City council member Jack Evans has his office in the fortress of city bureaucracy that sits at One Judiciary Square. From here he represents Ward 2, which includes all of Georgetown University and the surrounding neighborhoods.
Evans has served on the Council for 10 years now and currently is the Chair of the Finance and Revenue Committee, overseeing District financial and tax policy. Prior to his service at that committee, he was the Chair of the Committee on the Judiciary, with jurisdiction over the Metropolitan Police Department and the D.C. Fire Department, amongst others.
Jack Evans has been in the news a lot too. A failed bid for the Democratic mayoral nomination had garnered him some headlines back in 1998, and since then he has remained visible as one of the senior, most influential council members. But his name recognition amongst students is fairly low, considering that he does represent Ward 2 on the Council, the voting district that includes Georgetown University.
Certainly the case can be made that Evans has been no great friend to students during his tenure on the Council. He was one of the original proponents of a zoning overlay measure in the mid-1990s, designed to limit the number of unrelated persons living in one house at the same time. The proposal’s critics claimed that it was unjustly designed to discriminate against students. A modified version of the proposal, without his support, met with large student disapproval and was ultimately unsuccessful in 1997. He sponsored legislation forbidding students residing in the District with out-of-state car registrations to park in the neighborhood. He is also responsible for the legislation that stiffened penalties for noise-related citations and fake IDs.
At the same time, though, Evans has supported students of the University, including in last year’s election, when he endorsed both student candidates for the Advisory Neighborhood Commission, Justin Kopa (CAS ‘02) and Justin Wagner (CAS ‘02). He can claim legislative responsibility for a number of quality of life increases that have affected students over the last couple of years, including laws promoting more efficient trash pickup and the renewal of Volta Park. During interviews, he unequivocally supports students’ right to vote, which had been challenged last year by some residents of the surrounding neighborhoods. Representing all of Ward 2 means that Evans serves as the councilmember for both the students of Georgetown University and the other residents of Georgetown, Burleith and Foxhall, along with Foggy Bottom, Dupont Circle, Shaw and Downtown. This tension was reflected in one of the first things he told me while addressing town-gown relations: “Sometimes the residents are right, sometimes the students are right. We just do the best we can to represent everyone in the community.” Chalking him up as either a friend or a foe of students would ignore this more nuanced approach towards representing the whole community.
The Financial
Control Board
One of the chief accomplishments of the Council during the tenure of Evans has been the restoration of the District to fiscal solvency. With the announcement on February 7 by Chief Financial Officer Natwar Gandhi that the District had posted a fourth consecutive year of balanced budgets, the era of the financial control board has come to an end. The city has seen one of the most remarkable comebacks in modern urban history over the last five years. In 1996, Washington, D.C. stood on the brink of bankruptcy, nearly a half a billion dollars in the red. Today, the budget is nearly a half a billion dollars in the black, and all indicators are pointing upwards.
Part of the legislative package introduced by the federal government in order to help the District in the mid-1990s involved the creation of a financial control board, with authority to overrule the council and the mayor on budget-related matters. Since the election of Anthony Williams (a former city CFO) and the ascension of Alice Rivlin to the chair of the control board, the relationship has been less antagonistic then under their respective predecessors, Marion Barry and Andrew Brimmer. But the control board had been seen by many as an erosion of the home rule that the District had fought so hard for. At the time, the imposition of the board had seemed necessary, as the city government under Barry had moved near insolvency. But with record economic good times being enjoyed by the District and renewed investment in almost all areas of the city, many wondered when self-determination would return.
Evans is cheerful about the end of the control board era.
“I’m not sure there will be a dramatic change Oct. 1, with the board’s disappearance,” he said from the conference room of his suite at One Judiciary. Instead, he compared the relationship of the council and the control board to that of the beginning driver and the instructor.
“I’m on one wheel and the control board is on the other, pressing the brakes. They’re no longer in that role. That was the first four years. Now they’re sitting in the back seat, and I’m driving the car. And on Sept. 30 (the end of the fiscal year), they get out of the car, and I’m driving on my own.”
The removal of the financial control board leaves the city in a position of autonomy that is unfamiliar for many of its current leaders. The board served a useful purpose mediating seemingly intractable disputes between the mayor’s office and the D.C. Council.
With the removal of the board, however, Mayor Williams and the Council will be forced to get along, if only because nothing will get done otherwise. For Evans, this is an especially strange predicament. As one of the most powerful Council members and chair of the committee that oversees financial policy, it will be his responsibility to work with the Mayor in order to assure the continued success of the District government. This will mean working closely with the man who defeated him in 1998 for the Democratic nomination to run for mayor, in a city where the November open election is simply a coronation of the person chosen by the Democratic Party.
“Philosophically, I would say that the Mayor and I are on the same page, with fiscal responsibility,” Evans said. “We may have a difference of opinion on how to get there.”
Moreover, Evans estimates that the other council members have less positive relationships with the Mayor.
“There are some members who don’t like him, don’t want anything to do with the Mayor. Other people have better relationships with him,” Evans said. “[Institutionally] the office of the Mayor has had a hard time dealing with this Council. Relationships aren’t as good as they could have been. Information hasn’t been shared. Heads-up haven’t been given. Lobbying hasn’t been done.”
Evans remains very conscious of the scrutiny being placed upon the District now by creditors, now that the control board is gone.
