The Worst City Government in America
DeParle, Jason
The Worst City Government in America When it comes to screwing the poor and feathering their nests, the District of Columbia's bureaucrats take the prize. by Jason DeParle If you came anywhere...
...He kept his job...
...You have skilled people doing yardwork ." Meanwhile, some maintenance workers report to . the managers of individual apartment complexes and others report back to central headquarters...
...But even studies that adjust for the District's unique status find plenty of money heading towards the till...
...HUD recommends one maintenance man for every 40 apartments...
...But what are friends for...
...She found sanitation lacking ("pest and roach problems are persistent . . . pesticides . . . are often unavailable for months...
...The maintenance department, he said, was in a state of "complete breakdown ." IN- Inventory control: In 1987, the housing authority hired a city policeman to check security in the warehouse...
...city inspectors had long known of serious fire-code violations, but let the house stay open...
...Luther Place Church helps run nine different facilities for the homeless, including a medical clinic, emergency shelters, and group homes...
...But this time the city's apartment hunters had connections: the building was partly owned by the city's deputy mayor for economic development— a man, it seems, who practices what he preaches...
...Are you concerned that your department had this information nearly a year and didn't act on it...
...unfurnished one-bedrooms in the same neighborhood were renting for about $350...
...Among the various adjectives that come to mind concerning the care of Franklin and Spells, "vigilant" does not arise...
...Rats, scabies, lice, and urine-soaked mattresses are abundant at the shelters...
...His family found out six months later...
...Troupe works for the city council...
...Troupe's review of time sheets revealed that in 1984 and 1985, at least 15 percent of all maintenance workers' time had been spent fixing administrators' offices...
...I am concerned about a number of things," she said...
...Thompson," the Post concluded, "wants to change the widely held view that the District government is inefficient ." Thompson's expanded responsibilities include supervising the city's ambulances and public housing—suitable places to search for more excellence...
...Consider the early-eighties tune-up match against the Yugoslavian abortionist, Milan Vuitch...
...How are things now...
...And those are the mayor's own emissaries speaking...
...The government's mismanagement is so complete that the passive sins of its inept bureaucracy surely rival any active ones of business exploitation as an oppressor of the poor...
...I'll have to read that report in detail," Bowie said...
...DHS announced an investigation of the deaths that dragged on for almost a year and a half and then exhonerated the nursing home staff...
...a two-by-four keeps it from taking down the kitchen wall...
...The Pitts was less kind to its homeless families, who, city inspectors reported, hunkered down sixtoa-room in the midst of loose plaster, leaks, poor ventilation, holes in the walls and floors, no fire alarms, broken lights, bedbugs, roaches, and other insects...
...Village after getting locked outside on a 25-degree night...
...others are part of whole buildings emptied for "modernization" projects and often forgotten for years...
...inspectors had documented the filth at the home but let it stay open...
...Bowie laughed...
...The clinic told her she was pregnant and suggested an abortion...
...Feldstein, who's building a career on the inanities of the SFRA, presented some of the doctor's handiwork...
...Closed circuit security cameras were installed in the warehouse— and stolen...
...Troupe said some apartments went unfixed for as long as eight years...
...On the night she died, Franklin was missing from the 9 p.m...
...Follow-up: So what happens after an epic struggle finally ends in a renovation...
...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...
...There's no small amount of irony in this since the the leaders of most big-city governments sell themselves as friends of the poor...
...One reason so many tenant complaints get ignored, the mayor's commission reported, is that many maintenance workers can't read the complaint forms...
...In March, three children died in a rooming house fire...
...Or Car GT897, a city vehicle parked downtown and forgotten for nine months, while transients slept inside it...
...She attacked the facility's hygiene ("dry, caked residue on lips and chins...
...housing employees and the "despair" of the tenants...
...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 protections, "it is almost impossible to fire anyone regardless of how incompetent or nonproductive," the mayor's report concluded...
...But not as demoralized as the residents of the city's cold, crumbling apartments, and the 7,000 people lined up to get in...
...The spending money pocketed by the 52 shelter workers—about $23,000 each if you divide it out—is nothing by the standards of homelessness magnates like Cornelius Pitts...
...A measure of the nurses' lookout skills might be found in the fact that they initialed the safe-and-sound box on his medical chart for hours after he'd been rushed to a nearby burn ward, where he died ten days later...
...The poor...
