Focusing on the Bigger Picture
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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.
Public education and the Ward 1 feeder pattern
This is the most significant gap in my current agenda, and I want to name it directly. Columbia Heights families make decisions about whether to stay in this neighborhood largely on the basis of schools — Harriet Tubman Elementary, Bruce-Monroe, Bancroft, and on through Cardozo and Bell. In July 2026, a member of the D.C. State Board of Education wrote that the debate over new graduation requirements "only skims the surface" of students' real problems with college and workforce readiness, and that trust in the city's high schools has eroded. That is a candid assessment from inside the system.
An ANC has no authority over curriculum, staffing, or graduation requirements, and I will not pretend otherwise. But it has genuine standing on the things that surround a school: modernization capital budgets, Safe Routes to School treatments, joint-use agreements that open school fields to the neighborhood after hours, boundary and feeder-pattern decisions, and the quality of the walk to the front door. And a commissioner is often the only elected official a frustrated parent can actually reach. I would establish a standing education liaison function in this office and work in coordination with the Ward 1 Education Network rather than around it.
“‘Great weight" is not a magic phrase — it is an obligation that means nothing unless somebody checks. So I will publish every resolution, every vote, every agency response, and every single time an agency did not bother to answer at all, because silence is a finding too. I will publish my rationale even when I lose the vote. My neighbors did not elect me to be trusted; they elected me to be checked. The most radical thing a small office can do in this city is keep an honest, public record — and then live inside it.”
Our solution
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.