With the end of the Tony Williams era looming, D.C. politics is slipping back to business as usual. Name recognition is the game, issues are OUT.

That’s why this upcoming mayoral race, where a group of second-rate candidates are running with second-rate promises and even second-rate websites, is so important. There is a huge issue out there, and no one is willing to face it.

The issue, of course, is the pathetic, wretched, almost completely segregated schools of D.C.

Because of them, the whole progress of the city, the incoming of new, energetic people, the rise of blighted neighborhoods, financial stability and solutions to long-standing problems — all are in jeopardy.

You don’t have to go farther than a sunny Capitol Hill park to see this. The park is loaded with strollers, many of them tended by hired day-care workers, most of them occupied by the sons and daughters of young people who have cast their lot with the city rather than the suburbs. They have come here because the lure and the magnetism of the centrum are strong again, because the forces and the fears of crime and drugs and defeatism are being pushed aside by new expectations.

But a trap faces all these people: a school system so incompetent that most students never learn to read well, so frightening that shootings are par, and so riddled with defeat that it’s considered dishonorable in some neighborhoods to do well at school.

Tony Williams tried to take over this school system, it should be remembered, and failed because he met the status quo: people who really believe the system can improve from its position as one of the most expensive (per pupil), worst performing in the nation. Today’s leading mayoral candidates, Councilman Adrian Fenty (D-Ward 4) and council Chairwoman Linda Cropp (D), as well as council chairwoman hopeful Kathy Patterson (D-Ward 3), are all in lockstep, chanting the D.C. mantra: Throw more money at the infrastructure.

Today’s hymn is that “kids can’t learn in run-down schools.” It’s so ridiculous, yet that statement is truly believed by the establishment. The facts are seldom brought up: that schools are uniquely human institutions, that the physical plant is a minor element. What counts are the teachers and the students and the desire to learn. Great teaching as well as great learning can take place in a dripping cave as well as a well-lit room, not to mention a freezing one-room schoolhouse.

TAX INCENTIVE
Two years of stalling
Downtown D.C. is too often a desert at night. It’s far better than it used to be because of the boom in downtown apartment housing, the rise of 7th Street N.W. as an arts-restaurant destination, and the activity of Penn Quarter at the foot of Capitol Hill, which has quietly grown into D.C.’s Upper East Side for urbanites.

But a recent study — publicized in Washington Business Journal — shows that retailers still choose the suburbs by a ratio of close to 2-1. “Why go to D.C. if you can sit on the edge?” is the quote.

A big part of the reason for that attitude is the crummy, do-nothing reputation of the D.C. business bureaucracy, which is seen as charging fees for everything, putting up as many roadblocks as possible and then standing by with a huge tax bill.

Such is the experience of small businesses lured to the downtown area by a new idea, tax-increment financing (TIF). The plan, launched two years ago and funded with $30 million, provides loans on good terms to entrepreneurs, to be paid back out of sales taxes generated by the new businesses.

Businesses as small as a lingerie store and as large as Douglas Jemal’s Woodward and Lothrop building redevelopment have applied for the program. In the meantime literally hundreds of development schemes, large and small, have gone ahead without TIF help to change the face of downtown.

Yet not a single TIF deal has been inked. Not one penny of the $30 million has been lent. But you can be sure that the D.C. Office of Planning and Economic Development bureaucrats, housed in the luxurious Wilson Building, sporting the motto “City Living D.C. Style” have been pulling in their paychecks on time.

One clue to their “D.C. Style”: The website for the development office was last updated in February 2002.

Not only is the baseball stadium going to cost a great deal more than expected, it is built (intellectually speaking) on the flimsiest of foundations, a belief that the real-estate bubble that has hit Washington will continue.

Even the wildly optimistic D.C. Sports and Entertainment Commission is getting queasy. Wall Street said it won’t rate the bonds “investment grade” unless cuts are made. Mayoral candidate and City Council Chairwoman Linda Cropp (D) has already begun to pull the rug out from under by announcing last week that the $535 million stadium will cost much more and frills must go.

At least Cropp is talking about cuts. In the case of the visitors center, my favorite example of cost balloons, Congress started adding expensive new features even as costs exploded.

The usual way of doing business here is to dig the foundation of a new project, thereby anchoring it (in symbolic and financial terms), and to then start moaning about costs, adding that there is no turning back now.

Luckily for the stadium and the city, there is plenty of time for turning back. Not only has Robert F. Kennedy Stadium proved a salubrious and successful spot for baseball, the political truth is beginning to dawn even on the dimmest politicians here that the city simply cannot afford both a new $400 million hospital complex and a new stadium.

There was, at least, a bit of artful wordplay associated with this turn of events. Cropp, speaking of a pared-down stadium plan, said that the city could no longer afford a Cadillac, but perhaps a Buick. To which council member David Catania, (I-At large), who with mayoral candidate Councilman Adrian Fenty (D-Ward 4) is not a stadium cheerleader, snapped back, “If we want a Buick, we have one — it’s called RFK.”

• Barry Watch: Marion Barry (D), the former mayor and current Ward 8 councilman, showed how sensitive he is last week in two directions: He voted pro-business against adding more to the D.C. hotel tax to finance school rebuilding and stood conspicuously absent for a key vote on stadium financing, a project he’s always opposed. ...

• Dunkin Donuts dithers. Hill residents are curious: Is the famed chain coming or not to the corner of 8th and Pennsylvania Avenue S.E.? Dunkin, owned by French liquor giant Pernod Ricard, apparently forgot that D.C. is not France. Permits are required for major renovation such as that planned for 801 8th St. S.E. “Stop work” orders are now pasted up on the big storefront. ...

• A catalog cascade in your mailbox at this time of year can produce amusement. Top giftie so far for Hill rats: from A.J. Prindle (ajprindle.com), a stainless-steel cell phone with neat leather pouch. But it’s really a liquor flask able to carry 3 ounces of your favorite pick-me-up for those daunting mark-up sessions. ...

• CBD creep: The old Central Business District, like a rising dough mass, is swelling eastward led by Robert (Bob) Cohen, a city real-estate mogul. Cohen wants what was known as “the East End” (basically east of 16th Street N.W.) renamed “Midtown” and has approached Washington Post editors and other opinion makers. Does that make the Hill the new “East End”?

• The city’s new rolling blue and green trash cans have raised hackles in Hill alleys and discreet streets, but count on Jill Lawrence, the Hill’s energetic professional organizer (Jill of all trades). She’s designed a “polite and helpful” note to attach to eyesore trashcans. Her advice: “If you want to get rid of them, turn them upside down and call the city number (727-1000) or call me (544-5455).” Cost? Nothing.