...By 1986 annual payments ranging between $1.3 million and $1.5 million had allowed Pitts and his wife to eke out an annual income of $245,000 in salary, benefits, and profits, reported Marianne Szegedy-Maszak in The Washington Monthly ["How the Homeless Bought a Rolls for Cornelius Pitts," July/August 1987...
...And he noted that the authority's work records are so screwed up that many workers' days were unaccounted for, so the actual touch-up of H.Q...
...And Troupe had doubts about whether the work orders that were completed produced any work...
...government than the Department of Human Services...
...Feldstein asked...
...Anecdotally, there are stories like the one about the city paying $2.5• million to rent a building it couldn't occupy because it failed to give the builder the plans to finish the interior...
...Who says the city doesn't care about the homeless...
...We have a very serious problem with some of our property staff with alcohol and substance abuse histories," said Madeline Petty, the authority's former director, in prepared remarks to her staff in 1985 obtained by the The Washington Post...
...It took teamwork—bad maintenance, bad inventory control, bad security, bad rent collection...
...Troupe reported that the authority frequently dispatches its most skilled workers, such as electricians or refrigerator repairmen, to perform its least-skilled repairs—like setting circuit breakers, or pouring Drano into clogged sinks...
...This perfection of service nondelivery is worth a closer look, for it illuminates not only the housing crisis but a force that animates the city bureaucracy more generally: a higher regard for employees' needs than for the needs of those they serve...
...Wilson says she hadn't had heat for three years and uses her oven instead...
...The elderly...
...Part of the bathroom ceiling is corroded, and part is simply missing...
...If it did, they'd stress selfservice, with a motto telling patients to "help yourself" This may have been the record-setting year, but city inspectors have been training for a long time...
...Instead, he got M. Jerome Woods, a California consultant whose earlier stewardship of the California social services department had provoked a legislative investigation into—that's right— contracting irregularities...
...we never used general anesthesia for abortion...
...Failure to respond to this letter will result in closure of the complaint," an administrator warned...
...may have been more extensive...
...One foreman drawing top pay for supervising 27 people actually supervised two...
...And we're not talking burnedout light bulbs...
...To use the law to recoup damages the city pays for killing its patients was certainly a novel legal twist...
...From 1981 to 1983, HUD reported, the city lost track of more than $300,000 worth of appliances...
...At least six residents of the home say they were sexually abused while city inspectors kept Ferguson in business...
...A barbed preface to his report says that they lied about data, failed to return his phone calls, and withheld documents...
...She stressed that DCRA is "an innovative, action-oriented department ." Its motto is "People Working With People for People," she said...
...To the city, it's like I'm not even here...
...Until 1982, the city kept renewing the clinic's license...
...But American woman is sensitive...
...There are instances of maintenance staff being personally involved with residents and showering those residents with extra maintenance services while other residents go lacking...
...There's more...
...Wade sleeps on a fold-out cot in the dining room...
...Housing authority officials work for the mayor...
...In 1986, David Clarke, the city council chairman, charged that Bbwie had taken six years to rewrite drug regulations—abandoning their enforcement in the meantime...
...The city spent $128,000 in 1985 to fix up one longabandoned rowhouse, Troupe reported, but eight months later, it was still empty...
...Feldstein asked...
...Home is where the hose is While the crisis in D.C...
...No rats allowed...
...That's just her kitchen...
...In 1988 Otis Troupe reported that the motel's food service contractor, in just eight months, had overcharged the city between $500,000 and $750,000...
...But her former boss, Carol Thompson, who headed DCRA for three years until 1986, did her one better...
...In D.C., misery has won...
...Any lingering doubts about Vuitch's talents were erased when the doctor himself went on camera...
...Later in the year, police announced they were investigating reports that the owner of a day-care center had raped the pre-schoolers...
...refrigerated with food" (1980...
...the District has one for every 26...
...It was a lack of discipline from the top all the way down," said Sloane, the commission staff director...
...After driving to the wrong address twice, a rescue unit never did catch up with Victim Number Nine...
...And even then it didn't stir much...
...Exhibits A and B in this regard are two city-run shelters, Pierce and Blair...
...Feldstein asked...
...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...
...And the department didn't exactly score a public relations coup when a 911 dispatcher told a distraught caller to "grow up" Everyone knows that big-city governments are bad...
...Her years as the city's top inspector earned her a promotion, first to deputy mayor and now to city administrator, a $77,500 job as the District's top bureaucrat...
