Not the Planning Director We Need

Three days into his lame-duckitude, at 6:42 pm on a Friday evening, Mayor Gray issued a press release announcing his appointment of Ellen McCarthy as the new Director of the Office of Planning.

There’s a reason Mayor Gray didn’t make this appointment before the primary.   With controversy over the zoning review heating up, McCarthy would have quickly and predictably become a real liability on the campaign trail.   But now that his hopes of re-election have been dashed, Gray no longer appears to care what DC voters think or want.  McCarthy's appointment is a pretty clear sign that his goal at this point is to push the ZRR through before he leaves office.  The Mayor has always seemed disengaged from the zoning debate (leaving it to Harriet Tregoning) and, I suspect, he has no clue as to how truly screwed-up the draft regulations are.  (Judging from her comments during the round of debates prior to the Democratic primary, Muriel Bowser seems to share Gray's lack of awareness -- though that's somewhat more excusable in a Council Member.  It remains to be seen where David Catania stands on these issues.)

As last month’s OP Oversight hearings demonstrated, the Office of Planning is an agency that has lost the public trust.  And that sentiment was powerfully expressed by citizens from across the city.  In my experience, as well as that of many other neighborhood activists I know, that loss of trust has been a long process, dating back to Ellen McCarthy’s previous tenure as Deputy Director (and later Director) of the Office of Planning. 

Let me acknowledge, up front, that McCarthy did some important work in the 1980s and 1990s – primarily, but not exclusively, downtown.  She’s best-known for her effective advocacy of the kind of residential and arts development that has kept Penn Quarter from becoming a sterile office ghetto.  Both in and out of downtown, she’s also done significant work on historic preservation and on overlays.  But that was before she joined the Office of Planning.  (More about her record there, below.)

McCarthy's career has largely been spent representing property-owners seeking favorable governmental rulings and regulations.   In the seven years since she exited OP (after newly-elected Mayor Adrian Fenty replaced her with Harriet Tregoning), McCarthy, a non-lawyer, has worked at two different law firms, where her role was securing zoning "relief" and approvals for developers.  As you can see from her resume, her career is a classic example of what political scientists call the "revolving door" phenonmenon -- in which the regulators are drawn from (and hope for future employment with) the regulated.  Not surprisingly, the end result is that the public good gets sacrificed to (or reconceived as whatever best serves) private interests. 

In addition to facing conflicts-of-interest regarding former and future clients,  as Planning Director, McCarthy will also be making decisions that impact her husband's work.  Richard Bradley is the Executive Director of the Downtown DC BID (Business Improvement District) -- which means that his salary is paid by some of the largest commercial landowners in the city.  He reports to a Board of Directors that includes representatives from Akridge, Douglas Development, Hines, Quadrangle, Vornado/Charles E. Smith and other major developers.  As should be obvious from that list, Bradley's colleagues have interests not only downtown but citywide.   And, of course, downtown development issues are a central to OP's agenda in the Zoning Regulations Review.

Whose interests McCarthy will serve as Director of the Office of Planning isn't just a hypothetical question.  There's a track record here, both from her previous experience at OP and from her recent performance as one of 14 Council-appointed "community representatives" on the Zoning Review Taskforce.

McCarthy's tenure at OP was characterized by an emphasis on deal-making rather than planning, and by her manifest contempt for the democratic process -- documented in FOIA'd emails involving the Casey Mansion project, as well as evident in the community meetings and public hearings I attended over the course of the Upper Wisconsin Avenue Corridor Study.  During the UWACS, McCarthy tried to do an end-run around the legislative process by starting to implement this highly-contested plan through the PUD process before it was even submitted to the DC Council -- despite her explicit promise to the Zoning Commission that she would refrain from doing so.  The plan ultimately fizzled when McCarthy failed/refused to do the infrastructural studies that Kathy Patterson requested as a condition of her support for the project.

The UWACS was my first real exposure to DC development politics and I decided to get involved in it because I genuinely -- and, in retrospect, naively -- believed that what was being proposed was a collaborative planning process that would put an end to (or at least lower the stakes of and reduce the rancor associated with) what seemed like endless disputes over local development projects.  I was shocked to see OP, under McCarthy's leadership, treat the project as some kind of bizarrely antagonistic cat-and-mouse game between government and citizens.  No attempt was ever made to find common ground, to evaluate rival claims or assumptions through empirical study, to address the concerns of local residents, or to learn from critiques and use them to build a better proposal.

Unfortunately, the same dynamic has continued with the ZRR. In fact, OP's tactics in the  ZRR and the UWACS are eerily similar, as you can see from my real-time account of the latter. This is probably not a coincidence, since Jennifer Steingasser, who has been handling the outreach on the ZRR, was McCarthy's understudy at the time of the UWACS.

McCarthy's involvement in the ZRR has obviously been much more limited, but she clearly has not taken the "community representative" part of her role on the Zoning Review Taskforce seriously.  She neither solicited community opinion nor kept the public informed about the proposals that OP presented to the Taskforce.  And once substantive discussion about the ZRR gradually began to emerge on the Chevy Chase Community listserv, McCarthy was quick to denounce critics of the draft regulations as character assassins, alarmists, and conspiracy theorists.

Interestingly, her example of this alarmism involved transit zones.  McCarthy assured her neighbors that "In fact, neither the Office of Planning nor the Zoning Commission have determined what specific actions will be recommended for Transit-Oriented Development zones, and both groups have been quite explicit that one size does not fit all, and that, if the concept of a TOD zone is adopted, it will only be applied on a case by case basis, to determine where it might be appropriate."  Yet what do we see in the final draft?  Precisely the one-size-fits all approach that neighbors expressed concern about.

The bottom line: If we want to restore public trust in the Office of Planning and if we want to adopt a well-written zoning code that will protect the interests of residents and neighborhoods as well as commercial property-owners and developers, then Ellen McCarthy is not the Planning Director we need.  Hopefully our next Mayor will make a better choice -- someone who has respect both for the hard work involved in actual planning and for the community which s/he is appointed to serve.