there for decades.
Fifth, depending on your supervisor, there could be a great deal of review of your outside communications before they were released. Probably because I was a temp. employee, my letter-based communications were scrutinized to a high degree. You also had to report on a biweekly basis on your outside of the govt. contacts.
Sixth, some of my recommendations for the organization of the public process, including a weekend daytime meeting for people who couldn't come at night, and special meetings on trails and walk to school issues were rejected. They didn't want that level of engagement.
Seventh, related to 3 and 4, you also had to follow what the legislative branch people wanted too. They would "order" you to do stuff, based on a citizen query. Agencies would either do it or push back. Generally, a mutual working out was a better strategy. (E.g., the Council District 1 advocates had a good relationship with their council rep. who had a good relationship with the DPW director, so they got some bike infrastructure put in place, whereas such infrastructure was minimal elsewhere in the county.)
Finally, during the time I was there, the County Council and the Executive were what I'd term "bike indifferent." With the 2010 election it changed so that a majority became bike and ped "positive" and that led to passage of an ordinance in Feb. 2011, drawn for the most part from my plan, but at the instigation of advocates in Districts 1 and 5, not the govt. (I was gone by then, and technically my plan hasn't gone through the public hearing process yet, so it's still a draft).
This is why when citizens would start lecturing me about why sustainable transpo was a good thing, I would cut them off (gently I hope), telling them that I already knew about it, but that their elected officials probably didn't, and if they wanted things to change, those were the people who needed to hear the message.
by Richard Layman on Oct 14, 2011 11:50 am
Yea a crime scene....DCFD treats the patients of said crime scene.....Do you even know who takes care of a tree down? DCFD thats who! A ladder truck proceeds to all trees down and clears the road as not to impede traffic when (god forbid) there is an emergency.
by Bill on Oct 14, 2011 11:58 am
by Geoffrey Hatchard on Oct 14, 2011 12:00 pm
Of course he condones such thinking. That was the entire premise of his campaign.
In many ways, "One City" was about, "making sure not too much happens because it might make other people feel bad."
If I were an ambitious employee looking to make my name as a civil servant, I certainly would look somewhere besides the District of Columbia to ply my trade.
Probably a good thing and what they want. The civil service in DC exists for the purpose of creating stable a lower-middle/middle-middle class workforce for residents. It's not for ambitious people, in part because it disrupts the lifestyles of the current residents.
by JustMe on Oct 14, 2011 12:03 pm
Was he disseminating information or data. There's a big difference between the two. And I suspect a lot of folks don't understand the difference, and as such end up giving importantance to data that it doesn't deserve given it is lacking the context and analysis inherent to producing information. Tweeting ones naturally biased observations is hardly information.
by Lance on Oct 14, 2011 1:02 pm
I think your article lacks objectivity for the reason I stated above. "Liking" what a specific dcgov't employee does is one thing. Whether the employee is doing something someone else "should" be doing is another story altogether.
Based on what you've reported, this Pringer guy took it upon himself to do something that some bloggers/tweet followers really liked. He was stopped from doing this in part because it wasn't his job or within the domain of his office.
I think it's fair to be upset that that tweets are gone. I do not think it's fair to attach a label accepting a level of "mediocrity" to this city because of it.
Imagine if Marion Barry started to tweet "helpful stories" about similar happenings in Ward 6. Its not unreasonable to think that Wells or some other Ward 6 resident would ask "WTF" if for no other reason than it seeming as if Wells wasn't on the job. Sure it's helpful. But if Wells chose to stop Barry from doing this (assuming he could) that doesn't mean that Wells accepts mediocrity.
by HogWash on Oct 14, 2011 1:04 pm
While I agree that city employees/figures shouldn't be encouraged to share every little thing they hear, possibly distracting them from their job, I don't think they should be discouraged from sharing something they find important. Regardless of Hatchard's desire for all information to be free (which I agree with, to a point), I think at the very least it has the potential to generate support with the populace and support for the Ward—and that's something that no politician or public office could argue with.
I think the idea of mediocrity comes not from Gray's action, but from the inaction of the city as a whole, i.e. nobody in this city *wants* to share these things with the citizens, save Piringer—and his "downfall," so to speak, reflects poorly on all of us.
by RL on Oct 14, 2011 1:10 pm
#1, did you even follow the DCFEMS twitter feed before?
"giving importance to data that it doesn't deserve"? What does that even mean in this context?
The DCFEMS twitter feed didn't report biased observations, it basically recounted what was going on over all emergency channels in DC so the populace could be informed. It was extremely useful in finding out what was going on in the city on a minute-by-minute basis, what areas to avoid, etc.
