By Liane Scott, on April 27th, 2015 
Still not sure who to vote for tomorrow’s Ward 8 City Council Special Election? Here’s a voter guide provided by WUSA-9. I have rearranged them so that they are in alphabetical order.
Stuart Anderson (Democratic) He is a native Washingtonian and founding director of Family and Friends of Incarcerated People. He is also self employed in the property managment and home repair field. Website: http://www.ffoip.org/
Sheila Bunn (Democratic) A native Washingtonian, she was Deputy Chief of Staff to former Mayor Vincent Gay and Chief of Staff to DC Congressional Delegate Eleanor Holmes Norton. Website: http://www.bunnforward8.com/about
Marion C. Barry (Democratic) Known to most Washingtonians by his middle name, Christopher, he is the son of former council member and mayor, Marion Barry. This is his first run for political office and says he wants to carry on his father’s work. In a tweet about his run he wrote, “The legacy continues.” He told WUSA9’s Bruce Johnson hsi father encouraged him to run for the seat. Barry runs a small construction business. Website: http://marioncbarry.com/
Greta Fuller (Democratic) She has been an ANC Commissioner (8Ao6) for eight years. She was appointed member of the 11th Street Bridge Project Community Communications Committee; Member of the Historic Anacostia Preservation Society, Historic Anacostia Block Association, and Fairlawn Civic Association. Website: http://www.greta4ward8.com
Eugene D. Kinlow (Democratic) He is a native Washingtonian who lives in the Bellevue section of Ward 8. He is a senior Strategist at Dragon/Unicorn Strategies and Solution where he works on community engagement strategies for businesses and non-profits. Previously he was the Public Affaird Director for DC Vote. He is also the producer and host of the DC Politics Show on WPFW. He is past President of Ward 8 Democrats. Website: http://www.kinlowward8strong.com/
LaRuby May (Democratic) She has lived in DC for the past 17 years and has worked and lived in Ward 8 for 13 years. She currently serves as the Executive Directof of Vision of Victory Community Development Corporation, “an organization that focuses on real estate development and human capital development.” In 2005 and 2006, LaRuby served in Marion Barry’s Ward 8 council office as a Legislative Intern and Director of Constituent Services. In 2008, LaRuby was appointed to lead the DC Housing Authority Board of Commissioners. Website: http://may4ward8.com/meet-laruby/
“S.S.” Sandra Seegars (Democratic) She has lived in the ward since 1969 and calls Congress Heights home. She has been an accountant with the federal and District governments as well as a paralegal and ANC Commissioner. She also served on the DC Taxicab Commission. Website: https://sssandraseegars.wordpress.com/about-s-s-sandra-seegars/
Keita Vanterpool (Independent) She has lived and worked in Ward 8 for the past 10 years. She is a chiropractor and Chair of the DC Board of Chiropractic. Website: http://www.drkfcward8.com/tags/city_council_dc
Leonard Watson, Sr. (Democratic) As a councilmember he says “I will ensure improved relationships between the Ward 8 community and the police officers who work in the area. The installation of better street lights, more police walking or bike riding therough the Ward 8 neighborhoods.” Website: http://www.leonardwatsonsr.com/
Natalie Williams (Democratic) She is an ANC Commissioner (8A) which covers the Hillsdale, Fairlawn and Historic Anacostia communities. She was Vice President of United Medical Center, formerly Greater Southeast Hospital and was once communications/press director and advisor for then Councilmember Marion Barry. She also owns her own public relations firm, BlitzAssociates Inc. She is also a former WUSA9 news producer. Website: http://www.nataliewilliamsonline.com/home.html
Take a spin through candidate forums still available online.
The Anacostia Coordinating Council, in collaboration with Ballou High School PTSA, Advisory Neighborhood Commission 8C, and other local sponsoring organizations, hosted a Ward 8 City Council Collaborative Candidates Forum on Wednesday, April 1, 2015, from 6:00 p.m. to 9:00 p.m. at Ballou High School in Washington, DC. It featured all 13 candidates who planned to be on the ballot for the April 28 special election for the Ward 8 DC Council seat.
Ward 8 City Council Candidate Forum held at We Act Radio on March 20, 2015. Live streaming was provided by NMG Live.
