Posts about Kwame Brown

Mike DeBonis recently highlighted an even bigger failure: Upshur Park, where the grass actually caught on fire. DPR opened the park to great fanfare earlier this year, but then again didn't water the new trees and grass.

DPR followed up with DeBonis to tout Walter Pierce Park, which looks green and verdant. However, DeBonis noted, that might be because it isn't open yet.

DPR is also putting in irrigation at several of its playing fields. But this highlights what many parks advocates say is the issue: a focus on the recreational facilities, like pools, indoor rec centers, and athletic fields, over parks. Ironically, says a former DC government employee, under Mayor Williams the department was renamed to put parks first. Apparently the semantic change didn't translate to policy.

There's been a lot of upheaval at DPR in recent years. Mayor Fenty had 4 separate directors for the agency, one of whom Council refused to confirm amid controversies over contracts that were allegedly improperly routed through DPR. The Williams administration saw similar turnover rates in the job.

Perhaps the biggest cause of problems is funding. Over the last 5 budget cycles, DPR's budget was cut by 47%. It's hard to keep up maintenance of a growing set of parks and rec centers in that climate.

Now, park maintenance is slated to transfer to the new Department of General Services, which could mean it'll get the attention it needs, or it could mean it slips through the cracks entirely.

Perhaps parks slip through the cracks so much because DC has so little actual parkland that's not run by the National Park Service. Maria Barry, the volunteer president of Friends of 16th Street Heights Parks (including Upshur Park, the one that caught on fire), says that many calls to 911 about crime in the park end up routed to the Park Police, even though Upshur and nearby Hamilton Park are not federal and MPD has jurisdiction. Since almost all parkland is federal, dispatchers sometimes erroneously assume that all parkland is.

Tommy Wells now has oversight over DPR on the Council. Will he be able to make any changes? He could fight for more budget, though everyone else has pressing budgetary needs as well. Should he push for any structural reform? Some have suggested creating a separate park division, which could ensure some staff focus on parks, or it could simply rearrange the org chart to no real effect depending on how it's implemented.

When Kwame Brown announced he's open to an income tax increase, he stipulated the money go to maintaining schools, rec centers, and parks. That's a change from earlier promises to use extra money for affordable housing, but could alleviate DPR's woes.

Parks are a significant piece of building a good city for neighborhoods of all types and for all residents. We need to show that DC parks can be great. Failings at DPR aren't an excuse for NPS not to do better, but if DC could make its parks a model for urban parks, it would certainly help set an example for other, federal parks around the city.

First, a quick recap of the long saga: Gray's April budget proposal included a 0.4% tax increase on incomes over 200,000. Kwame Brown vowed to eliminate that, and swapped it out in favor of eliminating the tax exemption on out of state bonds, which no other state has.

The only reason the rest of the cuts-before-taxes councilmembers, like Mary Cheh and Jack Evans, agreed with the measure was because reinstating the exemption was on a list of priorities for spending future unanticipated revenue, at last some of which was indeed anticipated. But Tommy Wells wrangled an amendment to swap that item with restoring other cuts.

In any event, the next budget round had a bunch of spending pressures around Medicaid that pushed this item down the list. The replacement items aren't funded either, yet, and so the bond tax buyout still wouldn't have been had it stayed on the list.

Meanwhile, Mary Cheh said she would introduce an amendment to remove just the part of the bond tax for already-purchased bonds, and put back in an income tax, but only on incomes over $400,000. Yet she never introduced it, and instead passed a measure devoting some of DC's reserve funds to delay the bond tax by one year and make it non-retroactive.

Some councilmembers say she never really meant for the amendment to pass, and withdrew it after Mayor Gray whipped votes for it; she says it's because she feared Wells would round up support for some other change she didn't want.

What Gray vetoed was the bill that delays the bond tax. Now, if the Council doesn't act further, the bond exemption will go away even for already-purchased bonds, including on interest from 2011.

Kwame Brown still insists "people are tired of taxes and fees" even though a DCFPI poll found strong support for the original income tax increase.

Tim Craig writes,

Instead of a tax increase, Brown said he will probably push to establish a commission to explore potential cuts and savings to the city's budget. Brown said the commission would include government officials and citizens who will work to ferret out "wasteful spending within the government."

Say you were on that commission. How would you "ferret out" some waste?

It's become a familiar trope to say there must be waste. And there indeed is. But it's not so easy to just cut the waste, like most politicians pretend.

