Mayor Adrian Fenty held a press conference this morning to announce a slew of new cabinet-level nominations for his administration. Topping the list was his decision to go with current interim director of DCRA, Linda Argo, as his nominee to run the department. Argo was previously deputy director of DCRA, responsible for the agency’s public service enhancements. It’s a somewhat uncharacteristic move from Fenty, who has tended to focus his hiring efforts on bringing in individuals from outside the existing, broken bureaucratic structures in the hopes they can cut through the mess more quickly. Especially with a department like the Department of Consumer and Regulatory Affairs, which Fenty has publicly compared to D.C. Schools as a measure of its state of disarray, we might have expected the mayor would pick someone more radical. Not to suggest that Argo isn’t qualified — she has a wealth of management experience, and has been seen as something of a reformer since she came to DCRA a little over two years ago. If anything, this appointment is a reminder that Mayor Fenty’s management philosophy seems to be less a rigid theory and more a “whatever works” approach.

The other cabinet appointments announced this morning are:

  • Sharlynn Bobo as director of the Child and Family Services Agency (also the current interim director and a former deputy director.)
  • Clarence Brown as director of the Office on Aging. Brown was formerly director of the Howard University School of Social Work’s Multidisciplinary Gerontology Center and The Family and Community Resource and Research Center.
  • Clarence Carter, from the USDA’s Food Stamp program, will head up the Department of Human Services.
  • Kelly Valentine, a veteran of D.C. government, as the director of the Office of Risk Management.
  • Tori Fernandez Whitney as the director of the Addiction Prevention and Recovery Administration (APRA). Whitney’s prior experience includes work with the National Minority AIDS Council, so she could be a good choice to head up a new needle exchange program.

Photo from dc.gov

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