By Grassroots DC, on April 23rd, 2015 
Cross-Posted from Poverty & Policy Written by Kathryn Baer
My last post focused on the “cautionary tale” we can find in how states spent their Temporary Assistance for Needy Families funds. Now here, as promised, is what we learn about the District of Columbia’s TANF spending.*
The figures are somewhat dated, but they’re still relevant to decisions the DC Council must make as it works on the Mayor’s proposed budget for the upcoming fiscal year.
The District reported $254 million spent on TANF in 2013. Twenty-three percent went for cash assistance. This is a tad higher than the percent reported for 2012. But a family of three was still left at 26% of the federal poverty line. And that’s about where it is now, unless it’s one of the 6,300 families whose benefits have been cut three times already.
They’ll get zero, come October if the Council doesn’t approve the Mayor’s proposal to give them a one-year reprieve. Even if it does, our three-person family will have to get along somehow on $156 a month — roughly 9% of the current FPL.
The Bowser administration justifies the reprieve on the basis of continuing weaknesses in the employment component of the District’s TANF program.
I’ve previously reported the results of an audit that focused on outcomes for the parents facing benefit cut-offs who were actually referred to a contractor for job training and/or help in finding a job. Not encouraging.
But there are two other parts to this story. One is that some parents have had to wait for nearly a year to get those job-related services. This may be in part because the Gray administration froze additional funds for them.
And that’s perhaps because the Department of Human Services didn’t spend all the TANF employment funds in its budget, according to the new director. We certainly see what seems to be under-spending in the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities report I’m using here.
Only 15% of TANF funds spent on work-related activities in 2013. And even this was a marked improvement over 2012, when only 7% went for what surely ought to be a top priority for a TANF program.
At the same time, the District spent an unusually low percent of its TANF funds on administration and systems — 2%, as compared to a nationwide 7%.
This matters because the DC Council enacted exemptions from the benefits phase-out for families facing specified hardships, i.e., difficulties, beyond the usual, that parents would face trying to support themselves and their kids.
One, added for the current year, would temporarily stop the time clock for mothers with infants to care for. But the department hasn’t actually granted this exemption. The reason, we’re told, is that it doesn’t have the computer capacity to suspend time-counting for the moms and their babies.
I personally believe that the TANF time limits merit rethinking altogether. DHS itself is looking into a policy that would convert the one-time hardship exemptions for at least some of the designated families and perhaps others into hardship extensions, as federal law has always allowed.
But that’s not even on the drawing board yet. The proposed reprieve is on the Council’s must-decide agenda.
A rollback of the benefits cuts should be too, given what we know about job training waiting lists — and the many months families had to wait for the assessments used to decide what training and/or other services they should get to give them a reasonable chance of success in the workplace.
Beyond these obviously urgent issues, the Council should, I think, take a hard look at how DHS spends its TANF dollars. In 2013, the department spent nearly as much on “non-assistance” as on work activities. What’s in this catch-all category is a mystery. Not the department’s fault, but rather a flaw in the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ reporting format.
The new DHS director, unlike her predecessor, shared a break-out of TANF spending with parties interested enough to have attended a recent briefing. Some money here, some there, some someplace else.
I doubt the Council has ever delved into the dispersal of TANF funds. Every dollar may support something worthwhile. But the mechanism is hardly responsible — let alone transparent — budgeting.
And it inevitably diverts funds from cash support for very poor families and from work-related services that can help the parents get to the point where they can pay for their families needs.
These, I think most of us view as core . . . → Read More: DC TANF Program Short-Changed Core Purposes
By Liane Scott, on March 30th, 2015 
On March 20, 2015, the CEO of Exelon Chris Crane will testify before the DC Public Service Commission about his company’s efforts to buy Pepco Holdings, a company that owns three distribution utilities serving customers in Virginia, New Jersey, Maryland, Delaware, and the District of Columbia. According to Wikipedia, Exelon Corporation produces, trades and distributes energy in 47 states, the District of Columbia and Canada. If the deal goes through, Exelon will become (if it isn’t already) the largest competitive U.S. power generator and the dominant utility in our region. Little wonder that the DC Office of the People’s Counsel (OPC) considers the proposed merger to be “by far the most significant undertaking in the local electric industry since Pepco’s divestiture of its generation plants in 2000.”
