After ANC 3F Commissioner Frank Winstead youtubed a portion of the DC Council's Oversight Hearings on the Ward 3 ANCs, featuring Mary Cheh trying (unsuccessfully) to browbeat ANC 3E Commissioner Anne Sullivan into submission, there's been some online discussion suggesting Sullivan had it coming, given her own critique of Cheh's behavior with respect to the Tenleytown RFP.
One problem with the youtube clip is that while viewers can clearly see Cheh acting like a bully, they are left with no real basis for judging whether or not Cheh has been falsely accused of dereliction of duty.
As one Cheh defender summed it up, the charge is: “that Ms. Cheh has somehow colluded backhandedly with private developers to commandeer valuable public property, then ram an unwanted and unneeded project down the throats of a community who solidly oppose it.”
Yup, that's basically on target. To me, the crucial issues are cronyism and a betrayal of the public trust. Councilmember Cheh became a supporter of this project without paying much, if any, attention to the underlying facilities issues. And with each new problem that emerged as the proposal circulated more widely, Cheh’s approach was to step on the accelerator rather than the brakes. As she learned more, she never stopped to reconsider her support.
A few examples:
1) two days after learning from DCPS’s facilities people that Roadside’s proposal was premised on a gross underestimation of Janney’s facilities needs, Cheh wrote a letter to the mayor urging him to pursue such a project.
2) After ANC 3E’s special committee distributed notes of a meeting in which a senior economist at OCFO questioned the wisdom of a public-private redevelopment approach at this site, indicating that it would increase costs, delay the library, and be unlikely to expedite the school’s modernization, Cheh’s chief-of-staff tried to get the official to disavow or qualify his remarks. Although her claim was that the committee's discussion was based on information that was too hypothetical, CM Cheh herself used the exact same developer-provided information to claim that the Roadside's proposal would extract $16 million dollars of value from the land at this site.
3) When many of the written submissions sent to her by members of her taskforce (on behalf of the community organizations they represented) came back less than enthusiastic about the idea, Cheh failed to pass them on to decisionmakers, as promised. Instead, two days after receiving this input she urged DMPED to issue an RFP as soon as possible. Two weeks later, when asked to provide DMPED with names of community members who should be invited to provide public input on the contents of the RFP, she offered the names of six people representing only three community groups — Janney, Ward 3 Vision, and the condo board from the Roadside project across the street — all of whom were boosters of the project. Major stakeholders such as the Friends of the Library, St. Ann’s Church and other abutting property owners, not to mention established community groups like Tenleytown Neighbors Association and Tenleytown Historical Society, didn’t make Cheh’s list.
By cronyism, I mean friends doing friends favors. The crucial connection here is between Councilmember Cheh and Roadside Vice President Susan Linsky. Linsky, then a DMPED official, was part of the group of development-oriented professionals who endeavored to play kingmaker in the Ward 3 race. They chose Cheh as their candidate. Linsky then volunteered her services to the campaign, during both the primary and the general election and appeared to be one of Cheh’s most senior and trusted advisors. Linsky left DC government at the end of October 2006. By Linsky’s account, her close relationship with Cheh continued even after the election and her move to Roadside. In January of 2007 Linsky wrote David Jannarone (DMPED’s new Director of Development and an ex-Roadside employee) that “I continue to mentor Mary and her staff” as they transition into office.
Jannarone, patching ex-bosses Armond Spikell and Richard Lake into their conversation, responded to Linsky’s E-mail by telling Roadside that the best way to get DMPED involved in the Janney/Tenley library project would be for the community and the councilmember to invite them in. Apparently, his advice was immediately followed. A week after the exchange, Jannarone received an e-mail from a community member inviting him to a meeting about the Roadside project and indicating that Spikell had provided her with Jannarone’s name and contact info.