Transportation
With the District restored to a state of financial well-being, politicians can begin moving out of the crisis mode associated with the control board and look towards the future of the city. For Evans, this future includes upgrading the District’s public transportation system, Metro.
“We’ve completed the 103-mile system (referring to the originally planned construction for the Metro system), and unless Metro continues to grow, it will find itself, like many subway systems, beginning to stagnate.”
Evans keeps a copy of the latest Metro expansion plan that wants to lay up to 68 more miles of track. Although the plans for expansion are in the embryonic stages at the moment, Metro officials have begun to look into the future. Those plans include possible Metro stops in Georgetown, Adams Morgan and the upper Wisconsin corridor, three areas currently inaccessible by Metro where large concentrations of the population are centered.
The central issue surrounding expansion is cost. The original, 103-mile system cost $10 billion when it was built, of which the federal government paid two-thirds. The District paid a third of the remaining cost (Virginia and Maryland paying for the other two-thirds) and spends an additional $100 million a year on maintenance. The Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority, the governing body of Metro, has identified additional areas for expansion, but the federal government has signaled that it will not put any new money into the Metro system. At this point, the region is at an impasse.
“How much of a commitment are we going to be able to get, from the federal government, if any, and from Maryland and Virginia, whose decisions are made in jurisdictions that don’t necessarily like the metropolitan area, Virginia down in Richmond, and Maryland in Annapolis?”
Such is the unique position of Metro, which operates in three states (or two states and a District) and is funded by four separate governments.
“I think we can continue to maintain the system, but expansion is the key,” he said.
Like so many other policy decisions regarding the District, the decision-making power lies outside of the hands of the elected officials. Jack Evans, for one, is convinced that the city needs a more expansive Metro system. But unless Governors Parris Glendening of Maryland and James Gilmore of Virginia sign on and President Bush adds his stamp of approval, Metro will “stagnate.”
Past Achievements
Many of Evans’ accomplishments while in office have been city-wide, affecting all of the residents of the District. Perhaps the most public of those recently has been the sharp reductions in crime rates that the District has seen recently. A series of front-page reports in the Washington Post prominently detailed the overwhelming success of the efforts made by the District government and police force in reducing crime.
The town once alternately referred to not-so-lovingly as “Dodge City” or “Death City” has made huge strides in the direction of maintaining order, with progress being measured in every area measurable.
Homicide rates are down. He noted that in 1996, the District was the only major city in the nation with a homicide rate on the increase. Today, he says, the city has cut that rate by 50 percent. Incidents of police brutality are down. National and international respect for the force is up after the generally peaceful climate at a recent series of large-scale protests in the city. Many credit Chief Jack Ramsey for the success, noting that under his predecessor, Larry Soulsby, crime in the city was getting worse while the crime wave had stopped everywhere else in the nation. Evans, responsible for hiring Ramsey while he was head of the Judiciary Committee, is still critical of the force in some areas but acknowledges the sweeping successes of the Ramsey-led force. The force should be more accountable, closing cases more quickly and using its resources more efficiently. While he could single out individual officers that were worthy of praise, he also spoke of an institutional malaise that was only now being treated. For students, though, Evans’ idea of success may not be the same as theirs. He has pushed through laws to more aggressively punish noise-related citations and fake ID violations.
Student-Neighbor
Relations
But Evans stakes his reputation as an effective council member on his accomplishments targeting specific communities. A visit to his web page (jackevans.org) revealed lists of accomplishments organized by neighborhood, so that each of his constituents could see what exactly Jack Evans was doing for them. While Georgetown, Burleith and Foxhall have a list of accomplishments, there is no mention of the University itself. With its 6,000 undergraduates largely interspersed throughout his Ward, Georgetown students represent a large voting bloc for Evans but alos a source of occasional frustration.
“Overall, I think you’ll find that students have contributed a lot to the community, and overall you’ll find that the students have been well-behaved,” Evans said. “But, it doesn’t take but a handful of those who aren’t to then cause long-term residents of the neighborhoods to get upset, and I think therein lies the problem.”
As a student in the mid-1970s, Evans lived in Georgetown at 35th and N Streets.
“I know what it’s like to be there. I know all the tricks of the trade,” he said. ” There were eight of us living in the house and I don’t think anybody was on the lease. Was it a house that could accommodate eight? No. But there we were.”
And the students are still there today, and Evans has tried to do something about it. He supported a measure in the mid-1990s to limit the number of unrelated people living in a house together. But he recognizes the integral role of Georgetown University within the larger community of Georgetown, and went further to say that in many ways the problem of town-gown relations is not solvable.
“Student turnover is going to happen. One year I may have three perfectly-behaved students living next door to me and the next year I may have a fraternity house,” Evans said. “I think the University has gone a long way towards getting control over that issue.” He cited expansion projects on campus and University-sponsored community policing projects as examples of initiatives designed to reduce the stress on the University’s relationship with its neighbors.
Laughing on the job
On the wall of his office, near the volumes of books, Evans has a mounted toy shark, with a red button next to it. Upon pressing the button, the shark squirms and flops, singing and dancing, much to the delight of the council member. With 10 years on the job behind him, he still seems to be enjoying himself. After all, if a man can’t laugh at a dancing shark on the wall at work, it’s time to change jobs.