For one thing, some waste is an unfortunate byproduct of organizations. Even my former employer, Google, which constantly enjoys adulation from the press for being a great organization, has some people not pulling their weight. It's not a lot, sure, but even without obstacles to firing people, getting rid of anyone is difficult, unpleasant, and bad for team morale (especially because there's never unanimity about who the less productive people are).

In a private company, a lot of the waste is just hidden. That doesn't make it right, but the popular belief that anyone with half a brain could just take an axe to government spending easily is a little too facile.

On the other hand, there are indeed some clearer examples of people who aren't adding value to an organization. Most people I've spoken to in government agree and know who those people are; sometimes others share the same view, while sometimes the opinion varies from person to person.

Many agencies could benefit from strategic reductions in their staffing levels. Unfortunately, labor rules make it very difficult to eliminate people based on their performance. The standard procedure is a RIF (Reduction in Force), which has strict rules around removing the most junior people, or people based on their job category rather than their performance, and further rules requiring the agency to find new placements or rehire people if jobs open up.

As I've written before, I think it's detrimental to unions in the long run to stand against the general principle of merit-based firings. Better to push for least arbitrary process for evaluating employees, so that the firings are as fair as possible, rather than opposing the whole idea.

If the Council doesn't want to take this issue on, it may be very hard to find genuine opportunities to cut that haven't already happened. It's worth investigating. If Brown staffs his commission with thoughtful people who really are looking for good win-win solutions, it could come up with something. Though it's hard to have a lot of faith in Brown's ability to choose people on merit instead of for political reasons.

It would definitely not be helpful to have a Boehner-style commission that simply picks programs to axe. Most of the actual objectives the DC government pursues are worthwhile. If accomplishing them more efficiently is not really possible or not politically feasible because of labor issues, wholesale cuts are not the answer.

Such a commission also would not likely be able to find specific cuts between now and the beginning of the fiscal year in October. Brown may have to swallow the tax increase that most residents want, and then pursue longer-term efficiency gains for next year.

And what about alcohol licensing? Kwame Brown gave that to Jim Graham in January. It's widely agreed that this was compensation for taking away transportation. But it has little to do with human services. If rationalizing committees is so important, why isn't it in the same committee as other licensing bodies like DCRA?

I can think of no explanation other than that Brown didn't want to hurt Graham but did want to hurt Wells. Can you? And that's the problem. Brown keeps asserting that payback was not the motive, but almost all local reporters have pointed out that his explanation doesn't hold up.

Sadly, Mary Cheh has started parroting the same line:

CM Brown had to reshuffle things because newly elected Vincent Orange had to be assigned a committee and arrangements had to be made to account for Mr Thomas losing his committee. CM Brown reconfigured committees along better functional lines including placing transportation and public works under the comm on the environment.

No reshuffling had to happen with transportation, because the Thomas/Orange changes don't overlap at all with the Wells/Cheh/Bowser changes. And a transportation committee that has the environment but doesn't have WMATA is definitely not "better functional lines."

John Hendel wrote,

When questioning the Greater Greater Washington report, Brown also emphasized that he hadn't been able to weigh in properly, and that a proper news story needed to include all the different sides of a decision such as this. He told me that he likes the news site but that it has a lot of emotion, and that journalism needs to include multiple perspectives. Again, this sounds fair enough on paper but doesn't seem to harmonize with the increasingly loud sense of outrage over Wells' shift as well as what seems to be a growing consensus that yes, the SUV investigation may have played a role.

I'm sorry that Kwame Brown, citywide elected chairman of the Council of the District of Columbia, feels he isn't able to properly communicate with reporters who spend much of their time in his building. This underscores Alan Suderman's point yesterday that one of the clearest lessons from this saga is that Kwame Brown is bad at media relations. Or, maybe, the local press corps is just smarter and more penetrating than Brown would like.

If Brown is genuinely trying to improve the Council's function, Suderman makes another good suggestion: make committee staff more real professional staff rather than political hires of each councilmember.

When members switch committees, the expected convention in the council is that each member of the committee's staff just keeps working for the former chair in their new capacity. For example, in January Tommy Wells and Jim Graham swapped committees. But all the staff of Human Services kept working for Wells even though he didn't have human services oversight, and the staff of Public Works and Transportation kept working for Graham.

