Posts about DC Council

The question was about the zoning update, an issue we've discussed here perhaps more than any other. Both Frumin and Silverman expressed support for at least many elements of the proposals, but also insisted that they want to be sure to protect established residents' interests in some ways as well.

There's nothing wrong with striking a balance, but the question ultimately boils down to who will stand up strongly for a growing and inclusive city when the really tough votes arise on the Council.

It's clear Michael Brown won't. He wrote in his response, "I have frequently taken the side of the surrounding neighborhoods and stood with the residents to oppose certain aspects of the growth plans." And he said at a Ward 8 forum, "And my beliefs are trying to make sure, as a third generation Washingtonian, making sure this city stays the way I remember it."

We don't really know about Mara or Bonds. Neither has replied to requests to take a stand, and Mara gave a very vague answer on the issue when I asked him about the issue at a meeting.

What can we conclude?

On a Greater Greater Washington note and not a Let's Choose note, for urbanists trying to pick a candidate to vote for on April 23, it seems you have fairly clearly spoken that the choice lies between these two.

When I envisioned Let's Choose DC, my hope (but not necessarily that of Martin at DCist and Dan at PoPville) was that a completely neutral, non-endorsing process might help people coalesce around one candidate on their own. As it's turned out, that coalescing did happen, but thus far around two candidates rather than one.

Patrick Mara (who I endorsed 4 years ago) stopped participating several weeks back, and missed several previous questions as well. Plus, when he did participate, his ratings in the voting were never very strong (placing 8th on question 2 and 4th and 3rd on the others where he responded).

Paul Zukerberg and Perry Redd have reliably kept participating, and while they racked up lower totals, they took advantage of an opportunity to help more residents understand their views. Anita Bonds only sent in a response once time, and scored low. Michael Brown has participated a few times, but to almost universally low marks.

Is our community split down the middle between Frumin and Silverman, or do most of us simply like both of them? Who If you're undecided between Frumin and Silverman, what would help you make up your mind?

Update: The original version of this post mixed some of my own commentary with Let's Choose information in a way that could have been confusing or mislead people about the political intent of the site. I've rearranged it to split the two.

How the law became scarce

How did this happen? It's a tricky answer of access, ownership, and contracts.

The DC Council writes and publishes bills, which are additions and subtractions to the law itself. The law is compiled by a contractor—previously WestLaw, now LexisNexis. So the contractor holds a complete copy of the law.

The contractor publishes a few different versions of the "compiled law," each of which with restrictions:

• The online portal has a "browsewrap" restriction against copying in full.
  
• The CD they publish has a "clickwrap" restriction against copying at all.
  
• Even the printed version has a registered copyright by the Council itself.

Unfortunately, courts have upheld these types of restrictions in the CD and website Terms of Service. They get further support from the wire fraud statute, which prosecutors used in the Aaron Swartz case to escalate charges to felonies. And in all of these versions, the contractor tries to claim copyright through compilation copyright and additional content like citations and prefaces.

In the face of these strong guards against freeing the law, the most reasonable avenue for creating a freely-accessible copy is buying and scanning the printed copies, which is exactly what some citizens are starting to do.

Why this matters

This has effects in many places. Advocacy organizations pushing for changes can't reference laws by linking to them, so they have to copy & paste relevant sections and hope that people trust their versions. Of course, when laws go out of date, these copy and pasted guides stop working.

The goal of better educating the police about laws (like the rules of the road for bicyclists) is harder. Police can't have an offline copy of the law for quick access in the field, and the online version is near-useless on smartphones.

It's also locking the DC Council into using a contractor for this purpose. DC's contracts with WestLaw and LexisNexis aren't strong enough to force the contractors to provide them with a copyright-cleaned version, so the council itself doesn't have a compiled copy of the law that they can publish by themselves if they want to take this in-house.

What's Next

This is a hard problem to unwrap and fix, and there are multiple efforts afoot.

Waldo Jaquith is building The State Decoded, an open-source system for storing and displaying state codes. It's already deployed with Virginia's laws. Public Resource.org is working on the long task of scanning and digitizing the print edition. And a group of residents are encouraging the council to write a better contract than the current one with LexisNexis, which doesn't provide for copyright-free copies.

