Mark Plotkin, the dean of the D.C. statehood reporters, stuck the knife in. Not quite in jest, he accused Mayor Anthony Williams (D) of taking a “boondoggle” trip to China in the “last semester of senior year.”

The scene was the mayor’s March 1 press conference; the occasion the announcement of the “final deal” between baseball and the city.

But what was really remarkable about the conference was the mayor’s elegiac attitude. He didn’t bristle at Plotkin’s question; instead he turned it into an opportunity to praise his infamous predecessor, Marion Barry, calling him “prescient” for organizing a trip to China 20 years ago that led to the declaration of Beijing as “sister city” to D.C. Such trips, Williams intoned, always bear healthy fruit.

This city’s mayor is probably the smartest man ever to be the local leader. He is clearly bored with his job — there is no other explanation for his departure from the political scene when he stands head and shoulders above his political challengers — and yet he is still amused by part of it and enjoys tilting with the press. Every motion, every emotion that flashes across his smooth countenance says he has already moved on.

Williams has said he now wants to find something large that is broken and fix it. He clearly believes Washington is fixed, and perhaps he is right. The one time he flared with the press was when a questioner suggested he had been out of the loop on D.C. Public Schools Superintendent Clifford Janey’s “unveiling” of grand plan for reform. Williams stood straight up from his slouch at the podium and fired back time and date of the many, many meetings with Janey and others on the subject.

The answer was certainly no sell on Janey’s plan. Williams either has given up on the intractable business of the city’s miserable schools or now believes it will take generations to repair them. He has run out of time.

And then back to baseball, and to his wistful wish for a suitable residence for the city’s top executive — “But not for me” — and to a pension for the same person, and then to a curious whim of his, that the leader of Washington be called “governor.”

That’s how it ended, with a dying fall. “In the long run,” he said, even the Williams haters in Ward 8 would see the progress his administration had made. And he picked up his sheaf of papers and strode off, stage left.

BRIGHT WATER
Hill East clears a view

With little notice and without announcement, men and machinery have cleared a wide vista of the Anacostia River near Robert F. Kennedy Stadium that has been hidden for years.

The location is an area east of Congressional Cemetery and south of the D.C. Jail complex, little visited except by police fleet driving practice groups and throngs attending stadium events.

The change comes as a result of months of prodding by a group of Hill East activists including author Jim Myers, Lisa Alfred of the Barney Circle Neighborhood Association and Ellen Opper-Weiner, the activist Hill lawyer whose name is frequently mentioned as a possible Ward 6 City Council candidate.

“We wanted the neighborhood to have the joy of the sight of the water,” Opper-Weiner said. “It’s more symbolic than anything else.”

The symbol may be that of the growing power of local groups. Myers and others have led tours to this section of the riverfront, which forms the border of soon-to-be developed Reservation 13, the former D.C. General Hospital site. It has been used for years as a dumpsite for fill and an untended, unkempt patch of self-sown trees. A fence that borders the jail parking lot effectively blocks Hill residents from easily visiting, or even seeing, the river.

But on one visit last summer, Hill East group members took along Carol Mitten, the head of the city Office of Property Management, the agency that has jurisdiction over most of the buildings on the old hospital campus. Mitten promised to take action; last month a crew of tree and brush cutters moved in and cleared the undergrowth.

“Now because it’s winter you can actually see the river,” enthused Myers on a recent visit to the site. “I’m glad it got done before someone complained about wildlife habitat.”

One more big barrier remains between the public and the river on National Park Service (NPS) National Capital Parks East land. Either through neglect or on purpose, thousands of bush honeysuckle plants have been allowed to infest the riverbank. The bush honeysuckle, a spikey, impenetrable plant that grows to 8 feet, is termed an ecological threat by the NPS and is a proscribed plant on Park Service land.