John DeTaeye, for example, had been handling DPW issues, and had become an expert on recycling and trash. He had some good ideas which he'd discussed with me for improving recycling rates. Suddenly, he couldn't implement those, and had to learn human services issues (though he also got promoted to committee director).

One uncommon exception was Jonathon Kass, the excellent transportation committee staffer who has a background in transportation. Graham let Wells hire Kass to be the new committee director. But will Mary Cheh do the same? Then what would happen to Jeremy Faust, the current Government Operations and the Environment committee director?

It's all crazy. This makes it less likely for councilmembers to hire people with deeper subject knowledge. As long as all staff are generalists, with backgrounds in law or public policy or something, they can generally shift, but still have to learn new policy areas from scratch, at great cost of productivity and institutional memory.

Kwame Brown shouldn't swap around committees lightly, with unbelievable explanations. Barring that, he should take steps to reduce the severe impacts that result when committees change hands.

Jack Evans summed up the council's view of transportation best in his explanation of support for the appointment of new DDOT Director Terry Bellamy.

"Given our constituent services, it's so important to have someone at the helm of DDOT who is responsive. Bellamy has always answered the phone when I call. That allows us to go work on the really big stuff."

Urbanists in DC have yet to convince their civic leaders that transportation is itself "really big stuff," and that it is a means to solving the city's big problems. Until our leaders make that connection, we will never have the broad-based coalition that could have prevented Wells' removal from key positions.

For transportation to be taken seriously, urbanists in DC must start talking about it in terms of how it provides solutions to joblessness, crime, education and gentrification, which are the real sources of anxiety for most DC residents.

For example, Mayor Gray has made job creation a centerpiece of his agenda, but since only 28% of DC jobs are held by DC residents, it's likely Gray's initiative will have to create 4 jobs for every 1 that benefits a District resident. That's not very efficient.

Instead of spending taxpayer money to lure companies that provide jobs mostly to Virginians and Marylanders, the city could be investing money to improve access to jobs for existing DC residents. Economic integration, enabled by transit, can be a bulwark against underemployment and gentrification.

Urbanists may enjoy the minutiae of transportation infrastructure on its own terms, but if we are to convince others of our ideas then we will need to show how transportation is a means to greater ends. It's time to start talking in terms to which the rest of the city can relate.

Until that happens, urbanists will lack the broad-based consensus that would enable politicians like Tommy Wells to champion our ideas.

Brown, and his number two Mary Cheh, claimed this morning that the change is not vengeful but rather an attempt to better align committees with subject areas. Cheh oversees environmental issues, and she said Brown wants to reunite the environment with public works and transportation. All three were part of a single committee before 2008.

According to Wells, Brown offered the WMATA Board seat to Cheh as well, but she turned it down. If his goal really were to unite policy areas under one committee, he'd have pushed Cheh to either take the seat or not take the committee. Or, if his motive hadn't been payback, he could have just let Wells keep his seat.

Having oversight of planning could give Wells the opportunity to help OP move forward on its zoning rewrite and continue or even expand its good work on neighborhood plans around DC. But OP needs Wells' oversight far less than DDOT, WMATA, the Taxi Commission, and the other transportation agencies do.

And if unifying the Department of the Environment with transportation in a single committee makes sense, it would make even more sense to put it with planning and parks, both of which have a significant environmental impact as well. A Committee on Planning, the Environment, Parks and Recreation seems even more logical than a Committee on Public Works, the Environment, and Transportation.

It still seems evident that this move was motivated more by politics than common sense. That's why Tom Sherwood called Brown's justification for the transportation change "paper thin."

Wells and the other new members of the Board went through many days of orientation to learn the ins and outs of WMATA's operations, budget, policies and safety issues. In doing so, several have said they built up strong working relationships that can foster regional cooperation. Bowser will now have to learn the same material over from scratch, but without the camaraderie that Wells developed. Again, DC will lose momentum, expertise, and relationships, all because of Brown's pique.

Last year, the WMATA Board came under criticism for members acting parochially, which most everyone knew was code for Jim Graham (ward 1)'s penchant for favoring Ward 1 transportation projects. In the last budget, Bowser showed a very parochial attitude toward city programs, focusing entirely on her own ward. Will she do the same on the WMATA Board, pushing needed transportation enhancements for Ward 4 but at the expense of other parts of the city?

