Attorney-General Karl Racine’s Work for DC’s Poor and Homeless Community
What I believe is
the worst possible outcome of ever-blue DC’s local 2018 elections:
If Mayor Muriel Bowser
were to win re-election and Attorney-General Karl Racine were to lose, then the city’s
gentrification would likely be finalized and become irreversible. Someone who
won the seat as the city’s chief executive in the 2014 primary with only 11% of
the Democratic base would have gone on to win re-election due to the lack of
viable opposition (possibly with an even smaller slice of the electorate) in
2018. Her decisions aside, this gives her full run of the house to do as she
pleases. For her part, Muriel Bowser would very likely resubmit some of her
legislative suggestions which are designed to have negative impacts on the city’s
poor and she would be guaranteed to have some degree of success at getting the
DC Council to pass such bills into law. She might succeed at keeping the
Department of Open Government (DOG) under her authority (as opposed to having
DOG made a part of the elected and thus independent attorney-general’s office),
weakening DOG’s power and maintaining an “open government” contingent within
her office so as to receive warning about what DOG is investigating, stay
one-up on DOG and to carry out a mayoral cover-up. If the next attorney-general
were to lack an appetite for getting and keeping a gentrification-expediting
mayor under control, then the city’s poor would lose their supports. Key among the Bowser administration’s policies during a much-loathed second
term would be a closure of the CCNV Shelter by October 1st, 2022
without having made any meaningful effort to connect nearly 1,000 homeless
people (most of whom can and want to work) to housing-wage jobs.
INTRODUCTION:
The following is a compilation of the different things that
I, Eric Jonathan Sheptock, have learned about DC Attorney-General Karl Racine,
of the thoughts that I have about what an elected attorney general can do for
the city and of work that Mr. Racine has already done since taking office in
January 2015. In the spirit of full disclosure, I don’t work FOR or officially
represent him, though I’m beginning to work WITH him to address issues being
faced by the city’s poor and homeless community – an effort that he has proven
eager to undertake.
As of the April 18th, 2018 writing of this piece,
Mr. Racine is on the ballot for the June 19th, 2018 primary. That
may cause some skeptics to doubt that his concern for the city’s poor and
homeless community is genuine – to assume that he’s just pandering to the
voters. To be fair, I’ll say that he has expressed to me via email in May of
2017 as well as in April of 2018 that he wanted to meet with me to learn more
about DC homelessness. Though I participated in a 2017 meeting at his office
where a large group discussed an array of different issues and I had email
exchanges with him soon thereafter, I missed a May 2017 message from him in
which he asked for a meeting about homelessness. I only found it through a mail
search of his name in April 2018. Based on his repeated request nearly a year
after the first that the advocates teach him about homelessness, I’d have to
surmise that his interest in the issue is genuine and not driven by any degree
of political aspiration.
It’s also worth noting that Mr. Racine had thrown his hat in
the ring so as to run for mayor in the 2018 election cycle; but, he withdrew
his bid for mayor. He chose instead to continue his work as the city’s first
elected attorney general – the office having been made separate from the mayor’s
administration being a new dynamic that allows any DC AG to serve as a
counterweight to the mayor in a city where voters are not highly engaged in
local politics and where they thereby give the mayor full run of the house.
The next three subtitles are pasted from another writing of mine;
as, I am working diligently to get Washingtonians to see the importance of
political involvement and of having an elected attorney-general as well as the
importance of working with local officials after electing them to office.
Below them is a list of his responses to several questions I sent him –
responses that can, for the most part, be understood without knowing what the
question was – and a new question that I have for AG Racine. His answer to this
new question will do much to guide our collaboration on the issue of
homelessness. He emailed his answers my
to prior questions IN ALL CAPS
as a way of distinguishing them from my questions. (I offer additional explanation
where needed.):
AN ELECTED ATTORNEY-GENERAL
Karl Racine is Washington, DC’s first elected
attorney-general. He was elected in 2014, took office in 2015 and is up for
re-election in the 2018 election cycle. Mr.
