Promoting Good Government
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An Advisory Neighborhood Commission has no veto power and, as a creature of statute, its authority can often seem limiting. Our real currency is our credibility — and credibility is built on good governance and on ensuring decisions are made deliberately, with supporting records. So, neighbors should not only be able to trust me; they should be able to audit me - and their entire government.
The ANCs in DC are the most local unit of elected government in all of the United States and one of the least legible – other cities and localities have similar governmental neighborhood bodies, but are the only ones elected; others are appointed. Most residents cannot name their commissioner, do not know what the Commission voted on last month, and have no way to find out whether a District agency ever answered.
The ANC's real power is not in saying "no." It is in three things: deeply engaging residents, deliberate, transparent decision-making, and fighting to ensure that agencies actually give their views and recommendations "great weight." And that’s just the top layer of the job. When an ANC does its job correctly—with specificity, evidence, and a public record—it shapes decisions before they happen, rather than protesting (or responding to neighbors’ concerns) after the fact. This can and should be the antidote to many of the ills that plague the DC government and the approaches agencies take to decision-making. To be clear, things are not all bad, but they can be significantly improved, and the urgency to act now is greater than ever.
The next ANC term, 2027–2029, begins in the shadow of real fiscal constraints: a budget gap closed through reductions or one-time enhancements, constricted local revenues and shrinking federal financial support, and competing demands for the same dollars. In this environment, an ANC that intimately understands the District's government and fiscal structure and knows exactly where public money is going—and what it produces—becomes the neighborhood's most effective tool for defending public goods and demanding better returns on what is spent. And that will be more important than ever to ensure Columbia Heights is set up for success in the years ahead.
The Problem
From the perspective of an ANC, residents’ voices simply are not showing up in agency decision-making the way they should. The District has an operating budget, a capital budget, and, alongside those, agency spending plans. But the connections are often opaque about the District's real needs, and as a result, spending is often wildly out of control. It’s because of this that you hear residents asking why an agency fixed or replaced one thing but not another, even though the latter might have a greater overall impact on the community. And central to all this is the fact that the ANC was never asked or engaged about the budget or policy choices the Executive is contemplating for our neighborhood. Is a new service or facility planned for the neighborhood? It may have been planned three years ago by an agency with little to no communication to the ANC. Will the District respond to a problem we identify? The answer depends on whether the ANC's request lands with the right person and whether that person prioritizes it, which in many cases still results in months or years of delay.
An ANC that cannot read and respond to the District's budget and identify real recommendations to improve it is an ANC that cannot hold the Executive accountable - or urge the Council to make smarter appropriation decisions. Most ANCs do not. Most commissioners cannot explain where the money in the capital improvement plan comes from, why it was allocated the way it was, or whether the project ever materialized as it should have.
Fragmented Service Delivery
Coterminality means that the geographic boundaries, performance standards, and management structures of public services align so that the same area—in this case, Columbia Heights—can see all of them, hold them accountable together, and evaluate whether they are working efficiently. The District has not achieved this. A single neighborhood is served by DDOT, DPW, DHS, MPD, DOEE, and DPR, each operating under different service delivery overlays, performance metrics, and communication structures with community stakeholders. Violence interruption providers funded by the Office of Neighborhood Safety and Engagement may operate within geographic boundaries that differ from those of the DHS-funded homeless outreach or MPD’s Police Service Area. Some city services, such as DPW trash collection, follow ANC lines in some cases and diverge from them in others, such as police service areas. No entity is responsible for seeing the full picture of how public resources flow into a neighborhood or what they produce - and yet the ANCs could do this if service delivery was coterminous.
The ANC is the obvious locus for coterminality. It is the elected body representing the hyperlocal concerns and issues within a defined area - and importantly, this is separate from the role of the councilmember. But ANCs are not currently designed to play this role. To be clear, they have the authority to call agency officials before them (and, in some instances, non-governmental service providers) and can demand information on funding or performance (still through the FOIA process, which seems backward), but they have no institutional capacity to aggregate data across multiple systems and understand how agencies are effectively performing. And yet Congress and the Council implicitly grant ANC's the mandate to comment on matters affecting the neighborhood, which necessarily includes understanding which services are being provided, how they are funded, and whether they are being performed effectively.
Without this, the District's default is to allow services to proceed without coordination, clarity about who is responsible, or a neighborhood-level mechanism to identify gaps or redundancies. The ANC's role should be to insist on coterminality and to refuse to allow the excuse of "fragmentation" to shield agencies from accountability. Otherwise, the result is a District government that cannot answer basic questions: Where is public money going? Who is responsible for what? Are services reaching the people who need them? Are two organizations duplicating the same work? Is anyone accountable for outcomes? The District's answer to most of these questions is silence, because the fragmentation itself obscures the answer. The ANC's job should be to make that fragmentation visible and to demand coterminality so the neighborhood can see the full picture of what public resources - their tax dollars - are producing.