Meanwhile, it'll be months or years until it's possible to download DC's laws onto your iPhone and clarify whether it is, indeed, legal to bike on a sidewalk (sometimes) or drink in public space (never).

Elissa Silverman* and Matt Frumin continued their pattern of close finishes for the top two spots, with Silverman edging out a narrow win for the second question in a row in the percentage of voters giving her response a positive score. However, she also garnered slightly more votes for "very unpersuasive" than Frumin, meaning her response garnered more strong feelings pro and con.

Patrick Mara, Anita Bonds, and Michael Brown did not participate.

This week's question covers the controversial elements of the zoning update: fewer parking minimums, accessory dwellings, and corner stores. We asked the candidates if they support these proposals; Silverman expressed some trepidation about the parking minimums at a debate in late February, and we wanted to hear directly from the candidates on this issue.

We heard from all of the canidates except Bonds and Mara. You can vote until Monday night, March 18.

Note: We have regularly reached out to District policy advocates, former candidates, and other leaders (as well as our readers broadly) to encourage people to write guest posts. Elissa Silverman took us up on that invitation on 4 occasions in 2011 and 2012.

Chronic truancy, which DC defines a student missing more than 21 school days—a full month's classes—without documented excuse, is rampant.

Six high schools have chronic truancy rates over 30%, according to DCPS. The Urban Institute has different numbers, and suggests that seven high schools have rates over 40% with Anacostia high reaching 66%.

These rates strongly correlate with test scores, which suggests that overall educational reform cannot be successful without addressing this issue.

Graph from the DC council.

Naturally, the effects of truancy don't end there.

1. This may seem obvious, but children who have no history of truancy have a heightened probability of becoming chronic truants if their school has a high rate of truancy.
   
2. Truants are far more likely to drop out of school before graduation.
   
3. Before they do, they will test poorly; schools with high truancy rates manifest low test scores.
   
4. Criminals are far more likely to have been truants.
   
5. As a result of #3 and #4, truants are far more likely to have significant spells of unemployment after they reach adulthood.

Catania offers a possible solution; is it the right one?

Catania has proposed a bill to address this issue by strictly enforcing penalties for parents, should their children repeatedly be absent.

The current law has penalties, too. Should a child miss two or more days of class unexcused, his or her parents are subject under current law to a $100 fine and up to (!) 5 days in jail. This penalty is almost entirely unenforced.

Catana's bill would soften the criteria, levying penalties only after 10 days unexcused per year. However, should the child miss 20 or more days, the bill would make it mandatory to prosecute the parents. The penalties would initially only include community service and/or parenting classes, but could include jail time if the parents fail to complete their service. Parents would be able to avoid prosecution only by requesting parenting aid from Child Services.

Is punishing parents appropriate? Catania notes that there is little else to do. Directly punishing the student, through in-school or home suspension, only increases the likelihood of further truancy, and no other penalty for students has much salience.

Is there any other alternative?

The opponents of this bill—and there are many—argue that holding (often working) parents responsible for their children's attendance is unfair, and criminalizes parental difficulties rather than assisting with them. They further allege that this essentially targets the poor, as it there is a clear link between parental socioeconomic status and a child's propensity to be truant.

What they do not articulate, beyond general exhortations for better schools, is how to address the problem. At a recent hearing before the DC Council on the subject of truancy, many witnesses raised those objections to the proposal, but beyond repeated expressions of frustration from witnesses and councilmembers, none present articulated any coherent alternatives.

Perhaps Catania's bill is the best option available to address this problem. Or, perhaps it over-simplifies the issue. To think about the issue, first we must analyze a more fundamental question: Why do children become chronic truants? We'll look at that in the next part of this series.

We asked the candidates to give their positions on 6 ethics proposals:

• Ban or limit outside employment
  
• Eliminate or constrain constituent service funds
  
• Ban corporate contributions to campaigns
  
• Ban "bundling" from multiple entities controlled by same person
  
• Ban contributions by contractors and/or lobbyists who do business with DC
  
• Forbid free or discounted legal services, travel gifts, sports tickets for councilmembers

Silverman touted her work on Initiative 70 pushing to enshrine the third of these into law. She, Frumin, Patrick Mara, John Settles, and Michael Brown all also endorsed public financing of elections. Paul Zukerberg explicitly opposed it; while we don't know why voters chose as they did, perhaps most of you disagreed and that contributed to his 6th place finish.

