A report from Mayor Vincent Gray’s transition team slams the city’s transportation department, saying it “skirted accountability” and even violated local laws with how it funded major projects. The report, released by the mayor’s office this week, is intended to give Gray a blueprint on how to improve the city. But in doing so, it takes a swipe at the outgoing leadership under former Mayor Adrian Fenty and his predecessor, Mayor Anthony Williams, saying they left behind incomplete and underfunded projects for the Gray administration to clean up. It also accuses the District Department of Transportation of using the subsidy the city pays to Metro for the city’s own benefit, such as the D.C. Circulator.
Fenty’s ambitious streetcar program especially comes under attack. Trolley tracks were installed on H Street, it said, even though the city doesn’t have any provision for how to power the streetcars, doesn’t have a place to store or maintain the trolleys or have a spot for them to turn around. By moving ahead without studying the environmental impact, the report says, the city has lost out on federal funding.
The report also said the city’s existing three streetcars — which spent years mothballed in the Czech Republic at the city’s expense — cannot be used as they don’t meet Americans with Disabilities Act requirements.
But former District Department of Transportation Director Gabe Klein defended the department to The Washington Examiner, calling the report politically motivated and “wholly inaccurate.”
Klein said the streetcar accusation is “absolutely false” and argued that such trolleys run in communities all over the country.
He said the agency’s work has been held up as a model by officials around the country, except for by “two folks who used to run it in the ’80s and ’90s when it wasn’t a model.” The authors of the report, Cellerino Bernardino and Thomas Downs, both worked for the city under Marion Barry.
“I feel a little bad for Mayor Gray,” Klein said. “It really reflects poorly on the transition team and, in reality, the administration.”
The report said the agency used multiple contracts for the same project to obscure the purpose and cost. “We have an incredibly complicated budget because we have an incredibly complicated program,” Klein said.
Also, the city’s five-year plan is based on nearly $1 billion of federal earmarks, which the report calls a deliberate overstatement given that the city received only $150 million in the past six years. But Klein said the spending plan must include all projects the city hopes to build, even if the funding may not pan out.
He said DDOT’s budget had been signed off by the council and the city’s financial office, plus just got a clean bill of health from an outside auditor.
“Acting like something sinister is going on is ludicrous,” he said.