Additionally, the District funds nonprofit organizations serving our neighborhoods, including violence interruption providers, Main Street programs, behavioral health outreach and homeless services, and youth programming. An ANC has virtually no systematic way to know who these organizations are, what they are paid to do, whether they actually do it, or what the public got for the investment. The usual answer is: we do not know unless a problem surfaces. A service provider failing to show up is discovered by accident. Funds that are embezzled or mismanaged are eventually discovered by an audit or an investigative news report. An organization that is duplicating another's work goes unfixed because no one is looking at the delivery landscape. This is particularly acute in a neighborhood like Columbia Heights, where the District has invested heavily in violence interruption, community stabilization programs, and economic development, often through community-based organizations with little coordination or public visibility.
The “Great Weight” Gap
An ANC sends a resolution requesting information or proposing government action. Weeks, in some cases months, pass. No response. The ANC sends a follow-up. Another month. Finally, a brief email from someone who may or may not have the authority to commit to responding to the Commission's views. Meanwhile, the public has no idea whether the District is even considering the request. There is no log, no timeline, no consequence for being ignored. Agencies are required by law to only respond to views and recommendations in a handful of specific matters, and these carry “great weight.” In other areas of general advisement from the ANCs, an agency is not legally obligated to respond. And still, these are often the resolutions and reports that ANCs really do want to engage agencies on, because they go to the heart of our ongoing role to monitor issues affecting our neighborhood commission areas, which in turn should help the District government and agencies respond and address the issues effectively and holistically. This gap needs to be bridged in some way.
“The District works best when ANCs are at the table. The ANCs can transform how the City functions by exercising better oversight at the neighborhood level and by relentlessly holding agencies accountable for more effective service delivery.”
Our solutions
1. Publish everything, on a fixed schedule. Every resolution, letter, and vote posted within seven days, with the roll call and my written rationale attached — including, and especially, when I am in the minority. A commissioner who only explains the votes he wins is not being transparent; he is doing public relations.
2. An Agency Response Ledger. A public, running record of every request this office sends to a District agency: date sent, agency, subject, response received or not, days elapsed, and outcome. Non-response gets logged as non-response. This is the single most useful thing I can build, because it converts the District's most reliable tactic — outlasting the constituent — into a published statistic.
3. Financial hygiene as a standard, not an aspiration. On-time quarterly reports, a single checking account, documented grant expenditures, and published Commission financials — measured explicitly against the specific findings in the Auditor's ANC review, and reported to residents whether we pass or fail. I would rather publish a failure than have someone else discover it.
4. Language access that is real rather than nominal. Agendas, notices, resolutions, and constituent service intake in English, Spanish, and Amharic; interpretation available at meetings on request; and a Commission-initiated Language Access Act compliance review of the agencies serving this neighborhood. In a district where a licensing process failed partly because it assumed everyone had an email address and read English, this is not a courtesy. It is the difference between a government that exists and one that functions.
5. Meetings people can actually attend and follow. Reliable hybrid participation, agendas published at least a week in advance, consent agendas for uncontested matters so contested ones get genuine debate, written testimony accepted and entered into the record, and public comment scheduled early rather than at 9:45 at night after everyone with a child has gone home.
6. Grants with sunlight on them. Published criteria, published applications, and published outcome reports for every Commission grant dollar spent in this district. Small sums, high symbolic value — this is where public trust is either earned or quietly spent.
7. Even-handed oversight of District-funded organizations. Any community-based organization receiving District dollars to serve ANC 1A appears annually with a service map, contact volume, staffing, and outcome data. Applied evenly — to violence interruption providers, business improvement and Main Street organizations, and service nonprofits alike, including the ones whose work I admire and the ones who endorse me.
8. Committees that produce documents, not just minutes. Continue the model built in the Permanent Special Committee on Public Life and Neighborhood Planning: public hearings with real testimony, and adopted reports with numbered recommendations — as with the September 2024 Civic Plaza hearing and ANC 1A Report 2024-0008. A report with page numbers can be cited in a budget hearing three years later. A meeting cannot.
9. Defend Home Rule, because it is inside the job description. Support D.C. statehood and oppose federal interference with our locally elected government — including Section 740 federalization of the Metropolitan Police Department and the deployment of federalized troops that a federal court found unlawful. The ANC is the smallest unit of self-government in the United States. A commissioner who will not defend self-government has misunderstood the office.
10. Grade myself in public. Publish a first-hundred-days list, then a written self-assessment at the midpoint and at the end of the term, measured against the metrics printed in this document. Not a newsletter of accomplishments — a scorecard including what I failed to deliver and why.