...auditor, decided to have a look...
...Promising to discipline those responsible, they began an investigation that ended 17 months later with the conclusion that no one should be punished...
...public housing, even these two motels can't accommodate all the homeless families in need of city help...
...We met Wanda Wilson, who lives with her son at the Greenleaf apartments in southwest Washington...
...For all the broken toilets, missing sinks, or unheated apartments, there's one building that gets worked on rather often—the housing authority headquarters at 1133 North Capitol Street...
...Apparently others have had the same idea...
...As reports of the lost ambulances increased, the fire chief got serious: he rushed out and bought his crews some $8.95 maps...
...She collapsed...
...The next year, The Washington Post told Eva George's story: In 1980 maintenance workers removed a radiator from her home, promising to bring a new one in a few days...
...Troupe's audit is just one in a series of reports that tell better horror stories than Stephen King: ID- Occupied apartments: One way to handle bellyaching tenants is just to ignore them...
...One feeds on another, but the lion's share of the credit goes to maintenance officials and their staffs...
...mistresses, or the parole prospects of his former aides...
...He spent an hour walking around it without security guards noticing and wrote a report concluding he "could have taken just about any property that [he] could carry out of the building...
...The right, seeking to get the feds "off the people's back," nurtures a vision of bolstered local powers...
...by Jason DeParle If you came anywhere close to Washington, D.C...
...He cited "numerous instances" where renovated homes "remain vacant for months after completion," which subjected them "to vandalism and further deterioration ." For a look of our own, The Washington Monthly recently picked a random project for a visit...
...Daunted by the difficulty of scheduling a truck from the city motor pool, some maintenance workers used their own cars to move heavy equipment...
...Beginning in 1982, a series of, shall we say, generous city contracts to house homeless families pulled the Pitts Motor Hotel out of deep red and plunged it into abundant, lucrative black...
...They carted back buckets from a private apartment building in order to cook and wash...
...But the point isn't that city workers get more than they deserve...
...In the wake of the Rivers investigation, that was too much even for Barry (which is saying something) and the mayor fired him...
...And they let the day care center stay open...
...No way, said Lucenia Dunn, a public information officer...
...It's no easy feat to keep so many apartments vacant and vandalized when pesky budget officials start shoveling $100 million your way...
...bloody drainage seeping through her knee sock over the top of her left foot...
...And, some of these maintenance staff are spending time in these women's units when they should be working" Maybe these are the folks James Taylor had in mind when he sang, -"Hey baby, I'm your handy man ." Drugs are one problem...
...She suggested that "TV was on for the staffs benefit, not the residents" And she found continued problems with, of all things, the boiler...
...She faulted its supervision ("nurses were vague about who was in charge...
...I will have to address this with the appropriate individuals," Bowie explained...
...Well, let's see, where could she be...
...Given this bargain, DHS officials renewed Pitts's contract from 1982 to 1986 without even bothering to seek other bidder's...
...I think it's a lost cause," she says...
...two deputy administrators, with the slot empty for 22 months...
...In 1987 and 1988, inspectors found unchanged wound dressings, poorly kept records, peeling paint, a leaking ceiling, poorly labeled drugs, roaches, water bugs, and asbestos...
...And money isn't the issue...
...Under fire, DHS officials stalled for time...
...Feldstein asked...
...During that time, Vacant served as chief of maintenance for 23 straight months...
...But even with this variation of breakfast in bed, she spends more than half her income on utilities and rent...
...Franklin had a habit of wandering outside, especially in the cold, but no one bothered to check there...
...At least Wade has shelter...
...I don't want to be crass," Clarke said, "but what took six years...
...But when Cloherty went to have a look, city workers threw him out...
...The subsequent on-camera exchange belongs in an archive of bureaucratic indifference: "I'll have to read that report in detail," Bowie said...
...and four chiefs of management, including a year under an acting manager's direction...
...Why, she even gave city inspectors copies of In Search of Excellence...
...They don't, shall we say, make us wonder how city managers can make ends meet...
...It even brought new patients: "Residents were removed . . . because they didn't look good," said a third employee...
...Feldstein pressed on, quoting from a report from a different city agency that Sutton patients were losing weight from bad food and that two had died mysteriously...
...So what, then, is the problem...
...A former Caldwell House supervisor wrote inspectors in 1986 that he had "observed some residents urinating and defecating on themselves, . . . residents eating cigarette butts, trash out of the trash can, eating their own feces" In 1985, Feldstein reported that city inspectors had documented 397 violations at Sutton homes in five years...