The DC agencies that complained need to wake up and realize that DC government is a team, having one centralized resource is more useful to the public, and that just because DCFEMS tweets about something rather than MPD or DPW it doesn't mean that people think one agency or another is failing. What looks more like failure is when you start worthless turf wars that end up cutting off important information services.
by MLD on Oct 14, 2011 1:16 pm
Also, this Lon Walls guy sounds like a poster child for the old, outdated way of doing things in DC. Mayor Gray should kick him upstairs and bring back Piringer.
by MrTinDC on Oct 14, 2011 1:16 pm
by Paulus on Oct 14, 2011 1:23 pm
Cripes, have you not been paying attention? Gray was elected on a campaign platform of going back to the old, outdated way of doing things in DC. I don't mean this in a "Gray is just another Marion Barry" sort of way, but it is true that his campaign platform was about minimizing changes and disruptions to the way DC does things. In that sense, Wall, an old-school PR guy with deep roots in DC and the way it does things, is obviously going to be the favored character in the administration.
by JustMe on Oct 14, 2011 1:33 pm
Also, I understand what you mean but I'm still pretty sure information does not have a will and thus does not "want" to be free. I'm in favor of free information too, but it sounds kind of silly and cliched to keep saying information wants to be free.
by Joe on Oct 14, 2011 1:36 pm
While we should be discussing "who does it" the dialogue is stuck in debating whether this Piringer guy is a twitter hero for doing it at all. Doesn't seem to matter that DPW or some other agency may be responsible for doing this, it simply rests on the assumption that a heroic employee was forced to stop tweeting about stuff he had no responsibility for.
Can we just find out who can/should give the information that will satisfy the critics. We hear a lot about the great DDOT days of Gabe Klein. With all of the accolades he's received, if his or no other agency wasn't doing this prior to Piringer, doesn't that mean that Gray is reverting back to the old days, as in the previous administration. Marion Barry would be completely irrelevant to that fact. It just sounds better to invoke his name whenever we express disappointment with the way DC is currently run.
by HogWash on Oct 14, 2011 1:53 pm
by HogWash on Oct 14, 2011 1:54 pm
Using a medium to communicate is simply that - use of a tool. You are not a "keyboardist" for typing out your comments.
by Geoffrey Hatchard on Oct 14, 2011 1:58 pm
by Lance on Oct 14, 2011 2:25 pm
Off topic, but really it's the mainstream media supposed fact-checking good guys who give Phelps air time constantly by reporting on what WBC is doing; it's not people re-tweeting him on twitter.
On topic, seems to me that you're conflating the words "data" and "information" to make it sound like everything needs to go through a filter lest we be misinformed. But the kind of information DCFEMS was providing wasn't "data" that needed to be checked, it was simple informational statements like "MPD at scene of accident at 23rd & M NW."
by MLD on Oct 14, 2011 2:48 pm
And can't you see how alerting the general public that officers are at 23rd & M NW could ignite a religious war?
by Matt Johnson on Oct 14, 2011 2:52 pm
Right.
I think Lance may be unaware that the invention of the printing press was at the END of the Dark Ages and not the beginning.
But I get it, Dark Ages = safe times, Enlightenment = scary!
by MLD on Oct 14, 2011 3:13 pm
Well, sure. For the established authority, the Enlightenment was terrifying. Suddenly people can spread ideas without going through official channels, exactly the way news travels outside of established journalism via blogs and twitter.
Personally, I prefer a world where anyone can get the information to people who can use it without going through a middleman...
by AdaminAlexandria on Oct 14, 2011 3:19 pm
Oh, the horror of uncensored data!
by Jasper on Oct 14, 2011 3:43 pm
"Piringer is tops, absolutely tops, in his business. A former volunteer fire fighter himself, he’s worked for fire and police departments handing the press and public for over four decades. A trade publication recently hailed him as the “pinnacle of professionalism.” Personal experience can attest that Piringer answers his calls, returns his e-mails and is as well informed about goings-on as any flack around."
As someone who actually subscribed to the Twitter feed in question, it was undeniably useful. If I heard sirens, helicopters, etc in Columbia Heights, I checked Twitter to see what was going on. No spin, nothing in need of any filtering or interpretation.
by MrTinDC on Oct 14, 2011 3:48 pm
@MLD, it's not out of bounds to believe that information sent via tweet should go through some sort of filter, especially if the info is coming from our gov't.
