Former Editor-in-Chief Ryan Avent writes a weekly column about neighborhood and development issues.
It wasn’t easy to keep up with the business flooding through the Council as the latest session neared its end. Amid the bills dealing with Greater Southeast Community Hospital, authorizing development bonds, addressing land deals in the West End and over the Center Leg Freeway, and placing moratoria on new Adams Morgan taverns, an interesting pattern nonetheless emerged. In just this past week, the Council agreed to halt single sales of alcohol on H Street for three years, introduced legislation clamping down on fireworks sales and use, and gave preliminary approval to a measure capping payday loan interest at a 24 percent annual rate of interest.
The vibe given off by the Council cast them squarely in the role of public nanny. It’s also clear that the Council’s actions were not exactly a temporary departure from form. During last year’s crime outbreak, the Council quickly signed on to Mayor Williams’ crime prevention measures, which included expansions of video surveillance and a contentious 10 p.m. curfew for people under the age of 18. In the past year as well, Council members, and particularly Ward 1 representative Jim Graham, have acted swiftly to close down District businesses connected with crimes, even when it appears that there was little the business could have done to stop the criminal act. Increasingly, it seems that the Council’s first inclination when faced with a problem is to restrict choice.
It isn’t difficult to understand why. As the District’s population has grown, patience with lawlessness and the city’s neglect of quality of life issues has grown thin, and demands upon public officials to improve order in the city have increased. In many ways, the new lack of patience is a welcome and healthy thing; it’s right that public officials see how frustrated residents are with lagging public services and feel pressure to fix things.
At the same time, the Council seems all too willing to reach for the easiest and most facile conclusions available to them. Ward 6 Council Member Tommy Wells, in pushing for the H Street singles moratorium, directed constituents toward numbers showing drastic drops in police calls in Mount Pleasant since a similar ban was passed there four years ago, blindly assuming, it seems, that absolutely no other trends have been at work since 2003. Of course, during that same time period homicides across the city have fallen by a third; should we likewise attribute that decline to the Mount Pleasant singles ban?
Picture taken by the The Skipping Hippy.