...I think [the government's] just inefficient and incompetent ." As for what the city does with the $4 billion in taxes and federal grants it manages to retain, there are clues...
...Bowie's a bureaucratic survivor...
...But her real number is eight...
...Wade has fashioned a solution: she splits a $427, two-bedroom apartment three ways, with two other disabled women...
...Administrators got to see what it was that the maintenance staff was trying to maintain...
...This, as you might gather, does not make her a major player in the Washington real estate market...
...You don't see no deviled eggs unless inspectors come through ." It brought new furniture: "Things would be brought right at inspection time, and they would be collected right up after the inspectors left," said another...
...The District may be pushing incompetence to its limits, but other big-city governments aren't far behind (see page 37...
...Director Number One, David Rivers, resigned during a federal investigation into contracting irregularities...
...That's just the beginning of the bureaucratic bafflements...
...Officials explained that sufficiently clear "policy and procedures were not in place...
...Guess what...
...Housing officials, he ruled, "ignored and walked away from their responsibilities to public housing tenants...
...public housing has consigned Lilian Wade to a waiting list, it dumps others into the street...
...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 out the trash...
...In the winter of 1987, the city rented 12 furnished one- and two-bedroom apartments in southeast Washington for $3,078 each a month...
...anesthesia "not freshly prepared and yellowish in color" (1983...
...A lesser agency surely would have fixed something, even if by mistake...
...And who knows how long it took to get the case to court...
...Attempts to say just how wellfunded it is get complicated, since the District has responsibilities that elsewhere get divided between cities, counties, and states...
...Some of the city's vacant apartments are scattered throughout occupied projects...
...Fixit, working his weary way through the city's 2,700 backlogged maintenance requests...
...We get pork and beans...
...If bad local government were simply a matter of waste, we could just rub our sore wallets and hold a legitimate grudge...
...remember the 61 Philadelphia rowhouses destroyed during the city's standoff with MOVE...
...Any number of hypotheses arise to account for the lost car and empty building, but a lack of clerical and administrative staff is not among them...
...fecal matter found on the floor...
...In crucial areas like public housing, the District has even been caught returning federal money it failed to spend...
...Though my attempts to speak to Bowie were unsuccessful, I did get to talk to two other DCRA officials, and I asked them if the recent deaths and sexual molestations indicated a pattern of lax enforcement...
...A wish called Wanda In 1986, just about the time the maintenance workers got this system really humming, Otis Troupe, the D.C...
...last year, chances are you heard about the ambulance crews...
...The agency's name makes it sound like it runs gas stations...
...The city classified him as "unidentified" and sent his body off to be cremated...
...Not that the city doesn't have standards where private shelters are concerned...
...Woods lasted nine months in the District, until the reporters discovered that he was using city money to buy groceries and pay rent for himself and his top aides...
...In the meantime, Marion Barry, a mayor whose passion for efficient government knows no bounds, cast his net wide for someone to put the department back on course...
...With 9,800 employees and a $1 billion budget, DHS accounts for about 25 percent of city spending...
...When the police caught up a month later, he was wanted for four more killings...
...But the real story is this: they're worse than you think...
...Three years and no radiator later, a grievance officer ruled that the 13 code violation in George's home threatened her "life, health, and safety' When the Post checked on the radiator three years after that, George was still waiting...
...This, as it turns out, may not buy much soap, but it buys a lot of employees-52 of them, in fact...
...We don't beg" But not far from Wade's home there's a familiar Washington sight: empty public housing, and lots of it...
...Unoccupied apartments: Housing authority guidelines say that minor repairs to vacated apartments, such as changing locks or painting the walls, should take no more than seven days...
...The befuddlements of big-city government are not only tragic but ironic, given the zest for local government across the political spectrum...
...I will address that issue at another time," Bowie said...
...She was still missing at the 11 p.m...
...Casper poked around for a few months and delivered a stinging report...
...After that, with inspectors' reports growing ever more vocal, the agency just let Vuitch operate without one...
...The department shut down dozens of its offices so that 140 of DCRA's 840-member staff could attend a seminar called "The Customer and You—Partners in Service" But if the inspectors are a little hard for the public to reach, they've been perfectly' accommodating toward the nursing homes—offering advance notice of inspections and a chance to do some sprucing up...