I actually am shocked that there was no way to get this information before Piringer's tweets.
by HogWash on Oct 14, 2011 3:53 pm
I'd imagine that if the "old-school" minds had their way, we wouldn't be informed of much of anything, despite having multiple channels with which to do so. It's far easier to have incompetent medical providers and overly-aggressive police officers, for example, swept under the rug if fewer people are aware of the particular circumstances that landed them in hot water.
by RL on Oct 14, 2011 4:00 pm
Ah, there's the disconnect. PR professionals are not in the business of communicating information to citizens, that's a journalist's job. PR professionals are in the business of controlling and shaping information before it gets to citizens. Walls' reaction is right in line with his industry's SOPs.
by TM on Oct 14, 2011 4:02 pm
The filter IS the person who's doing the tweeting - they're a DC Government employee! I wouldn't expect them to be posting offensive things or useless joke information, but that's not the case here.
The problem is that some people feel like the DCFEMS twitter needed to be restricted and filtered, and I'm not sure why that would be the case given that the information that DCFEMS tweeted was completely innocuous.
Do you have any real argument as to why stuff like "MPD investigating crash at 23rd & M NW" shouldn't be posted online? Because it seems to me like you're just making your usual argument of "well if DC Gov't says they need to do it that's good enough for me!" It's not good enough for plenty of us.
You're shocked there was no way to get this information before? What medium would it have been distributed through?
by MLD on Oct 14, 2011 4:05 pm
by Geoffrey Hatchard on Oct 14, 2011 4:05 pm
Really? It's odd that you would think that considering that at no point in my responses have I advocated anything remotely similar to "banning the public" from getting the information. What I have asked is whether its "fair" to attack Gray and simply assume that he's willing to accept any level of mediocrity. Is that unfair to wonder about?
Yes, I remain shocked that there was no way to get the information before Piringer and at least thought this would have been handled efficiently under Fenty. I would have imagined that there was some sort of portal that allowed district residents to be informed about things happening in our city. But reading this discussion, it doesn't seem like that's the case. So yeah, I am shocked.
To be clear (again), I don't think there's anything wrong w/disseminating this sort of information -tweeted or otherwise. I'm questioning why attack an administration as accepting mediocrity when nothing seems to substantiate that claim. Remember the 15th cycle tracks? Then, Gray (like now) was attacked for undoing all the work of his predecessor, ensuring DC's last place standing in biking infrastructure, and taking us back to the proverbial "Barry days." Then we found out that the plans were never killed.
In that instance, a little objectivity would have allowed the critics to see the forest but for the trees.
by HogWash on Oct 14, 2011 4:27 pm
by Geoffrey Hatchard on Oct 14, 2011 4:32 pm
Piringer. Is. That. Filter.
Seriously, HogWash, what is up with you, today?
by JustMe on Oct 14, 2011 5:21 pm
It just really pisses me off that DC has to through this $#it over and over.
2nd
Its funny how DCFD incidents are making it on Twitter faster by other tweeters than by @dcfireems
follow;
@IAFF36 and @DCFIREBYE if you want the real story
Thanks
by Bill on Oct 14, 2011 5:40 pm
The traditional method was by listening to the police scanner, but those are encrypted, now, and you can't listen in, anymore.
by JustMe on Oct 14, 2011 6:22 pm
Just today? It's as if someone from the '50's was tasked with promoting mediocrity through obfuscation in blog posts.
by D on Oct 15, 2011 2:29 am
by Rob on Oct 15, 2011 12:37 pm
by SRfireofficial on Oct 17, 2011 7:32 am
We call them "myopic little twits." Well, not so much we, as one of Gray's most ardent supporters.
by dcd on Oct 17, 2011 7:50 am
Hog, you continue to make me laugh. Old Milloy ought to set a spell with you to learn how quickly and easily you stir the pot. You shold tweet that directly to Courtland. He'd love it.
by Greent on Oct 17, 2011 5:16 pm
by Rich on Oct 17, 2011 9:13 pm
The Gray platform was essentially, "In Development, In Schools, In Transportation, In Services: One City in Mediocrity".
He built his campaign on a promise to punish "developers", to roll back school reforms, scale back the advances the Klein DDOT had made, and he used the economic rebirth, and growth of the middle class in DC to stoke resentment among "those that have been left behind."
Oh, and since someone mentioned Courtland Milloy: he is an oddly fitting poster-boy for "Gray-ism". He hasn't lived in the city for many years, lives in PG County, pays no DC taxes whatsoever, but makes a very good living feeding off its dysfunction...all while stoking class resentment.
by oboe on Oct 18, 2011 3:07 pm
Also, Mayor McCheese must embrace a low-fat, high-fiber diet.
by oboe on Oct 18, 2011 3:49 pm
Add a Comment