Racine continues to explore the new possibilities that are created by the
Office of the Attorney-General (OAG) no longer being under the authority of the
mayor and the attorney-general no longer being a mayoral appointee.
The converse truth is that Mayor Muriel Bowser is the first
DC mayor since Home Rule that didn’t appoint an attorney-general. This creates
a natural and healthy tension between her and the AG that allows for him (and
any future DC AG) to keep her (and any future DC mayor) in check and to
maintain a balance of power. It’s worth noting that this balance of power is
especially necessary in 2018 in order to counter the dangerous (though
unintended) shift toward absolute mayoral power which is created by
the low voter turnout during the 2014 DC Democratic primary which allowed Ms. Bowser to win with 11% (42K) of DC’s
Democratic base (380K) and which is reinforced by the lack of viable competition during the 2018 campaign-less season.
THE ATTORNEY-GENERAL’S DUAL MANDATE AS AN ELECTED OFFICIAL
An attorney-general, whether appointed or elected, has
authority over the lawyers that work in the various departments of the
government that he or she represents -- with the possible exception of those
who work for the chief executive him/herself. However, as an elected official,
the AG no longer only represents the mayor’s administration; but, he or she
must fulfill a dual mandate of representing the government and the citizens.
That begins to explain why AG Racine is meeting with the community – so as to
construct an agenda as to what he can work on with DC denizens.
AN ADDITIONAL, IMPERATIVE STRUCTURAL CHANGE
An ongoing power struggle between Traci Hughes and Mayor
Muriel Bowser which has resulted from steps having been taken to keep the mayor
in check has now put the structure of DOG front and center. It is
counterintuitive to place a government watchdog under the authority of the
chief executive whose administration they are charged with keeping in check. AG Karl Racine has suggested that DOG be placed under his authority –
something that was made possible by the AG becoming an elected official but
which hasn’t been done yet. Making this change would get maximum
benefits with minimum effort by causing any sitting mayor to fear indictment
and/or a mayoral recall if he or she were to oppose the checks and balances put
in place by this structure.Placing Traci Hughes (whose 5-year term ends on April 22nd, 2018) or her replacement under the authority of OAG would make it easier for the Dept. of Open Government to do its job without fear of reprisal from those whom they are supposed to keep in check. The DC Council should also consider giving the director of DOG the authority to dismiss any non-appointed DC Government employee who is found, through a fair hearings process, to have deliberately and flagrantly broken any regulations around government openness – especially if the wrong that government opaqueness was meant to shield has been carried out and rendered irreversible damage to at least one party.
In light of the attempts at reprisal by the mayor’s
administration, it’s advisable that the term of Ms. Hughes be extended for at
least 90 days and emergency legislation be passed so as to place her office
under the attorney-general. Steps should also be taken to change the way in
which the position of director of DOG is filled and to revisit the relationship
between DOG AND BEGA (Board of Ethics and Government Accountability). It might
also be worth the AG’s while to investigate whether or not the Board of Ethics
and Government Accountability, through the part it played in the Bowser-Hughes
tension, acted unethically and cooperated at all with the administration’s
efforts to avoid accountability.
AG Racine’s comments
concerning the administration’s flap with Traci Hughes (CAPS to distinguish his
emailed answers from my questions): MY OFFICE MADE CLEAR THAT IT WOULD DEFEND THE OPEN GOVT OFFICE
(OGO) IN ANY MATTER BROUGHT AGAINST IT. I HAVE ALSO MADE CLEAR TO THE JUDICIARY
CHAIRMAN THAT OAG WOULD BE THE MOST LOGICAL AGENCY TO HOUSE THE OGO. THIS WOULD
GUARANTEE ITS INDEPENDENCE.
MY
APPROACH [to contract steering within DC Government]
HAS BEEN:
A) TO CONSISTENTLY SPEAK OUT ABOUT CONFLICTS OF
INTERESTS AS WELL AS THE APPEARANCE OF SUCH.
B) MOREOVER, OAG HAS NOT
HESITATED TO BRING ACTIONS AGAINST WELL HEELED DONORS AND CONTRACTORS.
