Mayor Fenty Delivers 2009 State of the District Address

March 19, 2009
Hattie Holmes Senior Wellness Center, 324 Kennedy Street, NW

Introduction
Let me start by thanking Ms. Alice Barnes for that wonderful introduction. Ms. Barnes has lived in the District for 43 years. She retired from the Department of Labor after 23 years where she was a benefits specialist.
Can we give her a round of applause?

Tomorrow, I will deliver to the Council of the District of Columbia my proposed budget for the next fiscal year. Despite the current state of the nation’s economy, the District has maintained a healthy fund balance and will present the city’s 14th consecutive balanced budget, which will serve as our blueprint for meeting new challenges in a time of economic scarcity. And although this budget requires us to look deeper to find solutions, since the day I took office, my agency directors have done an amazing job trying to find better and smarter way to be efficient. I’d like to thank my entire cabinet for their great work over the past year as well. Today, as has been my tradition this time of year, I’d like to share with you some highlights of that work.  

Education
As I said when I took office and continue to say today, education is the top priority of my administration. We now have the leadership and initiative the public school system has lacked for decades. I have to thank Deputy Mayor Victor Reinoso, Chancellor Michelle Rhee, facilities chief Allen Lew, and State Superintendent Deborah Gist for that.

The District of Columbia Public Schools is making great progress. In the past year, our education team has boosted test scores. Elementary schools in the District increased reading scores by 8 percent and math scores by 11 percent. Scores at secondary schools increased 9 percent in both reading and math. To keep those trends going, we’ve hired 175 professional developers to boost those scores even higher next year.

We now offer after-school programs with a built- in academic component at nearly every school; a total of 12,600 students participate -- including nearly 7,800 high school students.

More of our students are graduating from high school. Last year's summer school graduation class was the largest in recent memory—470 students graduated, compared to only 155 students in the prior school year.

Today, our children are more engaged in their education. DCPS student attendance has increased at all grade levels and more of our students are participating in career and technical education programs.  With 2,025 students in programs last year, there are now nearly 2,500 students learning specialized skills today.

The school system is working hard to guarantee classrooms are staffed with high-quality teachers by ensuring the highest standards are followed.

The administration is also committed to providing top-notch leadership in our schools. Because of DCPS’s recruitment efforts, the school system received 704 applications for principal positions—that’s 14 applications for every one vacancy.

The Chancellor herself met with 370 groups of parents, principals, teachers, staff, students and community members, and responded to 95,000 emails.

DCPS has increased funding for professional development by over 400 percent in an effort to provide dedicated staff at schools to support teachers.

Special Education
We’ve made great strides in special education reform.  For the first time ever, the DCPS Office of Special Education has full-time case managers and has increased staff oversight by more than 80 percent. In addition, DCPS has significantly reduced the number of backlogged and open cases from 1,478 in December 2007 to 362.

This school year, DCPS created eight Full Service Schools that focus on rigorous academics and offer intensive wellness supports such as wrap around services to address the complex needs of some of our students.

Facilities
In the past year, schools facilities chief Allen Lew completed more than 27,000 work orders, completely modernized four schools; upgraded, reconfigured and repaired 31 schools, and removed lead paint in 9 others.

We also reopened a special school – Phelps High School – for students who want to learn architecture, construction and engineering.

Public Safety
Another priority for this administration has been public safety. It is a challenge for any big city, and any big city Mayor. Thanks to the leadership of Police Chief Cathy Lanier and FireEMS Chief Dennis Rubin, we’ve built a safer community in the last year.

In 2008, we hired 151 new police officers, for a total of 4,020. They reduced violent crime citywide by 5 percent and gun robberies by 14 percent, arresting 700 more people than last year. There were fewer gun crimes in the summer of 2008 than any summer since at least 2003 and the homicide closure rate stands at 75 percent, our highest in 25 years and more than 20 percent above the average for comparably sized US cities. And although one traffic fatality is too many, we saw our lowest number in 27 years.

Our community policing efforts have added nearly 300 foot patrol officers to our neighborhoods and improved the relationship between officers and the communities they serve. As a result, we have seen a tremendous increase in crime closures across the board as officers know everyone on their beats and community members feel more comfortable coming forward to help us prevent and solve crimes.  

These numbers become even more impressive when you find out that for the second year in a row, MPD drove down response time in all seven police districts by 9 percent, even though calls for service increased by 15 percent.

