The Worst City Government
The Worst City Government Candor is even rarer than competence in the District of Columbia government, so Commissioner Barbara Burke Tatum's testimony last spring in a lawsuit on the city's...
...And the city has taken steps to prevent its popping up again: it has stopped planting any new trees—and it's turning the tree nursery of the Department of Public Works into a parking lot...
...But residents can take comfort from the thought that this particular budget drain won't last very long...
...From 1984 to 1987, the DPW lost trees to the fungus at a rate of 4.8 percent a year...
...I am out of compliance with everything...
...Although the city's homeless-program budget had quadrupled in five years, the lawsuit charged that shelter overcrowding was so extreme that men slept without sheets on chairs and roachy floors, where they sometimes woke up drenched in urine from exploding public toilets...
...Tatum cleared things right up: "There are a number of issues that, when you don't have a longrange plan and don't have set priorities for it within a given fiscal year, you don't know what your goal is, so, therefore, you just do, is what I found...
...NW Washington, DC 20009...
...So subsequently you spend money but nobody knows where it came from...
...But the department deploys only two people to check up on the city's 14,800 elms...
...The Worst City Government Candor is even rarer than competence in the District of Columbia government, so Commissioner Barbara Burke Tatum's testimony last spring in a lawsuit on the city's sewage-seeping, ratinfested homeless shelters was a bracing change...
...So you don't have to be a brain to know that we're out of compliance...
...Because this fungus spreads quickly, a 1985 city plan for controlling it mandated that the Department of Public Works conduct three surveys a year and promptly destroy any sick trees...
...And the District managed to spend almost twice as much per tree...
...James Bennet Please send nominations to: Worst City Government The Washington Monthly 1611 Connecticut Ave...
...Katherine Boo Washingtonians have begun to notice that a large number of.the elms that once shaded the city streets are dead or dying...
...Although city officials have argued strenuously that they don't have enough money to house an increasing homeless population, City Auditor Otis Troupe found in 1988 that the District...
...and it frequently waits up to a year after diagnosis to remove an infected tree— plenty of time for an elm to unleash a fresh brood of killer bugs...
...So where did all that money go, if not for sheets and working plumbing...
...The District spent $31 million sheltering the homeless last year—second only to New York...
...How...
...The cause is Dutch elm disease, which is carried by beetles...
...unable to document its expenses, had neglected to collect millions in federal reimbursement for emergency shelter...
...As usual, the city government has chosen to invest more in the cure—tree removal costs $875 a pop—than in prevention...
...A full year later, when queried on the state of the reimbursements, Tatum reassured the court that her people were still "three or four years behind...
...the National Park Service, which also maintains elms in the city, kept its losses down to only 1.3 percent through prevention techniques that trap beetles inside infected trees...
...I know we haven't opened any new shelters," Tatum snapped when questioned...
Vol. 21 • November 1989 • No. 10