...Feldstein's hidden camera filmed patients smoking dope in their rooms and unlicensed workers giving out powerful psychotropic drugs...
...But given the way city inspectors enforce the law, they're certainly free to try...
...but not for the better...
...This, in turn, gives the city government the chance to add to the misery of another class of people: the homeless...
...Hey, man, it's freezing out—you go...
...A few years of toting refrigerators around in their car trunks must leave these people awfully demoralized...
...Department of Housing and Urban Development voiced their dismay over the "apathy" of the D.C...
...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...
...Housing authority offacials more or less told Troupe to stuff it...
...This included the stories of two women who died on Vuitch's table, and another who said Vuitch operated without anesthesia...
...Inspection Day brought new food: "They fix 'em deviled eggs...
...Well, well, money's tight, and in an age of government cutbacks you can't have everything...
...But Spells, who was confused, incontinent, and senile, continued to try to bathe himself...
...After maintenance workers failed to fix her son's broken window for two years, she says, she broke into the vacant apartment next door, took one, and fixed it herself...
...Only one state hires more administrators per teacher...
...Last year, city inspectors visited his church shelters and wrote up six pages of violations—citing such dangers to the dispossessed as "walkway has cracks" and "rooming unit not numbered ." Steinbruck says it cost the church $10,000 to comply...
...In July, a 65-year-old woman in a home for the mentally retarded died after setting a fire in her room...
...The ones everybody's saying all along they're doing for—they're the ones suffering the worst," says Wilson, who, like a certain Washington, D.C...
...Sheets and towels included...
...in the old country...
...I lacerated uteruses' Not every public facility can match the one-two, hot-cold whammy of D.C...
...They kept racing out of the fire stations and losing their way, while their patients choked and bled to death...
...Vuitch admitted he sent yet another home after half an abortion and told her to return the next day with an additional $400...
...They said they wouldn't renew the clinic's lapsed license for 1983—a nice gesture except that it was November, 1984...
...She was 17 years old and six months pregnant...
...A good place to begin would have been the inspectors' own files, which contained documented complaints about the home dating back to 1980...
...Commission on Homelessness...
...A few years ago, the federal government got so tired of the District's decade-long failure to spend modernization funds, it finally stopped forwarding the money...
...Ferguson pled guilty in September to sexual assault...
...But the city spends $1.2 million a year to run the two shelters...
...But the landlord did throw in some counseling services (including, one might hope, the counsel to go into business renting apartments to the city...
...Bureaucrats on the veld Given its size alone, there's probably no better sample of the D.C...
...These delays help guarantee that the apartments will continue to deteriorate, sometimes so extensively that the tenants flee...
...Ahh, so that's where she was...
...But tenants have tried that too—Troupe reported that the authority hadn't fixed the faulty wiring in one apartment nine months after a court-imposed deadline...
...It accounts for a good share of city turmoil, too—with four directors in two years, DHS makes the New York Yankees look like a paragon of stable management...
...And for some liberal intellectuals, city government serves as the repository of hope for those activists who wanted to "empower" the people through "community development" But whatever the doctrinal allures, bureaucratic inanities block the empowerment of anyone besides the bureaucrats...
...In the spring, police charged Weldon Ferguson, the operator of a home for the mentally retarded, with sodomizing a client...
...Mainstream Democrats, attacking the Reagan-era cutbacks, have presented big-city mayors as a more compassionate example of executive leadership...
...The District has the only child support collection agency in the country that consistently has spent more than it has collected...
...Sure, civil service rules keep incompetent workers in, and strict residency requirements have kept lots of talented people out...
...By and by, they called the cops, who found Franklin's frozen corpse beside her wheelchair, 50 feet from the building...
...But this story comes with a twist: Among the patients was Wayne Smith, whose complaint of sexual abuse was taken so seriously by the city inspectors that they dashed off a letter telling him to call and arrange an interview...
...Archive of indifference In 1985, Margaret Engel of The Washington Post reviewed hundreds of SFRA inspections and found that the city had frequently ignored citizen complaints (as Weldon Ferguson's sodomized clients can attest), waived mandatory federal rules, and failed to follow up on documented violations...
...Not that bringing the troops downtown didn't serve a function...
...Pitts, who, like most of his clients, is black, says he knows why...
...But DHS wasn't interested...
...We take that very seriously...
...unlicensed drug distribution and surgical instruments mixed with clean ones (1982...