Fire and Emergency Medical Services has increased the number of 24-hour transport units to 39, bought 15 new ambulances, and increased the number of field supervisors by 40 percent – meaning more medical technicians on the street to handle your emergencies.

The department has installed more than 3,500 smoke detectors in homes across the District, 90 percent of them within four days of receiving the request.

Our emergency workers are also communicating better. We’ve installed 230 laptops in their vehicles, trained close to 2,000 employees in emergency management, and doubled the number of people who receive our Alert DC text messages to more than 70,000.

Healthcare and Human Services
Public safety and public heath and human services go hand-in-hand. And over the past year, we’ve met the challenge of protecting the District’s most vulnerable residents.

We’ve reduced the backlog of Child Protective Services investigations from 1,750 in June 2008 to 15 as of last month. We’re doing a better job of retaining our social workers and recruiting new ones faster, with a vacancy rate of less than 5 percent.

The District’s new Housing First program is helping homeless individuals and families survive. We’ve placed more than 600 individuals and families into supportive housing. This number grows every day – with 80 families in the process of beginning their new lives as I speak. In fact, these efforts have lead to a decline in homelessness in the District. Our recent Point-in-Time study shows that there is a 15-percent decrease in street homelessness and a 12-percent decline in chronic homelessness among single individuals between 2008 and 2009.

Our Aging and Disability Resource Center opened its doors last July, serving more than 2,000 elderly and disabled residents. Last year, 31,403 seniors received health promotion, nutrition education and counseling programs. We also broke ground on the Ward 6 Senior Wellness Center – a 15,000-square-foot facility similar to the one all of you have enjoyed here in Ward 4.

My Administration created the Department of Health Care Finance to prove high-quality health care services to almost 200,000 District residents.

The Department of Disability Services continues to help move District residents out of institutional settings and into smaller facilities in their own communities. We’ve increased the number of people who receive in-home support and live-in caregivers or live in supportive environments or host homes by 24 percent.

The Department of Mental Health is working to increase access to its services throughout the District. We have a new facility for adults who are experiencing a psychiatric crisis. They can get evaluation, treatment, stabilization and evaluation 24-hours-a-day, seven days a week.

Infrastructure and Environment
The District Government continues to meet its challenge of helping residents, employees and visitors get around the city.

Ridership on our DC Circulator bus service has grown by 16 percent this year – for a total of almost 2.8 million riders. This month, we’re expecting 14 new buses to arrive and begin serving new routes.

We’ve installed 300 pedestrian countdown signals at nearly every crosswalk in the District that has a light.

In the past year, the District Department of Transportation has filled 220,646 potholes, added 8 miles of bike lanes, and we’ve planted more than 4,800 trees.

The Department of Motor Vehicles has processed more than 161,000 driver’s licenses; 207,000 vehicle registrations and 214,000 inspections. But your number of visits to the DMV is actually going down, and that’s a good thing. You can now get your registration renewal notice by email and renew online. You can make installment payments on your parking tickets online too. And when you do have to visit the DMV in person, we’ve added more Saturday hours to make it easier.

As we’ve heard our new president say many times, it’s never been more important to pay attention to our energy use and how it affects the planet. So I’m proud to say we continue to prove that the District is one of the world’s greenest cities.

Since last September, our Department of the Environment has given away 2,000 energy-saving compact fluorescent light bulbs. We’ve replaced about 1,750 air conditioners and refrigerators for low-income residents, saving them almost 5 million dollars on their electric bills and reducing the amount of carbon in the atmosphere. We also helped more than 35,000 households with their utility bills – the most ever.

We’ve installed or committed funds to more than 65,000 square feet of green roofs in the District, which will reduce both storm water pollution and heating and cooling costs.

Last year, we opened two permanent weekly drop-off sites at Benning Road and Fort Totten for your household hazardous waste and electronics. We’re also the first jurisdiction in the area to offer weekly free document shredding for residents.

We’re cutting the number of cars we use in our government. We have instituted a fleet sharing policy within our District Government fleet for the first time, saving money for taxpayers and improving our air quality.


Jobs, Affordable Housing and Economic Development
And although we are facing tough economic times, we are meeting the challenges of providing jobs and affordable housing, and developing the District’s tax base.

This year’s Citywide Job Fair brought in 36,651 participants. We had more than 150 District Government, federal government and private sector employers take part.

