Defeat Poverty DC’s mayoral and council forum, held last Thursday night, became an arena not of challenges and critical thinking, but a display of gratuitous agreement between two supposed rivals who only highlighted their similarities.
In attendance were just Vincent Gray, current City Council chair and candidate for mayor, and Kwame Brown, current councilman and candidate for City Council chair. Mayor Adrian Fenty, who seems to shy away from public forums where his policies can be questioned, and Vincent Orange, who assigned roughly six volunteers and lined the streets outside with his signs, were conspicuously absent.
While the forum was conceived as an open dialogue of ideas and not so much as a debate, it simply grew into a friendly conversation between current council members and colleagues Gray and Brown. They talked about their visions for the future of the city and how they cannot stand the current mayor.
Both Gray and Brown spent part of the night outlining their similar plans for the city to defeat poverty and increase its residents’ employment. Each blamed unenforced First Source agreements as a major factor in the city’s joblessness. These are contracts companies from other states make with the city; the agreements require 51 percent of the workforce and 51 percent of resources to be hired and purchased in the District of Columbia. This is certainly one unemployment culprit, but there is no strong evidence showing it is an outstanding reason for job loss. They also agreed that in order to lower the city’s increasing unemployment rates, there must be a focus on expanding vocation education and reforming the department of employment services.
In discussing their methods to improve the job market and lower homelessness in the city, Gray and Brown started touting the success of their universal pre-k education program. Unique to the District of Columbia, it provides an early start on the education of all children younger than kindergarten age. Brown argued that alongside the pre-k program, the District needs “world-class middle schools” in order to keep children engaged in education, considering how many begin to “fall off” and drop out by 8th grade.
Gray concurred, citing the pattern of homelessness among at-risk youth, which he hopes these programs will help eliminate. According to Gray, children in the city who struggle with poverty issues are much more likely to eventually drop out of school, which limits them when in the job market. Both candidates openly mocked the power of the mayor’s office, saying that right now it answers to the chancellor of the school system, when really it should be the opposite.
They also discussed – not debated – the state of the District of Columbia’s finances. The city’s “rainy-day” fund has rapidly depleted over the past few years. This dearth has threatened spending for social safety net services, such as job counseling and housing programs for the city’s poor. Both candidates agreed, once more, that instead of continuing to take money out of the city’s rainy-day fund, the council and mayor’s offices should consent to use a pay-as-you-go strategy, which would take limited amounts of money out of the rainy-day fund only in necessary cases, instead of pulling millions out at the beginning of every fiscal year.
But pay-as-you-go just gives the appearance of higher sums in the city’s bank account until the programs, which are still scheduled to occur and be paid for, actually happen. This really doesn’t fix any of the city’s financial woes and only gives the illusion of still having money. The Home Shopping Channel calls it “easy-pay,” which means it’s still going to cost the same thing in the end, but you can spread it out to make you feel good about your bank account.
In the end, nothing came out of the evening that one could not have read on the respective candidates’ websites; the discussions bored the crowd, which trickled out early. There is nothing less exciting than two candidates competing in the same race acting friendly and agreeable with one another in a forum. Indeed, the only surprise was the announcement that Vincent Orange (not Mayor Fenty) would be absent.