...As the District's inventory of empty public apartments has grown, so have the numbers of homeless families lining up at shelters...
...Typical are fights between the foremen, who are mostly male, and the project managers, who are mostly women...
...Cloherty reported that Washington's church-run shelters provide a real night's sleep for about half the cost of the city-run squalor...
...Ready for one more...
...Sure, the bureaucracy functions first as a jobs program for its employees and only secondarily as a government...
...After two negligent deaths in three months, Spells wasn't the only one in hot water...
...Perhaps part of the answer can be found in events such as a 1986 seminar for the employees of the Department of Consumer and Regulatory Affairs, of which the SFRA is a part...
...Back then Wade held occasional jobs as a maid or nurse's aide...
...The condition of the Blair and Pierce shelters gives one hint of the quality of DHS work...
...Her large kitchen sink has no legs...
...The home she died in, Sutton's Caldwell House, became a target of attack by neighborhood groups, who said the patients walked the streets half-naked, begging for money...
...mayor, has civil rights roots in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee...
...Why were you not informed what was going on with this 21-page investigative report...
...You have the wrong people in the wrong places doing the wrong things," says Glenda Sloane, who served as the blue ribbon commission's staff director...
...This demonstration of the bureaucrats' willingness to share the tenants' burdens comes with an ironic footnote: the housing authority doesn't own its administration buildings, another city agency does, and therefore its maintenance staff isn't supposed to work on it at all...
...Our nominee is Frances A. Bowie, head of the Service Facility Regulation Administration, which licenses the city's nursing homes, day care centers, dialysis centers, homes for the mentally retarded, abortion clinics, and lots of other places to which vulnerable people turn...
...Thank you, they said, and welcome back to Wisconsin...
...Very pushy...
...How's this for a year's work...
...They might be fat, sloppy, kind of ugly, unkempt, had a big mouth, liked to talk, liked to complain ." "That's all our people," said Sutton, denying this was anything special...
...Poor fellas, they were just a bit disoriented...
...City law allows officials to recoup the cost of indigent care if the indigents somehow leave estates—from insurance policies, say...
...Director Number Two, Byron Marshall, served in an acting capacity for six months...
...And they did it without reimbursement for gas or wear-'n'tear...
...doesn't want to have memories of the surgery...
...Repairs involving more substantial work, like fixing broken floors...
...What did your people do about this when they got the report...
...No wonder Szegedy-Maszak found Pitts tooling around in a $117,000 Rolls Royce and a $61,000 Mercedes-Benz...
...Showers, sheets, towels, toilet seats and toilet paper are not...
...One pipe drips into a waiting bucket, and another simply falls out from time to time...
...A church organization down the street from Pitts offered the city better services for about 20 percent of the cost—$500 a month as opposed to $2,748...
...By 1987 the mayor's blue-ribbon commission on public housing argued that "the picture had changed...
...And it's not as though the District lacks the money to fix them up: In the past three years, the city has allocated about $100 million to modernize the apartments—so much that the housing authority can't figure out how to spend it all...
...One thing this army of carpenters, plumbers, and custodians needs is a decent general...
...T]he number of maintenance workers is more than adequate," stressed the blue ribbon commission report...
...Often, nothing...
...And the rival governments aren't exactly portraits of efficiency...
...Ever-vigilant, the city inspection office decided to have a look...
...They posted warning notices and began giving sponge baths...
...Smith, who is mentally retarded, doesn't read...
...A month earlier, a maintenance foreman had told them that he couldn't get the part he needed to fix the boiler...
...She's managed to hang on as inspection chief for seven years, which must make her one of the city's most enduring officials...
...Only when Mark Feldstein of Channel 9 aired a graphic series on the clinic in 1984 did the city bureaucracy stir...
...Plus the city sued the victims' families for hundreds of thousands of dollars to recover the cost of the "care...
...And they're worst of all for the poor, for whom city services such as public housing and public health care are supposed to offer a last defense against pure misery...
...Not only have they taken up to eight years to fix vacated apartments but auditors have found they ignore more than half the maintenance requests from those that are still occupied...
...This is not the only lacerated uterus in 15 years," he said...
...Three different city agencies knew about the condition of the home but did nothing about it...
...We go to churches and get some canned goods," she said...
...Charles Goggins, then the housing authority's chief of maintenance, told the commissioners about a maintenance worker who went AWOL for 1,000 hours...
...bedcheck...