The sustainability contingent of DC’s progressive community has come together to oppose this merger under the umbrella organization Power DC. We should know in the next few weeks whether their efforts will prove effective. I for one am on the edge of my seat. Although, I’ve been receiving emails from progressive list serves for months about this issue, I’m still trying to get my head around the deal itself and what it would take to stop it.
Stop it, you ask? We live in a capitalist country where corporations have the same rights, if not responsibilities, as citizens. As long as they have the money, what’s to stop them? Well, some things that we all agree everybody needs in order to promote the general welfare—schools, healthcare for the poor, roads, public utilities, etc—are regulated by the government. So, if the government and presumably its citizens don’t approve, then no merger. Where do things stand now?
The hoops that must be navigated in order for the merger to take place include approval from the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, which will weigh Exelon’s potential market power, an antitrust review by the Justice Department and the Federal Trade Commission, as well as approval by the public service commissions in the three states where Pepco operates and the District of Columbia. The deal has already been approved by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, which seems to suggest that federal regulators consider a lot of market power a good thing, given Exelon’s size that is. The Public Service Commissions of Delaware and New Jersey are also on board. The Maryland Public Service Commission came out against the initial proposal but Exelon has filed an appeal.
The DC Public Service Commission is still considering it but before they can approve the deal, Exelon needs to prove that it will benefit Pepco customers. So, what would we get out of the deal? If you happen to be a Pepco shareholder than the deal is good for you, at least financially. Exelon is offering Pepco $6.8 billion dollars despite the fact that Pepco is only worth $4.3 billion, which sounds hinky to me. So, I turned to the comprehensive reporting on this issue provided by the Grist and Utility Dive. Here’s what I learned that makes this merger more than palatable for Exelon’s shareholders.
Exelon makes the majority of its money via a sizable fleet of nuclear power plants. In 2013, 81 percent of the electricity it produced was nuclear, which accounted for some 60 percent of it’s revenue. Thanks to competitive pressure from cheap natural gas, rising renewables, and stagnant electricity demand, Exelon’s revenues have declined by about 40% in recent years. What’s the fix? Acquire distribution utilities like Pepco with a large customer base (Pepco Holdings, Inc., serves about 2 million customers) and a more stable and predictable revenue stream. If the merger goes through, all of these new customers will help to shore up Exelon and by extension the nuclear power industry. Hey, at least it’s not fossil fuels, right?
What’s most troubling to the sustainable-development contingent of DC’s progressive community is that all the work they’ve put into trying to make DC green may be put at risk by this merger. Thanks to their efforts, the District of Columbia’s official Sustainable D.C. plan calls for 50 percent renewable energy, a 50 percent decline in energy use, and a five-fold expansion of green jobs by 2032. If history is any judge, Exelon will do little to support DC’s efforts to promote sustainable energy and may in fact do what it can to put the kibosh on the whole thing. Evidence of their pro-nuclear, anti-renewable lobbying efforts are pretty numerous, but the Nuclear Information and Resource Service’s report Killing . . . → Read More: The Proposed Exelon-Pepco Merger: A Basic Primer
By Grassroots DC, on March 27th, 2015 If you want to know ahead of time what D.C.’s development community plans to do with our city, consider attending this event.
Deputy Mayor’s Office for Planning and Economic Development presents: “March Madness” with special guest Mayor Muriel Bowser
Monday, March 30, 2015, 11 a.m. – 1 p.m. Lincoln Theatre at 1215 U St. NW Doors open at 11 a.m. – Program starts at 11:30 a.m.
It’s that time of year. March Madness. On March 30, the Office of the Deputy Mayor for Planning and Economic Development (DMPED), joined by the Department of Housing and Community Development and Department of Small and Local Business Development, will reveal its top seeds – in the form of new and upcoming projects soon to be available to D.C.’s development community.
At this event, DMPED and other District agencies will discuss the solicitation process and response requirements, and most importantly, provide a forum for interaction among potential team members across the community development sector. Organizations in the following areas should consider attending:
• Real estate development teams • Design & engineering consultants • Architectural firms • Housing • General contractors • Subcontractors • Equity providers • Lenders • Capital sources • Small businesses
The disposition of District assets requires local participation for District-based employees and service providers. This event provides an opportunity for dialogue among talented local Certified Business Enterprises (CBEs) and development professionals to create relationships for future respondent teams. The Office of the Deputy Mayor for Planning and Economic Development encourages CBE’s with appropriate professional background to participate in this event.
