The worst city government in America - Washington, D.C

Washington Monthly, Jan, 1989 by Jason DeParle

When it comes to screwing the poor and feathering their nests, the District of Columbia's bureaucrats take the prize.

Jason DeParle is an editor of The Washington Monthly Katherine Boo and Michael Weeks provided research assistance for this article.

If you came anywhere close to Washington, D.C. last year, chances are you heard about the ambulance crews. Poor fellas, they were just a bit disoriented. They kept racing out of the fire stations and losing their way, while their patients choked and bled to death. After driving to the wrong address twice, a rescue unit never did catch up with Victim Number Nine. He lay hemorrhaging for 40 minutes until his family quit waiting for help and whisked him to the hospital, where he died. As reports of the lost ambulances increased, the fire chief got serious: he rushed out and bought his crews some $8.95 maps. And the department didn't exactly score a public relations coup when a 911 dispatcher told a distraught caller to "grow up."

Everyone knows that big-city governments are bad. But the real story is this: they're worse than you think. And they're worst of all for the poor, for whom city services such as public housing and public health care are supposed to offer a last defense against pure misery. In D.C., misery has won. The government's mismanagement is so complete that the passive sins of its inept bureaucracy surely rival any active ones of business exploitation as an oppressor of the poor.

In D.C., as in most big cities, the usual case against the government focuses on old-style sin and scandal: rumors of the mayor's drug use and mistresses, or the parole prospects of his former aides. But plain corruption, of which there's been plenty, is finally just a footnote compared to the quiet cruelty of the District's everyday bureaucratic incompetence.

A small sampler from recent months:

> A murder victim died with 22 pieces of identification in his wallet. The city classified him as "unidentified" and sent his body off to be cremated. His family found out six months later.

> An 88-year-old boarding home resident collapsed and died while covered with maggots and lice. Three different city agencies knew about the condition of the home but did nothing about it.

> A drug dealer suspected of murder walked out of the courthouse after two clerical errors combined to set him free. When the police caught up a month later, he was wanted for four more killings.

The District may be pushing incompetence to its limits, but other big-city governments aren't far behind (see page 37); remember the 61 Philadelphia rowhouses destroyed during the city's standoff with MOVE? The befuddlements of big-city government are not only tragicbut ironic, given the zest for local government across the political spectrum. The right, seeking to get the feds "off the people's back," nurtures a vision of bolstered local powers. Mainstream Democrats, attacking the Reagan-era cutbacks, have presented big-city mayors as a more compassionate example of executive leadership. And for some liberal intellectuals, city government serves as the repository of hope for those activists who wanted to "empower" the people through "Community development." But whatever the doctrinal allures, bureaucratic inanities block the empowerment of anyone besides the bureaucrats.

And money isn't the issue. Unlike the people it purports to serve, one thing the D.C. government can't cry is "poor." Attempts to say just how wellfunded it is get complicated, since the District has responsibilities that elsewhere get divided between cities, counties, and states. But even studies that adjust for the District's unique status find plenty of money heading towards the till. Only oil-rich Alaska collects more tax revenue per capita. In crucial areas like public housing, the District has even been caught returning federal money it failed to spend. "We have enough money," says John Wilson, chairman of the city council's finance and revenue committee. "I think [the government's] just inefficient and incompetent."

As for what the city does with the $4 billion in taxes and federal grants it manages to retain, there are clues. They don't, shall we say, make us wonder how city managers can make ends meet. Anecdotally, there are stories like the one about the city paying $2.5 million to rent a building it couldn't occupy because it failed to give the builder the plans to finish the interior. Or Car GT897, a city vehicle parked downtown and forgotten for nine months, while transients slept inside it. (Who says the city doesn't care about the homeless?)

Any number of hypotheses arise to account for the lost car and empty building, but a lack of clerical and administrative staff is not among them, The District has the only child support collection agency in the country that consistently has spent more than it has collected. The city historically has spent about twice the national average to deliver a welfare check. Only one state hires more administrators per teacher. And the rival governments aren't exactly portraits of efficiency. To waste more money than the competition takes work.