...This leads both to confusion and "a clash of egos," says Calvin Gurley, the staff assistant for the blue-ribbon subcommittee on maintenance...
...Katherine Boo and Michael Weeks provided research assistance for this article...
...The city brought in a consultant to quiet the uproar, then bagged her when her recommendations proved too tough...
...In January 1985, 88-year-old Wilhelmina Franklin froze to death at D.C...
...The city historically has spent about twice the national average to deliver a welfare check...
...I lacerated uteruses and other surgeons lacerated...
...illiteracy is another...
...Perhaps this Clouseau-like application of magnifying glass to church sidewalk is what has delayed city inspectors from arriving at the city-run shelters...
...To waste more money than the competition takes work...
...a strong smell of urine prevailed throughout the facility...
...As you might have guessed, despite complaints of abuse from the patients themselves, the city let the home stay open...
...A small sampler from recent months: No...
...No telling how many never get that far...
...it's that city residents get less, particularly those most in need...
...While the city decided it had no beef with the nursing home staff, it was less forgiving of the victims' families...
...It is widely reported that on some properties many of the maintenance staff drink or get high on the job...
...As a nice touch, Feldstein sent a woman co-worker into the clinic with a vial of his urine...
...Pesky budget officials Somewhere inside Washington's public housing authority, she's #247-56-2910...
...The staff didn't have to go outside to check on Spells...
...In 1971 auditors from the U.S...
...Pierce offers four showers for 170 men...
...patients illegally taken home overnight, use of expired drugs (1981...
...city inspectors had a long list of violations at the home, but let it stay open...
...Cloherty presented the appropriate officials with the evidence and managed to flush out a bureaucratic response priceless for its adherence to classic lines: "We've been trying as best we can with minor repairs to keep [shelters] up to a minimum standard of safety and comfort," said Virginia Fleming, deputy director for administration at the Department of Human Services...
...In D.C., as in most big cities, the usual case against the government focuses on old-style sin and scandal: rumors of the mayor's drug use and Jason DeParle is an editor of The Washington Monthly...
...When the woman upstairs does her laundry, she says, water leaks into Wilson's kitchen, so she listens for the machine and makes sure there's no food on the counter...
...A social worker at George Washington University offered reporters this description of Doris Giovannoni's body when it arrived at the emergency room: "She was absolutely filthy, and her body odor was beyond description . . . She was covered with lice, and her knee-high stockings appeared to be bonded to her skin...
...10' A drug dealer suspected of murder walked out of the courthouse after two clerical errors combined to set him free...
...City inspectors had received repeated charges of sexual abuse...
...Shopping around, the city managed to whittle down a nearby competitor to the bargain basement price of $2,661...
...At the suggestion of an advisory commission impaneled after the deaths, the city hired Sandra Casper, a Wisconsin nursing home consultant, to help set things straight...
...The church pastor, John Steinbruck, chaired the D.C...
...Her energy level is legendary," the Post recently enthused...
...Only oil-rich Alaska collects more tax revenue per capita...
...A 1985 Mark Feldstein series on three troubled homes owned by self-described multimillionaire Joan Sutton explained how this works...
...At least these shortcomings haven't held anyone back...
...Sister Ronnie Daniel, who works at Blair, says that that shelter offers none...
...Unlike the people it purports to serve, one thing the D.C...
...Daniel says the staff responded to one shower request by handing a homeless man a hose...
...boarding house collapsed and died after arriving in an emergency room while covered with maggots and lice...
...said one former employee...
...A murder victim died with 22 pieces of identification in his wallet...
...That was two years ago...
...The result was "closure of the complaint" And another 22 months passed until a doctor discovered that another patient had been sodomized...
...IP- An 88-year-old boarding home resident collapsed and died while covered with maggots and lice...
...In response to Feldstein's questions, Bowie's office finally issued a statement...
...City files bulged with violations dating back at least to 1980...
...They didn't like what she told them, so they got rid of her...
...But in fact it has plenty of hired help—more, literally, than it knows what to do with...
...In 1986, The Washington Post quoted comments leaked from a closed housing authority meeting in which the director said she couldn't fully account for $1 million worth of refrigerators and ranges...
...When the stockings were removed, in fact, the skin came off with them, and her ankles and feet were infested and covered with large and small maggots eating well into the tissue...
...So the city spreads the wealth around, paying landlords in D.C.'s poorest neighborhoods prices that would raise eyebrows in Georgetown...
