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

Washington Monthly, Jan, 1989 by Jason DeParle

Drugs are one problem; illiteracy is another. One reason so many tenant complaints get ignored, the mayor's commission reported, is that many maintenance workers can't read the complaint forms. And a lack of handyman skills, which tend to be a good thing for handymen to have, is a third: "Much of the staff," the commissioners delicately put it"lacks requisite skills or training." Alphonso Jackson, the authority's director, put it less delicately. After taking over two years ago, he told the city council that the agency was full of employees "who are not capable of doing their jobs," including boiler room mechanics "creating havoc in our boiler rooms" and a plumber "who knows nothing about plumbing, and he's been here 15 years." Jackson's now applying for a job in Dallas.

At least these shortcomings haven't held anyone back. The 1984 HUD audit found that about 80 percent of the housing authority's 337 maintenance men were "overgraded"-getting an electrician's salary, say, for taking gut the trash. One foreman drawing top pay for supervising 27 people actually supervised two. The agency's two exterminators, HUD found, did no pest-control work.

While housing officials issue lots of vows to clean things up, the two words you're least likely to hear are "you're fired." Given union and civil service protec"it is almost impossible to fire anyone regardless of how incompetent or nonproductive," the mayor's report concluded. Charles Goggins, then the housing authority's chief of maintenance, told the commissioners about a maintenance worker who went AWOL for 1,000 hours. He kept his job. "It was a lack of discipline from the top all the way down," said Sloane, the commission staff director. "It was an environment where people felt, 'You cartt fire me, you can't do anything to me.'"

That's not to say that all city maintenance men are drugged-out dodos. Buried in the commission's report, there's a nice story about some of them. Daunted by the difficulty of scheduling a truck from the city motor pool, some maintenance workers used their own cars to move heavy equipment. And they did it without reimbursement for gas or wear-'n'-tear. A few years of toting refrigerators around in their car trunks must leave these people awfully demoralized. But not as demomlized as the residents of the city's cold, crumbling apartments, and the 7,000 people lined up to get in.

Home is where the hose is

While the crisis in D.C. public housing has consigned Lilian Wade to a waiting list, it dumps others into the street. This, in turn, gives the city government the chance to add to the misery of another class of people: the homeless.

Exhibits A and B in this regard are two city-run shelters, Pierce and Blair. Just when it seemed that the wretchedness of the homeless had lost all shock value, Jack Cloherty, a local television reporter, showed that things can always get worse (see Monthly Journalism Award, page 13). Rats, scabies, lice, and urine-soaked mattresses are abundant at the shelters. Showers, sheets, towels, toilet seats and toilet paper are not. Pierce offers four showers for 170 men. Sister Ronnie Daniel, who works at Blair, says that that shelter offers none. But when Cloherty went to have a look, city workers threw him out. Daniel says the staff responded to one shower request by handing a homeless man a hose.