Bulger's son ran Brown's Ward 3 operation in his campaign for chair. The Council held roundtable on the nomination last week, but seems never to have posted it anywhere on the Council site; I have an automated system that monitors the calendar for changes, and the word "Bulger" didn't appear until Sunday when it popped up as part of today's Committee of the Whole agenda.

Bulger runs Government Relations, Inc., a federal lobbying firm, which used to lobby for Fairfax County (but does not today). Bulger also told me he was involved with pushing Congress to pass the current federal transit benefit.

It's pretty blatant, too. Brown isn't rearranging all the committees. He's just singling out Wells for punishment.

Wells will get the Committee on Libraries, Parks and Recreation, generally considered the least desirable post one of the least desirable posts. Mary Cheh, who is still close to Brown and his number two as Chair Pro Tempore, will take over Public Works and Transportation as well as keeping the Department of the Environment. Muriel Bowser, who got Parks and Rec in January because of her support for Mayor Fenty, will get Government Operations.

Committees are rarely shifted mid-term, and only to take responsibilities away from a member facing scandal. This may be the first time in history a committee is taken away midway from a member for being honest.

Brown had the opportunity to alter committees because Harry Thomas, Jr. stepped down from the Committee on Econmic Development amid his own ethical problems. Brown moved economic development into the Committee of the Whole, under his direct control.

Vincent Orange (at-large) wanted Economic Development, but Brown didn't want to give it to him because of their rivalry in the race for chair (and, perhaps, because Orange has a poor track record on economic development).

Instead, Brown is proposing a new, smaller committee with only oversight of the Department of Small & Local Business Development and some other smaller agencies, and is keeping Economic Development in the Committee of the Whole.

Since Orange has no committee today, there's no need for any further reshuffling. But apparently Brown is still sore from the report.

Ironically, however, that report could have been the best thing for Brown. It got the issue fully into the spotlight, reducing the long drip of new scandal news. It put a fair amount of blame on the Department of Public Works as well as on Brown.

Had Brown embraced the report, apologized for his missteps, and pushed to fix policies around official vehicles for the future to stop such failures from recurring, he could have put the issue behind him.

Brown had many opportunities to start rebuilding the Council's reputation. Instead, he has continued to drag it into the gutter. He told colleagues that his own campaign finance scandals didn't go any deeper, and then they did.

The Council started the year with very high esteem among the populace, after a term of steady and effective leadership under Vincent Gray. Now, it's widely derided, and rightly so, with many of its members facing some ethical questions.

Now, he's even transferring the DC Council's voting seat on the WMATA Board. That's quite ironic. Last year, before becoming chair, Kwame Brown participated in a secretive committee to study WMATA governance, dominated by the Board of Trade. One of the better recommendations from that committee was to make board appointments based less on politics. Now, Brown is reassigning the post once again based solely on politics, and dirty personal ones at that.

By putting politics over progress, Brown is abandoning a commitment to make transportation better in DC. The people of Ward 7, where Brown himself lives, could suffer. Wells was making improving bus service east of the Anacostia a cornerstone of his chairmanship. He hosted listening sessions in wards 4, 5, 7, and 8, got WMATA to promise technological upgrades for Metrobuses east of the river, and pushed the east of the river Circulator even though it meant losing some service in Ward 6.

Cheh, on the other hand, complained in the budget that the Circulator is going east of the river but doesn't go to the Palisades. Was that just posturing for her ward, or will she really push for more transportation spending in Ward 3 over other parts of DC?

Cheh is one of the least bad alternatives to head transportation, but it'll break the forward momentum that's been built with Council working closely with DDOT. Wells' staff has a deep understanding of transportation issues, including some carried over from when Jim Graham ran the committee. That institutional memory will likely be lost.

Plus, as Brown's closest confidante on the Council, Cheh could have tried to talk him out of this move which clearly makes him look petty. Does she also think keeping Brown's scandals quiet is the top public policy goal for the Council? Or is she sore with Tommy Wells for stymieing her plan to pretend to support the bond tax in place of an income tax, but then try to get both out of the budget?

DDOT is at a crossroads. New Director Terry Bellamy, formerly Gabe Klein's deputy, could aggressively move to implement the ambitious Action Agenda that Klein put together, including pedestrian safety, bikeshare expansion, cycle tracks, bus priority lanes, real-time bus information, Circulator expansion, performance parking and more.

