"The Advisory Neighborhood Commissioners, who are not paid, are very helpful for accessing community services for many people," said At-large City Councilwoman Carol Schwartz, the Republican candidate for mayor who lobbied members of Congress to try to preserve ANC funding. "It is a way for people to have more democracy for very little money. We’re talking less than $600,000 over a $5 billion budget."

Several candidates said well-publicized incidents of fraud in a few commissions should not be used as an excuse to eliminate all of them.

"Just because a few of them have problems doesn’t mean we de-fund the whole thing," said former chief financial officer Anthony Williams, one of nine candidates in the Sept. 15 Democratic primary for mayor. "That’s illogical and stupid. I support the ANCs. They ought to be funded."

Williams said the city’s current ANC commissioners are frustrated because "no one has listened to them for years. They believe they are not taken seriously."

Several candidates pointed out that ANCs occupy a unique position in the city’s system of elected government.

"ANCs can be aggravating, but they are unbought. They are not beholden to any special interest group," said businessman Jeffrey Gildenhorn, a Democrat. "It’s the last rung of the ladder. In some cases they are more effective than the council or the mayor."

He suggested ANCs could continue to function even if funding were eliminated.

But Sylvia Robinson-Green, a teacher born and raised in Southeast Washing-ton and a former ANC commissioner in Congress Heights, said lack of funding would be the death of the commissions.

Funding, already at an all-time low, is barely adequate, she said. Her ANC represented "the small people" in poor neighborhoods, she said, who had no other advocate.

"We would meet once a month and talk about things, but there was no way for us to get things done because we were always short on supplies," she said. "We didn’t even have ink for the printer. We had to get all our information out by word of mouth."

Councilman Jack Evans, D-Ward 2, a former ANC chairman, said he is confident funding for ANCs will be restored when a compromise D.C. appropriations bill is worked out among House and Senate members in the fall. He admitted that the ANC system, like other parts of the city’s government, is imperfect.

"Sometimes you have a good commission, sometimes you have a bad one," he said. "When people get fed up enough, they elect new people and then you have a good one again. It’s a grass-roots democracy."

Councilmen Harold Brazil, D-At-large, and Kevin P. Chavous, D-Ward 7, agreed.

"Some do excellent work, some don’t — they probably need a little more help rather than less," Brazil said.

Chavous pointed to Congress’ move as an erosion of self-government.

"I am strongly against any move that would take away the role of an elected official," he said. "We don’t have much democracy in this city anyway. Now they’re taking away ANCs?"

Evans said the problem with ANCs is lack of enforcement of financial regulations, rather than lack of training for commissioners.

"Training isn’t going to solve the problem," Evans said. "Residents have to elect better people, people that are going to show up."

Statehood Party candidate John Gloster said ANCs need more than just full funding.

"We need to beef up the ANCs’ political power and clout," he said. "Then we’ll get higher quality people running for office, we won’t have so many vacancies, and (we’ll have) fewer corrupt members."

Gloster said as mayor, he would link the ANCs to a decentralized Department of Public Works with substations in each ANC, to further facilitate delivery of public services, as many ANCs already do. Gloster’s proposal would formalize the relationship and give the ANC power to dismiss public works officials responsible for upkeep of their neighborhood.

"Commissioners would be able to call up the substation head and say, ‘Look, there’s a problem in this alley. What can we do about this situation?’ That’s putting power in the hands of the people," he said.

Copyright 1998, The Common Denominator