Wake up, National Park Service!

Bureaucrats at the National Park Service suffer from a lack of imagination. Or rather, it’s D.C. residents who suffer from it.
An outstanding case in point is that of “The Awakening,” a beloved waterfront sculpture that has lived at Hains Point in Southwest for 27 years. Now, at the whim of Milt Peterson — a big-time developer with his own private jet — the giant statue is moving to Prince George’s County to become a fixture at Peterson’s new National Harbor.

Seward Johnson, the artist who created “The Awakening,” wanted the park service to accept the artwork as a gift back in 1980. But because of a regulation prohibiting the agency from accepting such a present, the sculpture’s almost three-decade-long residence in the District has been “temporary” all along.

One is hard-pressed to find a Washingtonian who doesn’t harbor proprietary feelings about “The Awakening” and who does not object to its a-takening.

“They need to be more responsive to the constituents of the urban area in which they’re located,” an advisory neighborhood commissioner on Capitol Hill, Bill Schultheiss, said.

Schultheiss sees the same bureaucratic shortsightedness blocking his quest to set up government-regulated dog parks. He and others have been lobbying the District government to create enclosed spaces within existing parks where dog owners can off-leash their pets. There are already lots of de facto communal places where dogs roam leashless, but they are all illegal. City law requires dogs to be leashed at all times in public.

In March, the District released proposed rules for the creation of dog parks, but the regulations were prohibitively strict. The Department of Parks and Recreation extended the public comment period to take in all the angry howling from Schultheiss and others.

Too bad they were barking up the wrong tree all along: Most of the parks where people take their mutts, particularly on Capitol Hill, are federal property. And the National Park Service has a broad “no dog parks” policy — highly sensible for preserving the integrity of a national treasure like Yellowstone. But how much majesty is at stake when we’re talking about little old Stanton Park?

“When it comes to controlling and preserving little triangular parks around Capitol Hill I think it gets ridiculous,” Schultheiss said. He pointed out that canine enclosures would make the Hill’s parks more hospitable to people who don’t go gaga for bowwows.

If District residents want to have dog parks and to keep “The Awakening,” it looks like they’ll need somebody in Congress to twist the arm of the National Park Service.

Norton’s office did not offer a comment by press time.

Quarantine and Isolation: an elegant affair

The Department of Homeland Security sponsored a “Quarantine and Isolation Symposium” at the University of the District of Columbia on May 24. The elegance of the event’s title matched the chandeliers in the auditorium lobby at UDC’s Northwest campus. A splendid affair!

The daylong event for city officials featured panel discussions with representatives from various District agencies. It began with thanks to God for another wonderful day: “We’ll glorify you because you’ve been so good to us.”

Yes, thank you, God, for the many hideous plagues that have made the forced isolation and quarantine of our fellow human beings such a symposium-worthy topic. And thanks especially for the thoughtful goodie bags provided to all in attendance at said symposium, and also for the lovely salmon lunch!

Anyway, quarantine and isolation are two separate things the government must try to do for its citizens in the event of a large-scale outbreak of infectious disease or bio-terror attack. Isolation is when an infected person is confined. Quarantine is the confinement of everybody within an affected area.

To Hillscape, it seems that a disastrous outbreak of disease presents two basic problems: You’ve got to get the citizens to cooperate with the government, and you’ve got to get the government to cooperate with itself.

Keynote speaker Ivan Walks, the District’s former chief medical officer, discussed the city’s need to demonstrate
competence in order to address the former obstacle: “There’s something about building a history of credibility,” he said. “If you can’t get people to follow simple instructions, you cannot intervene in a way that’s going to keep people safe.” The problem for D.C. is that the city has “a bad history of unequal public health” — to put it crudely, people east of the Anacostia River know they’ve had it worse than the rest of the city.

In recent years the District has isolated tuberculosis-infected vagrants, but panelist Jason Thomas of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said there hasn’t been a quarantine since smallpox in the 1960s.
One symposium attendee left the auditorium in disgust, telling Hillscape he was offended that anyone flirted with the idea of a successful quarantine without addressing gaps in the system (he asked not to be identified). The tone of the symposium, he thought, was far too self-congratulatory.

“It’s completely unclear as to who has any authority or enforcement capability to make sure patients are getting appropriate care — or any care at all,” he said. The man, a trainer for the city’s community emergency response teams, said his experience dealing with D.C. residents has convinced him that the public would not cooperate with a quarantine attempt.

Mayor Adrian Fenty’s name was in the program, but he didn’t show up. The mayor’s office told Hillscape they had never confirmed that Fenty would attend. Eric Shuler, UDC’s program manager, was highly disappointed.

“It was very important that the mayor, [Del. Eleanor Holmes] Norton and [Council Chairman Vincent] Gray be here,” Shuler said. “It’s supposed to be a priority for them.”

Raise the roof! Or the rent, or whatever

John Harrod, the man in charge of Eastern Market’s North Hall and the surrounding red-brick plaza, notified his Saturday vendors that he’d be raising their rent by five bucks — an increase of almost 20 percent in most cases.

Eyes rolled as a cloud of flabbergastation descended upon the room at the May 23 meeting of the Eastern Market Community Advisory Committee (EMCAC). The timing is awful — business already is hurting because of the fire. And Harrod hasn’t paid his own rent in more four months.

“Tenants should not be expected to pay any more,” EMCAC chair Donna Scheeder said, noting that the increase is a clear violation of city laws governing market operations.

At EMCAC’s prodding, Market Manager Bryan Cook distributed a letter to vendors on Saturday morning telling them they don’t have to comply. But that didn’t stop Harrod from collecting his increased fees anyway.

“My rent is the lowest in town,” he said. “Gimme a break!”

Harrod acknowledged to Hillscape that he’s been behind on his own rent, but he blames his money troubles on the decrepitude of the building: “Ain’t no heat, no running water. I can’t rent it in part of December, January, February, March — I come out of the winter and I’m broke. I make money there six months out of the year.”

Harrod also noted that in summertime the North Hall has “got to be the hottest place this side of the Sahara Desert.”

One vendor characterized those gripes as “total bull—.” The person asked not to be identified so as not to risk losing his place at the market.