Attendance at this event is not a requirement for submissions of interest for the projects.
*Please RSVP for each individual attendee from your organization. The Eventbrite tickets associated with registration are not necessary for entry into the Lincoln Theatre on the day of the event, but please RSVP to ensure we know you are joining us.
By Grassroots DC, on March 23rd, 2015 
Cross-Posted from GFBrandenburg’s Blog
The results may surprise you.
To answer this question, I used some recent data. I just found out that the DC City Council has begun requiring that schools enumerate the number of students who are officially At-Risk. They define this as students who are
“homeless, in the District’s foster care system, qualify for Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) or the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), or high school students that are one year older, or more, than the expected age for the grade in which the students are enrolled.” (That last group is high school students who have been held back at least one time at some point in their school career.)
So, it’s a simple (but tedious) affair for me to plot the percentage of such at risk students, at each of the roughly 200 publicly-funded schools in Washington, DC, versus the average percentage of students who were proficient or advanced in math and reading on the 2014 DC-CAS.
I was rather shocked by the results. Here are my main conclusions:
1. For almost all of the schools, to get a rough idea of the percent of students passing the DC-CAS, simply subtract 90% minus the number of students ‘At-Risk’. The correlation is very, very strong.
2. There are only THREE DC charter schools with 70% or more of their students At-Risk, whereas there are THIRTY-ONE such regular public schools. So much for the idea that the charter schools would do a better job of educating the hardest-to-reach students (the homeless, those on food stamps, those who have already failed one or more grades, etc).
3. The only schools that have more than 90% of their students ‘passing’ the DC-CAS standardized tests remain, to this day, the small handful of schools in relatively-affluent upper Northwest DC with relatively high percentages of white and Asian students..(Unless you include Sharpe Health school, where students who cannot feed or dress themselves or hold a pencil are somehow deemed ‘proficient’ or ‘advanced’ by methods I can only guess at…)
4. As I’ve indicated before, it appears that for the most part, DC’s charter schools are mostly enrolling smaller percentages of At-Risk, high-poverty students but higher fractions of the students in the middle of the wealth/family-cohesion spectrum than the regular DC public schools. There are a few exceptions among the charter schools: BASIS, Yu Ying, Washington Latin and a few others are succeeding in attracting families and students at the high end of the socio-economic and academic scales.
5. It looks like we are now turning into a tripartite school system: one for affluent and well-educated familes (relatively high fractions of whites and Asians; mostly but not all in regular Ward 3 public schools); one for those in the middle (mostly blacks and hispanics, many enrolled in charter schools), and one for those at the seriously low end of the socio-economic spectrum, overwhelmingly African-American, largely At Risk, and mostly in highly-segregated regular public schools.
Very, very sad.
Here is the graph that sums it all up. Click on it to see a larger version.
In blue we have the regular public schools of Washington DC for which I have DC-CAS data for 2014, from grades 3 through 8 and grade 10. In red we have the privately-run but publicly-funded charter schools. Along the horizontal axis, we have the percentage of students who are officially At Risk as defined by the DC CIty Council. Along the vertical axis, we have the average percentage of students who scored ‘proficient’ or ‘advanced’ in math and reading on the DC-CAS at those schools. The green line is the line of best fit as calculated by Excel. Notice that the data points pretty much follow that green line, slanting down and to the right.
To nobody’s surprise, at both the charter and regular public schools, on the whole, the greater the percentage of students at a school who are At Risk, the smaller the percentage of students who ‘pass’ the DC-CAS standardized tests.
The colors do help us see that at the far right-hand end of the graph, there are lots of blue dots and only a small number of red ones. This means that the vast majority of schools with high percentages of At Risk students are regular DC public schools. You could interpret that to mean that parents in more stable families in those neighborhoods are fleeing from what they see as the bad influence of potential classmates who are extremely . . . → Read More: How Well Are Charter Schools in DC Educating Students Who Are Officially At-Risk?
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