Decision-making in the D.C. Council will look a little different next year.

A list of council committee assignments obtained by DCist/WAMU shows that Chairman Phil Mendelson has shaken up the membership of a number of the five-person committees where councilmembers first introduce and vet legislation. The proposed changes would take effect at the start of the next council period in January.

Most notably, Mendelson removed Ward 1 Councilmember Brianne Nadeau and Ward 8 Councilmember Trayon White from the housing committee. Ward 2 Councilmember Brooke Pinto and Ward 5 Councilmember Kenyan McDuffie, both of whom tend to vote more conservatively than Nadeau and White on housing and development issues, will replace them. (At-Large Councilmember Anita Bonds will continue to chair the committee.)

The decision will see Nadeau booted from the committee largely responsible for oversight of public housing and urban development — even as she continues to chair the council’s human services committee, which oversees the city’s homeless services system and often conducts joint oversight hearings with the housing committee. In losing Trayon White, the housing committee will also no longer include any direct representation from wards east of the river, which are some of the poorest, and most sought-after for development, in the city.

Nadeau tells DCist/WAMU she was “surprised” to learn about the reorganization, and that it will negatively impact her existing work on housing affordability.

“When you think about ending homelessness, we know that what it takes is housing, and having both committee assignments has really helped me create those synergies,” says Nadeau, who has sat on the housing committee for six years. “It’s been really important for me. Not only as the chair of the human services committee, but also as the Ward 1 councilmember, with such a [housing-]dense ward.”

Jesse Rabinowitz, an organizer at Miriam’s Kitchen, tells DCist/WAMU that Nadeau’s involvement in the housing committee is “vital,” since several of the housing voucher programs she oversees as chair of the human services committee are run in conjunction with the D.C. Housing Authority, which is overseen by the housing committee. (Nadeau told DCist/WAMU that she has asked Mendelson for joint oversight of the D.C. Housing Authority because “not having any window into what’s going on with the [agency] is a huge problem for me.”)

In a conversation with DCist/WAMU on Tuesday, Mendelson emphasized that more members expressed interest in sitting on the housing committee than it could accommodate, and argued that shuffling members around doesn’t preclude them from introducing bills they’re passionate about.

“It’s not meant as a personal affront,” Mendelson says. “The members of committees, usually at this time of year… overstate their role in terms of setting the agenda. Anybody who watches the council over a period of time will see that the agenda of any committee is controlled by the committee chair. And any member can introduce a bill.”

Mendelson also added that he received a series of “emphatic” text messages from White last week outlining which committees he wanted to sit on; housing was not one of them, Mendelson said. White did not immediately respond to DCist/WAMU’s requests for comment.

Just five months ago, Nadeau and White introduced a contentious bill to reform the District’s rent control laws, which proposed capping rent hikes at the rate of inflation and closing various loopholes that allowed landlords to get around existing rent caps. The bill would have also immediately expanded rent control protections to an estimated 13,000 housing units, and another 26,000 by 2033.

(While Pinto expressed general support for expanding rent control during a November hearing on the bill, she ultimately criticized most of its main tenets. Because Bonds never called for a committee vote on the bill, it will be scrapped when the current council period ends this month. It can be reintroduced next year.)

Advocates for affordable housing and the homeless criticized the reorganization online as tone-deaf and inefficient, with some making the link between Nadeau and White’s advocacy for rent control expansion with the decision to move them off the housing committee.

But Mendelson pushed back against those criticisms, referring to them as “conspiracy theories.”

“I get you’re hearing that somehow this is retribution for a bill that I either never knew [of] or I had forgotten had been introduced by those two,” Mendelson said about the rent control bill. “[But] that was not part of my thought process at all.”

The housing committee will now also adopt oversight responsibility for the Executive Office of the Mayor, a function previously delegated to the government operations committee led by outgoing Ward 4 Councilmember Brandon Todd.

Mendelson also dissolved the standalone education committee, moving oversight of the District’s public school system solely under the Committee of the Whole, which he chairs and all councilmembers are members of. He’s been pulling schools oversight closer for a while: For the last two years, the Committee of the Whole has shared responsibility on all school bills and oversight.

This won’t be the first time there isn’t a standalone education committee. Mendelson brought it back in 2012, after six years of all education issues being housed in the Committee of the Whole. The council’s education committee was previously chaired by outgoing At-Large member David Grosso.

Mendelson has also proposed creating a new committee to deal with COVID-19 and the recovery (it would be co-chaired by Ward 6 Councilmember Charles Allen and Ward 7 Councilmember Vincent Gray) and a committee chaired by At-Large Councilmember Elissa Silverman to manage the process of redrawing ward and ANC boundaries based on the new Census data. There were otherwise no changes to the leadership of the traditional council committees, which include judiciary and public safety, transportation and environment, business and economic development, and more.

Freshman Ward 4 Councilmember Janeese Lewis George will sit on the labor, recreation, transportation, human services, and COVID-19 committees; newly elected At-Large Councilmember Christina Henderson will join the health, government operations, redistricting, and labor committees.

The full council will vote on all these changes when they meet again in January.