If the Park Service would simply follow its own policies and remove the bushes, the Anacostia west bank would at last be visible. Park Service officials have said in the past that there is not enough money available for such measures. “What about volunteers?” asks Myers, “The riverbank could be cleared in stretches in a few hours of work.”

HEAP OF TROUBLE
City’s recyclables all mixed up

The tall, brawny recycling worker shrugs his shoulders. “I don’t sort it out,” he says. “I don’t know who does.”

The Hill’s (and the city’s) recycling program has fallen far short of high expectations, which saw as much as 45 percent of the usable trash being recycled. The current estimate is about 14 percent.

According to the official website of D.C. recycling (www.recycle.dpw.dc.gov), all is uplift. An annual festival, Earth Day, is coming up April 22. The Office of Recycling is offering to accept (at Carter Barron Amphitheater, 16th and Kennedy streets N.W.) such things as batteries, paint, office equipment, televisions and many other items (no propane tanks, microwave ovens, refrigerators, air conditioners or furniture).

But according to the Sierra Club’s Brenda Moorman, all is not so well. Seventy percent of D.C.’s waste comes from commercial sources and is hauled by private haulers, she reported, and even though recycling is mandatory in D.C., all that is required is a paper “recycling plan” filed with the Office of Recycling.

The result, says Moorman, is a “disgracefully short” 6 to 8 percent recycling rate, far lower than D.C.’s stated 14 percent.

Sierra Club surveys show the federal government fares hardly better. The four largest federal offices reached only 11 percent of trash recycled.

Larry Martin of the D.C. Environmental Policy Committee has tried to persuade D.C. Public Schools to separate out white paper (at $180 per ton a particularly prized recyclable) from daily trash but received a negative response.

That’s just the tip of the trash-berg.

In spite of detractors (like the brilliant but flawed “Recycling is Garbage” 1996 article by New York Times writer John Tierney), recycling remains the best hope for individuals to do something about the ever-increasing amount of trash, packaging and paper products produced by the consumer society. Finland, Denmark and Germany recycle 70 percent of their beer containers. We do 5 percent. QED.

• Barry Watch: High-water week for former Mayor Marion Barry (D). He completed his turnaround from one of the strongest opponents of the baseball deal (“This billion-dollar stadium is the worst stickup since Jesse James”) to hand-clapping fan of the $611 million (pre-cost-overrun price) stadium. His mumbled apology in court won him probation on his tax case. Now all he has to do is come up with $246,000 in tax arrears — and pass the next drug test. ...

• Measure of progress? Jean-Keith Fagon’s invaluable free Community Guide (published by Hill Rag) now measures 222 pages. The community phone book hangs in the kitchen of most Hill row houses. Last year a mere 174 pages, it now looks like … a phone book. ...

• Lime mortar — cursed by many, beloved by the so, so authentic restoration crowd, will be explored at a seminar to be hosted by Frager’s Hardware March 18 (this Saturday) at the Pacific Grill, 1115 Pennsylvania Ave. S.E. Contact Frager’s at (202) 543-6157 to register. ...

• A familiar flap is growing over plans to expand the Hill’s well-known private elementary, Capitol Hill Day School, at 210 South Carolina Ave. S.E. The 225-student school wants to add to an adjacent row house it owns and is pushing plans through the local Advisory Neighborhood Commission (6B). ...

• Here it comes — Washington Nationals tickets have gone on sale at prices 8 to 22 percent higher than last season, when attendance was on average 33,000 per game. But there’s controversy over how many of those seats were filled by “comps” — free tickets given to groups to promote game-going. So where’s the need for a bigger stadium? The cheapest Nats seats are still $7, however.

• School superintendent Cliff Janey wants to turn Eastern High School at 19th and E. Capitol N.E. into a magnet and a local version of his alma mater, Boston Latin School, the famous Harvard and Ivy League feed. Critics are asking where the expertise and funding can be found for the transformation. A better question: Where can the students be found? Eastern scored near the bottom in reading, with only 9 percent of 10th-graders rated proficient against national norms.