...frequently took two years...
...Village, the city's largest nursing home, offers another...
...government can't cry is "poor...
...In some cases, entire courtyards of shuttered, silent brick...
...Well, as they say, if you don't like it, sue...
...Given, among other factors, the mismanagement of D.C...
...Others aren't so lucky...
...In 1987 a federal judge found the complaints included such frills as a lack of heat and hot water...
...The agency's two exterminators, HUD found, did no pest-control work...
...a patient sent home with red urine and a catheter inside her (1982...
...The report had sat in Bowie's office for nearly a year...
...Screws and booze With a record like that, you'd think the District had but a single Mr...
...I just don't believe that any white person can be as interested in the welfare of poor black people as a black person ." Pitts's cross-town rival, the Capitol City Inn, does things on a slightly larger scale, picking up $4.3 million a year without even a contract...
...Just as revealing as the deaths was the city's reaction: Like Afrikaaners on the veld, the bureaucracy circled the wagons— insuring its own survival if not that of its patients...
...now, after a heart attack, she gets by on a $359 monthly disability check...
...Together they account for 19 percent of the city's public housing—more than 2,400 empty, waiting homes...
...Village...
...We have enough money," says John Wilson, chairman of the city council's finance and revenue committee...
...Facing two negligent-death suits, the city sued back for $340,000—its view of what the nursing home care had been worth...
...bedcheck...
...The District's mismanagement of public housing has a long and proud history...
...He lay hemorrhaging for 40 minutes until his family quit waiting for help and whisked him to the hospital, where he died...
...And perforated...
...Though Vuitch insisted she stay away from a hospital, she finally made it to an emergency room and gave birth to a dying fetus...
...Sutton places were back in the news this summer after 65-year-old Sylvia Singer died in a fire...
...Buried in the commission's report, there's a nice story about some of them...
...In August, an 88-year-old resident of a D.C...
...Alphonso Jackson, the authority's director, put it less delicately...
...Vuitch was still operating at the time of the broadcast, and it took the subsequent public clamor to close him down...
...The Pitts contract had a number of marvelous provisions, such as charging the city $97.07 per square foot for office space in a neighborhood of junkies and prostitutes while the city was paying only $15 for prime office space downtown...
...She was a real embarrassment to them," says Anne Hart, the ,city's long-term care ombudsman...
...but Troupe reported that maintenance workers in fact took an average of seven-and-a-half months...
...A record like that—five dead and many sodomized—ought to win someone an award...
...Don't you think allegations of that serious nature should be investigated thoroughly at the time they're turned over...
...In fact, three different city agencies knew about the conditions there, documented them, and then did nothing...
...Bowie conceded the homes had had a few problems but argued they "were not serious enough to pose immediate danger to the health and safety of residents there...
...Two months later, 71-year-old George Spells was burned to death by scalding water in the shower...
...Those were the good old days...
...A sampler: instruments "in need of cleaning" and "lab specimens...
...No one bothered to look for her...
...The authority failed to produce work orders on 56 percent of the maintenance requests that the property managers wrote down, Troupe said...
...Well, these things take time...
...In an italics-in-the-original statement, Troupe called their behavior "entirely unacceptable," which is what auditors say when they get really mad...
...When Casper issued a follow-up report a few months later stating that little had changed, city officials had heard enough...
...Instead they've seen more changes of government than postwar Italy, with many top administrative posts being filled by a leader named "Vacant ." From 1983 to 1985, the housing authority went through four different administrators, including a six-month period with none at all...
...he traveled right past the nursing station to a shower that nurses knew was spewing out scalding water...
...It was an environment where people felt, 'You can't fire me, you can't do anything to me' " That's not to say that all city maintenance men are drugged-out dodos...
...And this and that" Asked about the woman who said Vuitch had denied her anesthesia, he answered, "German-origin girl...
...After losing hot water for three weeks in 1985, the residents of one project lost cold water too...
...City attorneys finally abandoned this approach and settled out of court, paying $85,000 to the Franklins and $98,000 to the Spellses...
...And there you go—another vacant apartment...
...It is difficult for a white business person to care for my people," he told Szegedy-Maszak...
...That's how many years have passed since 59-year-old Lilian Wade first applied for a place in public housing...
...But plain corruption, of which there's been plenty, is finally just a footnote compared to the quiet cruelty of the District's everyday bureaucratic incompetence...
Vol. 20 • January 1989 • No. 12