Michael Brown, meanwhile, opposed banning outside employment and changes to constituent service funds. He also did not address the proposals involving monetary or in-kind campaign contributions. As a consequence, 47% of you said he did not answer the question while giving him the lowest finish of any candidate on any question thus far on Let's Choose DC.

This week, we're asking about school truancy. See the responses and vote now!

Let's Choose DC is a partnership between Greater Greater Washington, DCist, and PoPville which aims to educate voters about candidates' positions for the April 23 race for DC Council at-large. This week, we got responses from Matthew Frumin, Perry Redd, John Settles, Elissa Silverman, and Paul Zukerberg.

John Settles has been removed from the ballot after a successful challenge to his nominating petition signatures left him short of the required number. Paul Zukerberg also faced a challenge, but survived; he denounced the process and competitor Elissa Silverman, whose supporter filed both challenges.

Sadly, Patrick Mara (who serves on the State Board of Education and has made education a significant part of his platform), Anita Bonds, and Michael Brown did not respond to the question this week.

The top 3 candidates retain the same 1-2-3 ranking as in questions 3 (education) and 4 (growth): Matt Frumin and Elissa Silverman a close 1 and 2, and John Settles a clear but still competitive 3rd. All three had over 60% of voters view their responses either "very persuasive" or "persuasive."

On the other end of the spectrum, the other 3 candidates who responded—Anita Bonds, Perry Redd, and Michael Brown—got less than 25% persuasive/very persuasive. Michael Brown did particularly poorly, with 29% of voters rating his response "very unpersuasive" and another 28% rating it "unpersuasive."

Patrick Mara and Paul Zukerberg did not respond to this question.

And don't forget to vote on this week's question, on ethics! For that one, we have responses from all 7 candidates except Ms. Bonds. You have until Monday to vote, but why not do it today when perhaps you have a less hectic schedule?

We asked the candidates to explain whether they were for or against each proposal, along with any explanation they wished to give and any other proposals besides these 6 which they would push for if elected. Perry Redd, Elissa Silverman, Matthew Frumin, Michael Brown, Paul Zukerberg, John Settles, and Patrick Mara submitted responses. Anita Bonds' campaign manager expressed interest in responding but did not yet submit something.

You can see and rate responses (starting with a randomly-selected candidate) now. Some candidates specifically addressed each of the proposals in their responses, while a few did not appear to specifically take a stand on each as the question asked. When you rate the responses, please factor that in to your rating on whether, or how fully, the candidate answered the question.

You can vote until midnight Monday, February 11. After that, we'll do some analysis to try to not only figure out whose responses was most popular, but how people with different sets of budget priorities felt about the candidates.

Meanwhile, stay tuned for the results of last week's question, on DC's growth, coming later this week.

Matthew Frumin slightly edged out Elissa Silverman in a close finish. John Settles placed third, followed by Patrick Mara, Perry Redd, and Paul Zukerberg much farther behind.

71% of voters gave positive reviews to Frumin's answer, compared to 70% for Silverman's. Silverman had more people rating her answer "very persuasive"—38% versus 30%—but also fewer people thought her answer "fully" answered the question—46% versus Frumin's 65%. 14% of voters said Silverman did not answer the question, while only 1% had that reaction to Frumin's response.

Voters were very divided on Patrick Mara's response, perhaps not a surprise since he essentially said he didn't like the premise of the question and that it wasn't possible to really discuss education in the available space. 48% of people said his response "partially" or "fully" answered the question, while 34% said it did not at all.

Most (75%) felt that Perry Redd answered the question, but actually agreed with it less than anyone else's, with 65% rating it as unpersuasive or very unpersuasive.

Once again, we had no responses from Anita Bonds or Michael Brown. Brown also did not attend a DC for Democracy forum last night.

You can still vote on Question 4, about candidates' views on growth, until Monday night.