Mayor Adrian Fenty has been in office for a little over 20 months now. Almost all of the criticism leveled against him since he became mayor have been about his style of governing. He doesn’t consult enough people when selecting key members of his administration (Michelle Rhee). He moves too quickly to fire city employees when something goes wrong (the Banita Jacks case). He allows his closest advisers to run roughshod over certain agencies (the Peter Nickles/Linda Singer switcheroo). Despite those criticisms, Fenty has been able to hang on to his image as an effective reformer who is focused on improving the city’s most troubled areas, like the school system. If anything, concerns about Fenty’s leadership style have only lent themselves to bolstering that image. But yesterday’s D.C. Council hearing on what went wrong with this year’s summer youth jobs program showed for the first time how Fenty’s style can lead to substantive problems.

As the Washington Post wrote, D.C. Inspector General Charles Willoughby called planning for the expanded program “haphazard and ad hoc” and said a “chaotic environment” led the administration to overspend its budget by $30 million. And the City Paper caught some interesting late night testimony from surprise guest Summer Spencer, the former head of the Department of Employment Services who was fired when the scandal over the program first broke. Spencer apparently described Fenty’s decision not to a set cap on the number of participants in the program as one of the main reasons why everything fell apart.

And check out this quote from the Post story:

Council member Marion Barry (D-Ward 8), who had expanded the summer program while he was mayor, issued a statement calling on Fenty to “apologize directly to the citizens . . . for allowing such gross negligence to take place.

When Marion Barry can credibly take you to task for a huge failure, you know you’ve really messed up.

Photo by noahdevereaux