C) I HAVE ALSO SUBMITTED
ANTI-PAY TO PLAY LEGISLATION TO THE COUNCIL
D) ALONG WITH A
COMPREHENSIVE CAMPAIGN FINANCE LEGISLATION THAT WOULD BAN DONORS FROM RECEIVING
GOVT CONTRACTS FOR TWO YEARS AFTER A POLITICAL CONTRIBUTION HAS BEEN GIVEN. I BELIEVE THAT BANNING DONORS FROM
RECEIVING CONTRACTS IS THE BEST AND MOST EFFICIENT REMEDY.
E) LASTLY, I PUSHED FOR
PUBLIC FINANCING OF CAMPAIGNS. (MODESTLY SPEAKING, I BELIEVE THAT MY EFFORTS
CONTRIBUTED TO THE RECENT PASSAGE OF CHANGES TO CAMPAIGN FUNDING.) By
the way, Mayor Muriel
Bowser reluctantly funded this new law with an $860K implementation
budget for Fiscal Year 2019 (which begins on October 1st, 2018.)
In my 4/11/18 blog post at www.theobsoletes.com/eric I list
several laws that Bowser seeks to change and which would decrease the mandate
that developers have to build "affordable" housing, would decrease a
citizen's right to sue over projects that will hurt the poor and would weaken
the powers of a government watchdog. In a recent e-mail to you wherein I
included the blog post that I am referencing, I briefly described a not-so-obvious
form of contract steering that occurs within the DC homeless services arena --
one that, in the minds of the perpetrators, justifies them doing little or
nothing for able-bodied homeless people. Add to this the dysfunction at
D.O.E.S. that I'll describe in a soon-to-come blog post and you have a culture
within DC Government of failing to assist and then disparaging the poor and
homeless. There are many instances that I could juxtapose for you. When you
factor the UMC obstetrics unit issue and the fact that a meeting about its
closure which should have been open to the public was kept secret, this
collection of truths points toward deliberate and expedited gentrification by
Muriel Bowser. Her plan leans heavily on contract steering and apparently
includes decreasing the capacities of or downgrading the quality of services
for the city’s poor as a way of frustrating the needy and those who might
always be low earners out of town.
ERIC, I COULD BENEFIT FROM AND WELCOME
A SIT DOWN WITH YOU ON THESE ISSUES, AS I SEEK TO FULLY EDUCATE MYSELF ON THE
ISSUES CONCERNING DC’s APPROACH TO HOMELESSNESS.
AS AG,
MY OFFICE HAS BROUGHT NUMEROUS ACTIONS AGAINST DEVELOPERS, PROPERTY MGMT
COMPANIES, AND LANDLORDS WHO HAVE UNLAWFULLY TARGETED VULNERABLE TENANTS, AND
OTHERWISE HAVE SOUGHT TO DISPLACE LONGSTANDING DISTRICT RESIDENTS e.g.: BY
PURSUING A STRATEGY TO CONSTRUCTIVELY
EVICT TENANTS BY NOT MAINTAINING THE PROPERTIES IN A HABITABLE MANNER.
Can you prove whether or not the meetings and
data that Bowser doesn't want Traci Hughes to give the public access to concern
matters pertaining to gentrification, mistreatment of the poor and/or contract
steering??? NOT AT
THIS TIME
What characteristics within the next mayor
(2019-2023) would make it easy for you to work with him???
COMMITMENT
TO DC’S MOST VULNERABLE RESIDENTS
A
collaboration-guiding question for Attorney-General Karl Racine:
Being
as you’ve expressed a strong desire to assist DC’s homeless and the legislative
suggestions, policies and practices of the administration which already do or
could potentially hurt the city’s poor and homeless community are a mixture of
intentional and unintentional acts on the part of the mayor, does your mandate only allow for you to take penal and corrective
action based on a strict interpretation of the law or does your mandate also
allow for you to address unintentional matters related to government dysfunction???
That
question might also be asked as: To what degree is it necessary for you to work
with the inspector-general of DC Government in order to address government
activities that adversely affect the poor and how likely is it that this
collaboration will take place???
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