But the big-footed charity, which came to town to set up a campus at Potomac and Pennsylvania avenues S.E. and in the process angered a good part of the community with its arrogance and entitlement, is now eating crow.
Due to be torn down are four brand-new, stand-alone town houses that cost $2.1 million to build and are the symbol of the charity’s headstrong ways. In their place, a Dallas firm will build a 274-unit condominium. It’s already a hot address.
But the sweetest victory banner of all is a scrap of paper. It’s a check for a mere $175.40 signed by Boys Town’s most furious champion, Father Val Peter, who will long be remembered for suing the mayor and the local group, as well as for poisoning the air with charges that the Capitol Hill community was racist to the core.
That check, the only reimbursement for expensive litigation — is now hailed by the two leaders of Southeast Citizens for Smart Development (SCSD) as a victory trophy.
The court that dismissed a suit against activists Will Hill and Ellen Opper-Weiner, leaders of SCSD, awarded it. The two, who raised over $40,000 to pay legal fees over the four-year fight to stop the charity’s plan are exultant.
Father Peter refused to pay until SCSD successfully sought a court order this fall. “I laughed myself silly,” Opper-Weiner said last week.
Last week, the two offered an open challenge to the Flanagan organization to return to D.C. all or part of the estimated $6 million profit that came from the sale of the large lot on which Boys Town was to be built and to forgo D.C. tax money that the Flanagan organization gets for operating a home for errant youths along Sargent Road N.E.
“It’s a fiction that this is a charity,” Opper-Weiner said. “Boys Town is a government contractor.”
Indeed, one of the issues that inflamed locals was the forecast that the Flanagan organization, which has an endowment of more than $900 million, would receive close to $50,000 from the city for each of the troubled youths it was to supervise at the intended Potomac Avenue campus.
park service
Chief Chambers: ‘How I lost my job’
An unrepentant former Park Police Chief Theresa Chambers has renewed the charges of upper-echelon muzzling and official whitewash of agency shortcomings — even though they cost her job as top cop.
Chambers was the first-ever female chief of the 620-officer agency but had the temerity to answer questions about staffing posed by Washington Post reporter David Farenthold. Suspension and an order not to speak to reporters followed.
Chambers, 47, has waged a fighting retreat against a campaign to oust her after she said her force was understaffed and stretched too thin to respond to anti-terror duties at famed Mall memorials as well as fight crime.
Her bosses sacked her, citing insubordination and disregard of orders from the top.
They had ordered Chambers, who since her ouster in 2003 has run a free-swinging and critical website, www.honestchief.com, to stop talking to the press, even though Park Service brass frequently do just that. Defiance of that order and a feud with President Bush-appointed Parks czar Don Murphy led to her downfall.
She has now issued a polemic detailing what happens to a whistleblower on Park Service time. “Following my termination and the publicity that accompanied it, it is unlikely that any current Federal employee will be willing to speak up with straightforward, accurate information about the realities of any danger we face,” she wrote.
Hill citizens have noticed for years that Park Police are unable to patrol their turf and that the police have closed such large and popular parks as Anacostia Park and Hains Point, as well as attempting to close smaller city parks such as the Hill’s Lincoln, Stanton and Folger parks, at night due to lack of patrol officers.
But Chambers had the temerity to state publicly that there were not enough officers to go around. That got her the ax. Chambers’s legal appeals continue.
range rover give over
City fines monster SUV heavies
Can there be any more ridiculous sight than a 100-pound woman maneuvering her gleaming Cadillac Escalade SUV into a street parking space on the Hill?
The four-wheel-drive monster towers above the other cars, belching hydrocarbons; its high fenders are a terror to those parked near. Though supposedly for rugged use in the outback, its equipment, tinted windows and gleaming enamel reveal that it has never been off the pavement. The lady climbs out, looking like a kid getting off a draft horse.
One SUV television ad recommends making a new lane through traffic by rolling right over the cars in the way.
D.C. has finally taken steps to limit the incursion of these huge trucks disguised as cars by upping the excise tax by 1 percent (which will mean about $500-$600 in additional costs to buyers) and increasing the titling fee from $115 to $155. The new fees are aimed at so-called sport utility vehicles that weigh more than 5,000 pounds.
Mayor Anthony Williams (D) and City Councilwoman Carol Schwartz (R) pushed the legislation, which got preliminary council approval Dec. 7. It’s not unfair to point out that the mayor drives one of the biggest of the breed, a Lincoln Navigator.
“It’s a security thing,” a mayoral spokesman temporized.
Schwartz and Williams said they are fighting pollution with the fees, which amount to SUV fines, but far worse than pollution is the danger that these cars cause on city streets. Some of them are so high that they have been banned from the Kennedy Center garage. When one is parked near a corner, it’s impossible to see oncoming traffic. Left turns are more dangerous because of blocked vision, and parking clearance is reduced.
SUV owners and car dealers are sure to lean on their horns over the strictures, but for years the SUVs have been the beneficiary of breaks and loopholes — they are in reality trucks but are registered as cars. They have been hugely profitable because they are simple rear-wheel-drive truck bodies with sheet-metal-and-plastic superstructure.
More than that, there is the psychological element. Police say big SUVs have become the prestige ride for the drug business. But for ordinary D.C. residents, they are a rolling fantasy. The Yukon, the Expedition, the Explorer, the Discovery and others all speak of manly wilderness adventures — which the vehicles seldom face on their placid trips from garage to parking spot. But for the driver, there’s always the thought that someday the freeway will narrow to a goat track, a maiden will shout distress and he’ll be there, all four wheels churning.
METRO
• Cure for the damps: There’s nothing like a roaring wood fire on a wet winter evening, particularly a Sunday — try Ella’s between F and G streets on 9th N.W. where they bake pizza “al forno” in a hardwood tiled oven in the back of this moderne restaurant — it’s the best near-Hill pizza. ...
• Grim report card: 48 percent of area jobs require a bachelor’s degree or higher, Washington Business Journal reported last week. But 37 percent of D.C. adults are at level-one literacy, which means they can’t sign their own names or total a bank deposit, and 10 percent of D.C.’s 16- to 19-year-olds are not in school or not high school grads. ...
• Handy to have, in light of Capitol Hill security hysteria, checkpoints, etc.: a card from the American Civil Liberties Union titled “What to Do If You’re Stopped by the Police.” Main advice: Don’t argue or complain. Take notes. Check it out at www.aclu.org.
• Unnoticed amid the fray of shopping, per holiday parties etc., Congress gave the best gift the Hill could have received — a green light, plus some funding, for the massive underground tunnels or tanks that will control storm sewage and street runoff, which now befoul both the Potomac and Anacostia rivers. ...
• Volunteer call is going out for exclusive Penn Quarter’s yearly gala to be held Monday (invitation only). People are needed to pick up food, label dishes, set tables and clean up the wreckage afterward. This may be the only way to crash this bash at the Great Hall of the Building Museum. Check in at
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• With Hill real-estate values still soaring (a recent report showed a 24 percent increase for the year), watch out for the city’s Property Valuation Confirmation van — an innocuous looking white van with a video camera jutting from the side, which films snazzy row houses for reassessment purposes. Solution? The ever-popular shabby look. ...
• A new Thai restaurant is due to replace 8th Street pub Mickey’s, whose owner is retiring; further down 8th, according to Hill Rag reporter Andrew Lightman, Las Placitas Cantina is closing down, to be replaced by Portner’s, a branch of a downtown restaurant. |