Last year, we hired 19,000 young people in our Summer Youth Employment Program. This year, I will continue my commitment to provide a job to every student who wants to work and meets the requirements. We just signed up our first group of workers, and we’re adding public and private sector employers to the program every day.

We’ve financed more than 2,200 units of affordable housing in the past year. The Department of Housing and Community Development assisted more than 500 low- and moderate-income residents in our first-time homebuyer program.  We’ve funded a total of 373 special needs housing units for the homeless, elderly, and persons with disabilities.  

The District also recently broke ground at the Ivy City/Trinidad Demonstration Project, which means that 38 affordable units will soon be available to low-to-moderate income families in the Trinidad neighborhood.

We are sponsoring more than $13 billion worth of economic development projects, and we’re doing everything we can to keep them on track. This includes more than 12,000 units of market-rate housing, 4,500 units of affordable housing 1,800 hotel rooms, 8 million square feet of office space and 2 million square feet of retail.          

We’ve issued a solicitation for Hill East Waterfront, seeking a master developer to transform more than 50 acres surrounding the former DC General Hospital site into a $1.4 billion new waterfront neighborhood that will be a model for environmental sustainability and the link between Capitol Hill and the Anacostia River.

We selected a developer for a $108 million, 400-unit residential project at the Minnesota Avenue Metro Station and we broke ground on the Department of Employment Services headquarters, which will be built next door to the Metro.

We reached a development agreement to build a $42 million, world-class waterfront park at The Yards, along the Anacostia River and we’ve just broken ground on nearby Diamond Teague Park.

Customer Service
When I took office in 2007, I pledged to lead a government that’s as open, responsive and accountable as humanly possible. We continue to find new ways to meet that challenge.

I go to community meetings every week to get your feedback – hundreds of meetings in the past 26 months. But my Office of Community Relations and Services team has attended many more, in your neighborhood and every neighborhood.

Last year, we attended nearly 1,500 community meetings and put together almost 800 Fix-It operations -- bringing in multiple agencies to address trash cleanup, abandoned properties and many other constituent service requests.

We delivered on our promised to create an expanded citywide Call Center. Ever since we launched our 311 service a little more than a year ago, we’ve been adding services to that phone number. We’ve integrated the call centers of the Departments of Motor Vehicles, Health, Consumer and Regulatory Affairs, and the Environment into 311, so there’s no more searching for the right number when you need to reach us. The center operates 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

We handled 2.6 million calls to 311 and 1.4 million calls to 911 in the past year. And my Correspondence Unit responded to 24,521 emails and letters from constituents.

Conclusion
Finally, let me say I think it’s been an amazing year for providing the top-quality services you’ve come to expect from your government. I want to thank my City Administrator, Dan Tangherlini, and my Chief of Staff, Carrie Kohns, who lead the team of men and women who come to work every day to serve you. They have earned my gratitude and your applause.

In the coming fiscal year, we will need to do more with less. The budget I'm about to deliver to the Council will reflect this need. To keep the District's finances strong, we will continue to make critical choices about how to spend your tax dollars.

These choices won’t be easy, and they won’t always be popular. But I promise you this. I will consider every idea, exhaust every effort, and overcome every obstacle in delivering better services for less money.

Although our 2010 budget will be smaller than last year’s, we will take no shortcuts in our commitment to protect the critical city services you expect and deserve, without raising taxes.

This year’s revenue reduction will be softened by money from President Barack Obama’s American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA), also known as the federal stimulus bill. The law provides funds to the District of Columbia for a variety of activities, including education, public safety, healthcare and health research, road and bridge construction, public transportation improvements and energy efficiency and environmental projects.

Our budget proposal will move forward with our aggressive public education reform agenda providing funding for richer academic programs in every school. Along with the school reform plan, we remain committed to investing in public safety personnel and putting more officers on the street to protect you. At DC Fire and Emergency Medical Service we will continue to work to restore fire stations and create programs that enhance service delivery.

The Administration will build on its successes in the last year and continue improving the health and well-being for all.
Increased investments will be made to perform infrastructure maintenance and improvements while also recognizing the importance of our environment, parks, and recreation facilities.

Lastly, rebuilding District neighborhoods responsibly requires a commitment to preserving and expanding affordable housing. This year’s budget seeks to preserve and expand affordable housing despite the downturn in the regional housing market.  

The Fenty Administration will continue to pursue these priorities in the coming year. I believe our best days are still ahead of us.

Thank you very much, and may God bless the District of Columbia.