Or, Bellamy could let inertia win out, not making the tough calls and allowing projects to stagnate when the public isn't unified for or against them, as they usually aren't. Wells and his team were well situated to push DDOT to achieve its potential.

By taking Wells off the committee for transparently political reasons, Brown is showing that forward progress in the District isn't foremost in his mind. Instead, punishing those who don't cover up his own ethical failings is the priority. At least now, we know exactly what kind of man we have as Chairman.

The Council typically goes along with a chairman's committee choices, but they all have to vote on the recommendation this morning. Will this Council really stand by and let Brown do this? If they do, each member will be sending the message that it's appropriate to cover up a colleague's misdeeds.

What, then, should the public assume is behind each future decision the Council makes? Or the difficult decisions they do not make? Email Brown and the Council or call Brown's office at (202) 724-8032 to remind them that this unprecedented, vindictive move will further degrade the reputations of Brown, each member who votes aye, and that of the Council as a whole.

Update: Mary Cheh has sent me the following statement:

Kwame decided to reshuffle and make more coherent committee functions. And yesterday he told me of his plan to emphasize the environmental work in one committee, bringing back environment to public works and transportation (stormwater, recycling and waste management, transportation policy, pollution and vehicles, etc. brought together with environmental policy) and he offered the committee to me. I jumped at it and am very enthusiastic.

The argument about making committees more coherent makes little sense when he's also splitting up the traditional Economic Development functions into smaller committees to limit Vincent Orange. We all know why this one area is being singled out. I'm disappointed that Cheh is defending such an ethically suspect move.

Mayor Gray's original budget proposal included a hike of 0.4% on income over $200,000, which Brown focused much of his effort on eliminating. He ultimately hit on the idea of replacing it with a measure ending the tax exemption on out of state municipal bonds, an exemption that has been eliminated in all other states which had one.

While his rhetoric argued this was fairer, it was clear he really wanted to reverse the change when DC's revenue estimates turned rosier, as was expected.

Brown addressed the future "unanticipated revenues" through a list of conditional budget items, which would get funded in priority order depending on how much extra money comes in. $21.567 million also goes to the capital budget and 50% of the remainder goes to the reserve fund, so the rightmost column shows how much "unanticipated revenue" there would need to be to get up to that specific item.

Item	Cost	Total 2012 UR needed
1. Hiring more police	$10.8	$43.2
2. Housing First (homeless housing)	$1.6	$46.4
3. Housing Production Trust Fund (affordable housing)	$12.0	$70.4
4. Mental illness services (housing and children's services)	$5.5	$81.4
5. Restoring bond exemption for pre-10/1/2011 bonds	$13.4	$108.2
6. Keeping MLK Library open on Sundays	$0.3	$108.8
7. Main Streets green teams	$1.8	$112.4
8. Parking rates lowered to $1/hr in busiest areas	$3.0	$118.4
9. Buying books for libraries	$1.4	$121.3
10. Early childhood education	$2.0	$125.3

But the Council had a few other ideas. Tommy Wells successfully passed an amendment to replace restoring the bond exemption with a set of other items: interim disability, affordable housing, children's mental health, and homeless services. He had to give Vincent Orange $500,000 to throw a party at the Lincoln Theater, where Orange serves on the board, to get enough votes.

Between first and second reading, the Gray administration disclosed a large spending pressure for FY 2012 involving healthcare providers for DC's Medicaid and DC Alliance programs that went onto the top of the list. The Council then moved the Green Teams to the top.

Meanwhile, there was also some "unanticipated revenue" in FY2011, the current budget year. The mayor proposes to use that to fund the Medicaid costs, school nurses, police, and mental health services, all of which would then come off the list for how to spend FY2012 money.

Finally, the FY2012 "unanticipated revenue" estimate is $77 million at the moment, enough to just fund the green teams and the rest of the Medicaid costs. That could increase or decrease in the future.

This list summarizes all the items and how they will be funded with 2011 or 2012 money under the current estimates. Items in green are currently slated to get funded, while red items are not. As above, the rightmost column shows the total amount of "unanticipated revenue" needed for that item and all above it to get funded.

