Posts about Vincent Gray

The Mayor's Office is continuing to negotiate with Dan Snyder and the Washington Redskins to build a training facility at Reservation 13. Until the outcome of the negotiations is determined, any development plans for Reservation 13 remain on hold.

Commissioners strongly pushed back that the community must be involved in the decision about a training facility on the site and expressed frustration that the Mayor is not seeking feedback from residents. Deputy Mayor Hoskins said that his office is not involved in the negotiations. ...

The Deputy Mayor said his office should know whether the city will pursue a training facility or continue with the current development plans in 30 days. If plans for a training facility do not move forward, he said that the city would return to development plans approved by the community. ... The Deputy Mayor also said that any training facility proposal would have to be consistent with the zoning for the site. ...

All 9 Commissioners, representing Wards 6 & 7, agreed that Mayor Gray needs to come out to the community and explain how a potential training facility fits into the master development plan agreed to by residents.

It's possible to vaguely imagine a way that a practice facility could be part of a mixed-use neighborhood. For example, the Redskins could build practice fields and any necessary parking entirely underground, then put surface streets, parks, and buildings on top of them. Their offices could occupy a building with ground-floor retail that's open to the public.

Dan Snyder could build all of this entirely with his own money, in this very urban way. But does anyone seriously believe that is possible? This is the guy who tried to charge people just to walk into his stadium instead of paying huge parking fees. Would he actually want to design practice fields that fit into a good neighborhood landscape when he has a perfectly good, entirely private facility in Ashburn?

Maybe if the District built the whole thing and gave it to him for free, he'd accept the deal, but it would be a terrible bargain for taxpayers. If he paid money for it, why would he want to spend extra money just to essentially make the facility invisible and unobtrusive?

Certain city leaders seem to believe that bringing the Redskins to DC is worth virtually any cost simply for the civic pride involved in having an NFL team inside one's borders. We know Jack Evans has a massive blind spot for organized sports. He abhors spending government money on anything except sports facilities, where the sky's the limit. We know that Michael Brown doesn't know any better. We should expect better from Mayor Gray.

Correction: The original version of this article had a sentence about criticism of DMPED. However, since Hoskins said the negotiations are not coming from his office, this is not relevant. The sentence has been deleted.

Politicians often release estimates of jobs they created, and perhaps cynicism around such estimates explains the lack of credit given to One City One Hire for the hiring of 1,400 jobless residents.

The difference here is that the leader of One City One Hire, Director of Employment Services Lisa Mallory, actually knows who these 1,400 people are. She knows who they are because her staff personally introduced them to their current employers.

Understanding One City One Hire requires understanding that one of the biggest barriers to employment in DC has nothing to do with skills, criminal records or addiction issues. A major barrier to employment is the lack of trust by local employers in jobless residents, particularly those east of the Anacostia River.

While this barrier is not often mentioned by the local media, any job training provider can attest to its reality, and the discouraging effect it has on District residents who are otherwise job-ready.

Chris Hart-Wright, Executive Director of Strive DC which works with chronically unemployed District residents, says she spends much of her time seeking to build trust on the part of local employers in her clients. She says that all training providers are doing the same thing, and that they need the city to use its influence to play this role so they can focus on training and case management.

That's what One City One Hire is all about. Run by the Business Services Group within the Department of Employment Services (DOES), One City One Hire asks local employers if they will consider a small number of resumes pre-screened by DOES for their open positions.

Director Mallory has transferred DOES employees into the operation of working with employers to understand the requirements of particular positions and evaluating thousands of resumes of jobless DC residents to fill those positions.

Now, overcoming the trust gap between local employers and jobless DC residents is only one of several difficult steps that need to be taken to address chronic unemployment. But the success of Gray and Mallory in conquering this first barrier raises hopes that they will live up to their promises on other barriers to employment.

First, Mallory has committed to transforming the One-Stop Centers that are responsible for empowering jobless residents with access to training, transportation and child care benefits, and other resources needed to get a job. This is no small task, as these centers have historically been more like DMV centers in the 1990s.

It will require strong leadership in each One-Stop, implementation of a uniform assessment process so that employees are trained in uncovering and addressing barriers to employment, and tight coordination with agencies like DHS that can address barriers like transportation and child care.

If this transformation doesn't occur, then the body that oversees One-Stop funding, the Workforce Investment Council, could conceivably pull all funding from DOES and contract with a private agency to run One-Stops.

Second, Mallory has committed to providing data on jobless residents who enter One-Stop Centers that would provide the first ever profile of DC's jobless and their barriers to employment. Finally, Mallory has committed to holding training providers accountable to metrics of job placement.

These are significant challenges, but the success of Mallory and Gray in addressing the challenge of trust in jobless DC residents should give us cautious optimism they can be met.

Tackling chronic unemployment is not optional. It is essential to improving education outcomes of the 30% of District children living in poverty. It is essential to limiting gentrification and ensuring all residents benefit from the District's resurgence in recent years.

Gray deserves credit for his accomplishments thus far and greater interest in his vision for finishing the job on unemployment.

A fairer solution would be to allocate those dollars according to the uniform per pupil formula that is already in place. That formula is designed to ensure that each DC school child gets the same amount of funding, regardless of where he or she goes to school.

DCPS has completely legitimate funding needs. They want to use the money to increase food service contracts, supplement teacher salaries, and for other personnel costs. DC's public charter schools also have legitimate funding needs. In fact, they have exactly the same needs to feed their students and pay their teachers and other staff.