For those interested in a quid pro quo analysis, the timing of Roadside’s contributions to Cheh’s campaign fund and her constituent services fund is suggestive. Roadside’s first two contributions to Cheh’s campaign (one from the corporation, one from Roadside principal and MD resident Richard Lake) were made during the second week of November 2006 -- i.e. only after Cheh’s victory in the general election. Obviously, contributions made at this stage aren’t motivated by a desire to influence the outcome of an election; their most likely function is to curry favor with the new officeholder. Then in December 2006, even before she took office, Cheh expressed to Chief Librarian Ginnie Cooper her desire to see a mixed-use project at the Tenley-Friendship library site. At this point, Roadside was the only developer expressing an interest in such a project.
The third contribution was made on May 31, 2007, when Roadside donated to Cheh’s constituent services fund. A week later, Cheh wrote to the Mayor in support of a public-private partnership at the Janney/Tenley library site, praising Roadside’s proposal and providing Roadside (but not the rest of the community) with a copy of that letter. That letter’s existence remained a secret from the community until an ANC 3E committee member happened to attend a Library Trustees facilities meeting where Linsky invoked it as evidence that there was widespread support in the neighborhood for Roadside’s proposal. In fact, Cheh did not even divulge the letter's existence when she solicited feedback from her taskforce, some six weeks after urging the Mayor to pursue the project.
In sum, I think that Cheh did a much better job of representing Roadside’s interests than the community’s interests in this process. She was more concerned with enabling private development than with ensuring that our community’s public facilities needs were met. She was more concerned with getting her way than with ensuring that decisionmaking involving public lands emerges from a transparent, well-defined, and standards-driven process. This land should never have been offered for sale without a surplusing decision. But it was put on the auction block because CM Cheh was eager to “cut ribbons” and to please her friends and allies — not because anyone made a rational decision that a public-private venture was the best way to modernize and expand our school and our library.
Cheh’s supporters make two arguments in defense of her actions, neither of which strikes me as very persuasive. The first is that Cheh’s support for this project is entirely consistent with her oft-expressed commitment to smart growth. On one level, I’m certainly willing to believe that Cheh’s position on this project has been driven by ideology. Cheh has consistently espoused a very simplistic version of “smart growth” which basically boils down to “if there is a Metrorail station, then maximize residential density.” This position makes her popular with developers, of course, but I don’t assume that her support for this project (or other similar ones) was bought per se. At any rate, support for a concept doesn’t justify Cheh’s refusal to deal with and her attempts to suppress the very real concerns raised by the community about the project’s shortcomings.
Secondly, the fact that Cheh’s June 6th letter expressed a preference for competitive bidding is, for me, not particularly relevant. As Commissioner Sullivan’s testimony points out, the issue is whether the land should have been put on the auction block at all. That was the major hurdle that Roadside needed to clear, and Cheh’s letter was essential to their success in doing so.
The fact that Cheh didn’t ask Fenty to award a no-bid contract for Roadside just means that sometimes friends ask for things that are unreasonable, so you do what you can for them and let them do the rest themselves. And, frankly, it has been clear throughout these discussions that any competitive bidding process would involve a very uneven playing field tilted in Roadside’s favor. They had a major head start, information no one else had, and a former employee running the show. And remember, a month later, when another crony’s interests were served by a no-bid contract for a similar deal in the West End, Cheh voted for it. See http://ocf.dc.gov/pdf_files/cfd/OCF%20FI2007-101_95.pdf for details on Eastbanc VP Joe Sternlieb’s role in Cheh’s campaign. Her Roadside letter didn’t rule out a similar approach for Tenleytown, though the outrage that resulted from the West End deal made such an outcome politically impossible.
As for suggestions that Commissioner Sullivan was out of line for criticizing Councilmember Cheh, I have to say that I’m very pleased to be represented by ANC Commissioners who see their role as that of advisors rather than sycophants. And I hope to be represented by a Councilmember who sees her role as serving the public interest rather than handing out favors to courtiers. Yes, it’s regrettable and counter-productive when the relationships between ANC Commissioners and the Ward Councilmember become this antagonistic. But it doesn’t follow that the way to prevent that outcome is for ANCs to roll over and play dead. Maybe it’s time for our novice Councilmember to recognize that the ANCs can function as a valuable resource for providing insight into the concerns of various neighborhoods within the Ward. That’s what they’re there for.