Item	Cost	2011	Total 2012 UR needed
1. Main Streets green teams	$1.8		$25.2
2. Payments to Medicaid managed care companies	$32.0	$6.0	$77.2
3. School nurses	$12.5	$12.5
4. Hiring more police	$10.8	$10.8
5. Housing First (homeless housing)	$1.6		$80.4
6. Housing Production Trust Fund (affordable housing)	$12.0		$104.4
7. Mental illness services (housing and children's services)	$3.5	$3.51
8. Interim disability, affordable housing, children's mental health, homeless services, and Vincent Orange's party	$13.4		$131.2
9. Keeping MLK Library open on Sundays	$0.3		$131.8
10. Parking rates lowered to $1/hr in busiest areas	$3.02		$137.8
11. Buying books for libraries	$1.4		$140.6
12. Early childhood education	$2.0		$144.6

This is the Council's priority list. If more money comes available, whether found elsewhere in the budget or through increases in "unanticipated revenue," it should go to these priorities.

What it shouldn't go toward is reverting the bond tax exemption. Brown himself declared a list of priorities that put Housing First and affordable housing, well, first—or at least ahead of reversing the bond tax.

It's disappointing that now he wants to go after that again, even though higher priorities on his own list are still not funded, and the Council made clear that it wants to restore cuts to services instead with extra money. Brown should follow the Council's wishes, rather than putting first his own priorities which aren't even shared by most DC residents.

Councilmembers Muriel Bowser (@MurielBowser) and Yvette Alexander (@CMYMA) are active on Twitter and tweet fairly regularly. They use their accounts to respond to questions, retweet others and often take conversational approaches with their tweets. Wells, Bowser and Alexander are good about replying to questions, too.

Michael Brown (@CMMichaelABrown) and Jack Evans (@Jack Evans_Ward2) send moderate numbers of tweets, though it appears their staff do the work for them. They retweet fairly regularly and promote their schedules and news. You can often get an reply from them too, or at least links to find out more about an issue.

Mary Cheh (@MaryCheh) is less active than Evans or Brown and primarily promotes her news and updates, though occasionally she will send replies. Her account will be fairly active for a couple days, and then be silent for a stretch. It seems that staff tweet for her.

David Catania has two accounts, though neither is him personally. One is @CataniaPress, which promotes news and information about him. The other is @Catania_COS, his chief of staff, who engages more directly with followers and constituents.

Chairman Kwame Brown has an account, @KwameBrownDC which primarily mentions where the chairman has been and what visits he makes to groups and organizations in the city. It seems that staff tweet for him as well Brown does manage his own account. He often sends replies but rarely retweets. The account was also silent from February 17th to April 2nd, when the SUV scandal was in top gear.

Jim Graham, Harry Thomas and Vincent Orange all have accounts, though they rarely use them. Graham's account, @JimGraham_Ward1 last tweeted June 14 and is only following 27 people. When the account is active, it primarily promotes news and updates from his office.

Harry Thomas's account, @HLTJrWard5, hasn't been active since March 14th. Vincent Orange used Twitter during the April 26th special election campaign, but his account, @VincentOrangeDC last tweeted on May 12th and is only following 55 people.

Councilmembers Marion Barry and Phil Mendelson do not have accounts.

Mayor Vincent Gray has a Twitter account, @MayorVinceGray, run by his communications staff. At first, the account primarily promoted the mayor's schedule, but recently has started engaging more with followers and residents.

For those councilmembers who don't use Twitter regularly, does it matter? Barry doesn't have an account, but that doesn't mean he is less popular in Ward 8. It also doesn't necessarily mean he is not engaging with his constituents.

Twitter certainly isn't the only way to engage with constituents. Not everyone is savvy with the technology or has regular internet access. Others may find it overwhelming to use. But Twitter can be an effective way for councilmembers to address constituent concerns and provide a sense of connection with residents.

Some of the more active councilmembers, like Wells, Bowser, and Alexander, can help make government somewhat more responsive and approachable. Other accounts, like Cheh and Kwame Brown, occasionally engage with residents and at least provide a medium for getting information.

Should councilmembers be managing their own accounts or is it better to have a staff member do it? Wells, Bowser and Alexander seem tweet themselves and are able to engage more than others. During the protest over Congressional budget riders, Wells' account stopped sending tweets the moment his staff (@CharlesAllenDC and @AnnePhelps) tweeted pictures of his arrest. Michael Brown's account, on the other hand, tweeted pictures of Brown himself wearing handcuffs.

Many District agencies, like DCRA and DDOT, have used Twitter with great success to answer questions and address complaints. Now the Office of Planning has joined the flock, too.

Which officials' tweets do you find most useful? How would you like to see others improve?