WASHINGTON TIMES: D.C. ANC members break the rules without redress
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| Regina James (photo courtesy Washington Times) |
Excerpt:
In June, the D.C. auditor determined that William Shelton withdrew $30,000 from an Advisory Neighborhood Commission 5B account, spending it on payments for a Lexus and purchases at Bloomingdale’s. Mr. Shelton was chairman of the ANC in Ward 5, one of 37 little-scrutinized boards of elected officials each with budgets in the tens of thousands.
In the few weeks since replacing Mr. Shelton as the top official at the bottom of the city’s political hierarchy, Ms. James has punished colleagues who called for accountability, refused to give elected officials access to records, flouted legal judgments by city agencies, closed meetings to public comment, moved to hire a highly paid staffer and acted so suspiciously that she was evicted from a room in a drug-treatment facility where she had set up an office.
Excerpt:
There is no indication that ANC 5B has spent money on the community in recent years. Instead, it has purchased high-end BlackBerry service for every part-time, volunteer commissioner, recorded in auditor’s reports as a landline expense. The commission currently owes $8,000 to AT&T.
And it maintained office space inside a Salvation Army facility, where without any discussion or contract drawn up by the commission, Mr. Shelton began paying a friend, Patsy Staten, $25 an hour to answer phones about 25 hours a week. Ms. Staten signed her own timesheets. In repeated calls to the ANC office during those hours, no one ever picked up the phone.
Asked what she did at the office on a typical day, Ms. Staten said: “Twiddle my thumbs.”
Excerpt:
D.C. law says ANC officials must make documents available to the public upon request. But when they were requested at the front desk of the Salvation Army, Ms. James refused to come out of the office and called the police.
“I don’t give a damn about the D.C. code,” she said.
Excerpt:
Repeatedly, when constituents brought credible complaints about regulations that were ignored or flouted, the chairman refused to provide easily obtainable documentation, and the Office of Advisory Neighborhood Commissions declined to obtain them.
Reports that lacked so much as a signature were stamped by the auditor, and many reports submitted to the auditor are missing basic pieces of information. Multiple ANCs routinely failed to deduct taxes.
Commissioner India Henderson, who took over for Ms. Brown-Daniels as treasurer for a stint in 2010, said she documented repeated concerns to Mr. Simon; Lynard Barnum, then the auditor office’s chief ANC specialist who resigned weeks ago; and D.C. Council member Yvette M. Alexander, Ward 7 Democrat, who was then head of the committee with jurisdiction over ANCs. But nothing was ever done.
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