Mayor Adrian Fenty’s cleared street in Crestwood

It’s an awkward truism of urban politics that a snowstorm can be the undoing of an elected official. Take too long to get the snowed cleared off the roads — like Marion Barry in 1987 when the city struggled for a week after a snowstorm, which he missed because he was in California at the Super Bowl — and you’re an out-of-touch executive leading an inefficient government. Respond quickly — like Mayor Adrian Fenty was credited for doing after the December 2010 2009 storm — and people will applaud.

Of course, not everyone is equally happy or angry after a big storm. Some neighborhood streets gets cleared before others, and for those who live on uncleared streets, there’s often a nefarious reason that they’ve been ignored. After December’s storm, District resident Denise Wiktor wrote to the bi-weekly online newsletter themail to air her grievances with what she saw as a plowing and salting operation that prioritized based on income instead of need. “The disparity between how the rich and rest of us are treated by DPW is obvious,” she wrote, citing a comparison between streets in Mt. Pleasant and Georgetown.

Yesterday, Michael Cover, a resident of the Crestwood neighborhood — home to Mayor Fenty — wrote an email to his local listserv abour road-clearing. Titled “Why am I not surprised?”, he wrote, “that the street in front of the mayor’s house is clear down to the pavement while mine (and most of Crestwood) has not seen a plow or salt since yesterday morning.” An attached picture showed a nicely cleared residential road, an anomaly that appeared soon after the storm had ended.

Given that the majority of the District’s residents don’t personally like Fenty and that he’s regularly accused of being aloof and arrogant, the image would seem to provide evidence of the city’s chief executive using public resources for his own convenience. And in the scheme of urban snow-removal poiticking, that’s bad. But a fellow neighbor saw differently, responding, “Since the Mayor is our elected leader, elected to take care of city problems, it seems reasonable to enable him to move about freely.”