The ANC: G-town’s own bastion of hyper-democracy

Before last Monday’s Advisory Neighborhood Commission began, the six commissioners in attendance milled around the room, anonymous amongst the neighborhood residents in attendance, save for the fact that they were dressed in suits. Their choice of attire seemed particularly incongruous considering their surroundings—the ANC was holding the meeting in Georgetown Visitation School’s dance studio, your average elementary-school-gone-community-meeting setting, complete with awful acoustics, humming fluorescent lights, and flimsy folding chairs. In fact, the absurdity of it all made me wonder if the meeting would bore me with its banality or thrill me in the way that only capable hyper-local governance can.
It did both. That’s because due to the nature of their job descriptions, the ANC 2E commissioners’ work blurs the fine line between mundane, personal matters with a vague connection to local government and pertinent issues in which the whole community has a clear stake.
Washington, D.C. touts its 37 ANCs as advisory boards whose opinions on traffic, parking, zoning, liquor licenses, and police presence must be given “great weight” by District agencies. But this doesn’t even begin to explain the phenomenon of the ANC. In an odd sort of way, ANC 2E’s powers institutionalize the need for the people and business owners of Georgetown to be good neighbors. On Monday night, two business owners’ remarks evidenced that, for better or worse, community members feel the commissioners’ sway over building permits and zoning regulations acutely.
For example, an owner of Dixie Liquor who appeared to ask for an exception to Ward 2’s recent ban on single alcoholic beverages up to a certain size was visibly frightened by the notion that even the presence of litter outside her store could jeopardize her request. Stressing that the property surrounding her store is immaculate, she pleaded, “We really try to be good members of the community.”
She made a good case, but at the same time, the trivial detail of how she presented herself was an obvious strike against her. By appearing in sweats before six suited commissioners, she offended the pomp and circumstance of the whole affair. It may seem petty to nitpick over issues of dress, but the disparity in attire represented, for me, a compelling dilemma: Was this simply an exercise in suburban silliness held on middle school grounds, or the most basic layer of government?
Later in the meeting, Vicki Davis of Piccolo, the 31st Street restaurant that was damaged by a large interior fire in October, presented the ANC with the restaurant’s restoration plans. Their approval seemed to be no foregone conclusion.
“We will do whatever you ask us to do to get this building back into service,” Davis said.
In broken English, her mother added, “We have always paid the taxes and have been good neighbors.”
These are the kinds of pertinent issues of livelihood in which the ANC deals, which made the airing of personal grievances that also took place during the meeting seem all the more bizarre.
Since the city charges ANC 2E commissioners with finding sidewalks to straighten, stop signs to replace, and potholes to fill, a Georgetown resident’s niggling annoyance with, say, a busted streetlight can easily evolve into the kind of indignation that often leads students to characterize ANC 2E as “petty.”
But what else can you expect, when neighbors must mold their complaints to jive with governmental discourse? Last Monday, a woman who lives across the street from floodlights that shine too brightly into her living room at night brought enlarged colored photographs of the offending light fixtures, which stood on school grounds, to the ANC commissioners, only for them to more or less brush her off. She wouldn’t quit, and insisted on thrusting the fruits of her Kinko’s labors under their noses.
“Ridiculous!” I thought at the time. But then again, who wouldn’t find herself offended, her tone a little arch, if the pains she had taken to make her case in a way that would attract seven august commissioners’ notice got the high hat?
ANC 2E is much more than a place where separate interests do battle over bus routes and keg bans, but in a sense, it’s exactly that, because it’s a strange political animal that forces everyday complaints onto the plane of bureaucrat-speak. It’s where petty grievances meet legality at one point in the night, and where six harrumphing men on the brink of retirement and one student convene to determine the personality of the neighborhood at another. It’s where real life meets hyper-local government, whether hyper-local government wants it to or not.