Rebuke for N.H. sens.

Senate Republicans blocked a vote and effectively killed a bill to provide D.C. residents with voting representation in Congress, and now the bill’s supporters are looking to stir up a backlash across the country. First stop: New Hampshire.

New Hampshire state Rep. Cindy Rosenwald (D) filed a resolution last week to admonish her state’s U.S. senators, Republicans John Sununu and Judd Gregg, both of whom opposed the D.C. voting rights bill.

“I’ve been down in Washington a lot this year, and every time I go I am struck by your license plates,” Rosenwald told Hillscape, referring to the common slogan “Taxation Without Representation.”

Rosenwald is appalled that D.C.’s 600,000 residents lack a voting representative in the House or Senate. “It’s as if the state of Vermont (population: 623,908) doesn’t have the right to vote. I think of our neighbor to the west and wonder, ‘What if Vermont didn’t have a congressman?’”

Rosenwald filed her resolution at the urging of D.C. Council member David Catania, with whom she served on the National Legislative Association on Prescription Drug Prices. Both chair health committees in their respective legislatures.

The offices of Sununu and Gregg had no comment.

DC Vote, the advocacy group leading the push for D.C. voting rights, worked with Rosenwald and Catania in devising the resolution. DC Vote executive director Ilir Zherka says he will lead a bandwagon to New Hampshire early next year when the state legislature debates the bill, right when all eyes will be on the state for primary season.

“We’re going to … make sure the constituents of various senators know where they stand on this issue,” Zherka says. “Sununu is definitely one of our targets. We think that he’s reasonable.”

Zherka mentioned a few other likely targets in the Senate: Gordon Smith (R-Ore.), John Warner (R-Va.), Robert Byrd (D-W.Va.), John McCain (R-Ariz.) and Thad Cochran (R-Miss).

In advance of the 2004 presidential election, the D.C. Council took up a bill to move the city’s presidential primaries ahead of New Hampshire’s. But it balked under the Democratic National Committee’s threat of banning its delegates from the national convention. Earlier this year, the matter came up again and nobody wanted to fuss over another political statement about primary scheduling — except for first-year council member Tommy Wells, who insisted that Iowa and New Hampshire “do not represent America.”

Rosenwald said that “the New Hampshire House of Representatives is the most representative body there is,” citing a ratio of one representative for every 3,000 New Hampshirites.

In an e-mail, Wells’s chief of staff, Charles Allen, said, “We love New Hampshire. Always have, always will.”

ANC: Give us what you made us take

The Advisory Neighborhood Commission (ANC) for Northeast Capitol Hill wants Congress to give the District authority over the D.C. Public Charter School Board. Congress created the board in 1996, when Republicans led by then-Rep. Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.) sought to give D.C. parents an alternative to D.C. public schools. Charter schools receive public funding but don’t answer to city bureaucracy.

“The city was in receivership; the schools were incredibly dysfunctional. That’s not the case now,” says ANC commissioner David Holmes, who attended congressional hearings on D.C. charter schools in 1996. “The mayor has committed his political career to a turnaround of the schools. The time has come to undo this taking away of a school function from the city.”

The U.S. secretary of education currently provides the mayor with three choices for each of six positions on the charter board. The Northeast ANC first chafed at the charter board’s federal status when it asked the D.C. inspector general to investigate whether the board was complying with regulations on providing adequate notice of meetings and school siting decisions. It turned out the board was bound by federal regulations, not local ones.

The ANC’s effort started when the AppleTree Institute, which operates the AppleTree Early Learning Public Charter School, bought an old two-story building by Lincoln Park to use as an additional pre-school campus.

That agitated local residents, who went straight to the D.C. Zoning Commission and wrangled with AppleTree over the finer points of zoning rules. AppleTree’s managing director, Russ Williams, thought the neighbors were basically worried about traffic and parking. The neighbors framed the debate as a question of whether schools can open in neighborhoods as a matter of right without local approval.

D.C. has over 50 charter schools — the most in the nation — even though test results have offered little proof that they are actually better. Critics complain that there are too many, and that they hurt regular public schools by taking better students away.

Congress’s imposition of charters on the city wasn’t as unilateral as it is often characterized. Then-Mayor Marion Barry (D) cooperated with Gingrich, with whom he claimed a “spiritual bond.” But for many people, the Republican-led affront to home rule was unconscionable, and a bitter aftertaste persists today.

For its part, the Northeast ANC doesn’t harbor an ideological opposition to charters — in fact, it recently gave its blessing to the Options Public Charter School’s expansion plans. But Holmes laments that the charter board’s current status harks back to the days when the federal government imposed a financial control board on the city.

“It’s one of the last remnants of the control board,” he says.

Holmes and fellow commissioner Joe Fengler will approach the office of Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton (D-D.C.) for advice on how to proceed this week.

Iconoclasm lives on Barracks Row

A recent news report raised the possibility of chain stores like The Gap or J. Crew coming to Barracks Row on 8th Street SE, raising great concern in the Capitol Hill neighborhood. There are people who like the idea of a place where you might be able to buy socks and underwear, but there are probably as many people who view chain stores as a vile threat to local identity. 

The idea first surfaced in a Sept. 10 article in The Washington Business Journal. On Sept. 27, neighborhood newspaper Voice of the Hill editorialized that putting a Gap on 8th Street would certainly “seal the fate” of other small businesses on the strip because tax assessments would skyrocket even more than they already have.

Commercial tax assessments for the portion of the city containing Barracks Row shot up 77.7 percent this year. Some business owners on the strip have said that if the taxes get any higher, they’ll have to close shop.

Cristina Amoruso, executive director of the Barracks Row Main Street nonprofit credited with revitalizing the strip, says everybody should simply relax — no plans for a Gap or J. Crew are in the works. Studies on foot traffic and neighborhood preference must be conducted before a Gap just pops up, she added.

“I love everybody’s ideas,” Amoruso says. “But we’re gonna have to slow down.”