Public charter schools already have costs that don't apply to DCPS schools. For example, a new charter school has to find, buy, and outfit a building, while a DCPS school does not. But all the charter schools want is equal funding and an equal chance to prove their worth, knowing they can lose their charter if they don't perform well in educating their students.

Mayor Gray still has time to do what's right and fix this by distributing the newfound revenues in accordance with the existing funding formula. Equal funding for all of DC's public school students is not only good politics, it's the law, and it is in keeping with the promise of One City.

Bike lane striping under the Gray administration has ground to a halt. Almost none of the promised 2011 additions to the bike network were delivered. And while DDOT promises to stripe new bike lanes as soon as the weather warms up, they are clearly falling behind.

Meanwhile, the most significant proposed bike projects, the L and M Street cycle tracks, remain mired in study. DDOT has said it won't commit to building them until it has completed a study of the existing 15th Street and Pennsylvania Avenue cycle tracks. That's a little odd, because DDOT already completed a similar study in 2010. Why do we need another one to tell us the same thing? And how long is this study supposed to take? It's already been six months.

No doubt Mayor Gray hears a lot about bike lanes. It must seem that half of his constituents want more of them, and the other half don't want them at all. Putting off the decision in order to avoid upsetting anyone must be a tempting solution. It's hard to know for sure, but the longer these studies drag on, the more likely this possibility seems.

But the delay-by-study strategy can only work for so long. Ultimately voters in Maryland saw through Ehrlich's Purple Line scheme, and it contributed to his defeat by Martin O'Malley.

When Gray was elected I said we should give him a chance to prove that he really will continue urbanist policies. After one year, the jury is still out. It is still too early to judge him. It is still too early to conclude that he is trying to study the cycle tracks out of existence. But if he hasn't decided to build them in another six months or so—a year after the study began—then we'll have our answer.

Cross-posted at BeyondDC.

Not only would spending any taxpayer money on this scheme be extremely foolish, it's a bad idea even if the Redskins bought the land at market value and financed everything themselves, which they surely don't actually plan to do. In fact, having any Redskins facilities or stadium anywhere inside the District would be harmful to its future.

As DeBonis notes, Hill East, aka Reservation 13, is slated to become a mixed-use community with access to Metro on one side and the river on the other. Progress has been stalled due to the economy, but the economy will pick up, and the District needs to be thinking long term.

A practice facility occupies an enormous amount of land but employs or houses very few people. DC needs more taxpaying residents and more jobs, not big practice fields, weight rooms, and gyms for a small number of athletes. Maybe a couple rich ones will live in DC and bring their taxes, but how many really might? If they want to live in an urban area, they already can live here; if they don't, they won't anyway.

DeBonis suggests using some of the huge parking lots, which sit on federal land designated exclusively for recreation. But even this is a bad use of space. We could build playing fields for our residents and schools instead. There's already a skate park going into this area; suggestions from a recent Capital Business forum included adding a velodrome or rock climbing.

It's also worth thinking about the long term. Some of this land should become an extension of Capitol Hill, and 20 years from now, the feds might be willing to accommodate that. A 2006 NCPC study looked at the site, and suggested some mixed-use development and waterfront parks, along with sites for those memorials and museums every interest group wants to build these days.

DC's competitive advantage (and Arlington's) compared to the suburbs is that living in those jurisdictions is much more convenient. Most jobs are in DC and Arlington, and being central, they're mathematically closer to jobs in other jurisdictions than living anywhere else.

Transportation options are more numerous; there are more Metro lines, more bus options, and you're much more likely to be able to bike or even walk to work. More retail is within a short walk or bike or transit ride.

On the other hand, land is scarce; DC only has 68.3 square miles (and Arlington 26). Therefore, DC's best strategy is to use its limited space to attract as many residents and taxpaying jobs (not government and nonprofits) as it can. Football does neither of these.

Football teams only play in their stadiums 8 regular home games per year. Add a few other events, and it's still empty almost all the time. But when it's full, huge numbers of people come at once, and many will drive, requiring massive parking surrounding the stadium. Plus, football has a strong tailgating tradition, meaning people want those parking lots.

Dan Snyder, the Redskins owner, also makes a lot of money from that parking. He makes so much that he tried to charge people an extra fee to get into the stadium if they don't park, but rather walk in or come by shuttle from Metro. And he filed a high-profile nuisance lawsuit against one of DC's most valuable media organizations. So why are any DC leaders spending time on accommodating the Redskins?

Soccer, on the other hand, frequently uses urban stadiums worldwide that don't need much or even any parking. A DC stadium could be quite urban in its form. It hosts more games than football, though still far fewer than a baseball stadium or basketball/hockey/concert arena.

Advocates for a deal to keep United in DC say a soccer stadium will bring in economic development around the site, especially if it's at Buzzard Point, where 2 streetcar lines are planned to terminate. It'd be great to have United there, though the District still shouldn't spend any appreciable public dollars on it.

Mayor Gray tweeted, "We value DC United & hope they stay in DC. But District is in a challenging fiscal environment now & publicly funded stadium not possible." Gray (or his media team) emphasized in follow-ups that "no public $ has been expended on Redskins either," and, "Once again, we've put nothing on the table for Redskins."

Gray should hold that line and never offer anything to the Redskins. We can be sure that Evans and probably Michael Brown would love to, though. Evans even claims to be maniacally focused on keeping the District's budget lean, but has a giant blind spot when it comes to giving money to organized sports (or, for that matter, almost any development project, though at least those purport to bring in more tax revenue than the tax break is worth).

DC residents are better off with the Redskins in Prince George's County than inside the District borders. As this year's Council campaign heats up, voters should ask candidates if they believe in spending any public money on football, and be very wary of any candidate who says yes.