Washington City Paper (July 24, 2020)

POLITICS HOW TO AVOID MORE BUDGET DEBACLES 4 NEWS SCHOOL REOPENING TALKS LEAVE OUT UNIONS 6 FOOD TRY ORDERING FROM VIRTUAL RESTAURANTS 11 THE DISTRICT'S FREE WEEKLY SINCE 1981 VOLUME 40, NO. 29 WASHINGTONCITYPAPER.COM JULY 24–30, 2020

WASTE MISMANAGEMENT The District loses millions of dollars a year at its trash transfer stations. Taxpayers are eating the cost.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS COVER STORY 12 Waste Mismanagement: D.C. is losing millions of dollars at its aging trash transfer stations.

NEWS 4 Loose Lips: Council watchers say the body’s budget process needs a makeover.

6 Stick It to the Unions: Unions representing school workers demand to be included in reopening discussions.

8 On ICE: A woman avoiding immigration officials in a Maryland church experiences a different kind of social isolation.

SPORTS 10 Home Runs: After winning the D.C. championship, Mamie Johnson Little League is reeling in new baseball players.

FOOD 11 Virtual Insanity: How 25 restaurants operate out of the same Takoma Park seafood spot

ARTS 16 Accessibility Insights: The Smithsonian’s director of accessibility discusses making museums that work for everyone.

18 Film: Zilberman on The Rental 18 Books: Sarappo on Diane Zinna’s The All-Night Sun

CITY LIGHTS 19 City Lights: Enjoy the shade of D.C.’s official tree and check out some definitely not haunted puppets.

DIVERSIONS 21 Crossword 22 Savage Love 23 Classifieds Cover Illustration: Julia Terbrock

Darrow Montgomery | 4000 Block of Bates Road NE, July 20 Editorial

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NEWS LOOSE LIPS

Budget Squawks

Darrow Montgomery

The most recent meeting about the Fiscal Year 2021 budget turned into a “shitshow.” Budget watchers have ideas for reforming the process.

D.C. Council Chairman Phil Mendelson

By Mitch Ryals @MitchRyals D.C. Council Chairman Phil Mendelson broke his own rules, and now we’re all paying for it.

In the lead-up to this year’s budget debates, the chairman sent an email to each of his colleagues informing them of the kind of budget shenanigans he would not tolerate. For one, committees were not allowed to propose tax increases, according to Mendelson’s rules.

Apparently, that rule doesn’t apply to the chairman.

Mendelson’s proposed budget contained three changes to the tax code, including a new and controversial 3 percent tax on advertising sales that turned this week’s legislative meeting into a “shitshow,” as At-Large Councilmember Elissa Silverman described it.

The chairman said he proposed tax increases in order to stave off similar efforts from his colleagues—a move that has backfired, he acknowledged, as three councilmembers

came to the July 7 budget meeting with tax legislation of their own.

Ward 6 Councilmember Charles Allen tried and ultimately failed to raise taxes on residents who make more than $250,000. But he succeeded in delaying a tax cut for publicly traded companies, a move that will raise an estimated $7.4 million in revenue in Fiscal Year 2021.

An amendment from Ward 1 Councilmember Brianne Nadeau cut a tax subsidy for “qualified high tech companies,” which is expected to bring in $17 million.

And Ward 8 Councilmember Trayon White’s amendment successfully lowered the threshold for those subject to the estate tax from $5.6 million to $4 million, chipping in an estimated $1.8 million in revenue. Altogether, the Council is considering more than $66 million in tax increases to balance the Fiscal Year 2021 budget.

The chairman repeated his general aversion to raising taxes, as well as doing so within the budget process, throughout the meeting two

4 july 24, 2020 washingtoncitypaper.com

weeks ago. He found support from Ward 3 Councilmember Mary Cheh and Ward 5 Councilmember Kenyan McDuffie, who echoed the chairman and lamented the lack of a more thorough and public process around the tax proposals.

“I think [raising taxes] in this fashion, in this budget hearing, virtually, is challenging, given the complexities not necessarily of the particular measures, but bringing all the measures together cumulatively,” McDuffie said.

“I agree that when we talk about taxes, we need to talk about it in a thoughtful, open process way, a comprehensive way,” Cheh added.

“And that despite the fact that there may be all sorts of data out there, that is not the process that has produced this amendment.”

The frustrations with the lack of a more thorough vetting process for tax legislation in the budget is a symptom of a larger problem with what some budget watchers say is a flawed process. LL will get into that, but first, a brief explainer on how the budget process generally works.

Every year, the mayor submits a budget to the Council by a certain date. This year, the Council extended Mayor Muriel Bowser’s deadline to May due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The Council then has 70 days to pass the budget into law.

To arrive at the final budget, each Council committee considers the mayor’s proposed budgets for the agencies within their jurisdiction. Committee chairs are free to reconfigure those agencies’ budgets, but they generally do so using only the amount of money the mayor recommended.

The committees then submit their recommendations to Mendelson, who, as chair of the Committee of the Whole, assembles them into one cohesive budget for the entire District government. It’s the chair’s prerogative to keep the recommendations from the respective committees or change them entirely.

This year, Mendelson circulated his budget documents at 6 p.m. the evening before the Council was set to debate for the first time, leaving councilmembers and their staffs just 16 hours to review a 216-page document and react to the chairman’s changes and draft amendments.

But it doesn’t have to happen exactly that way.

Ed Lazere, a current at-large Council candidate and the former director of the D.C. Fiscal Policy Institute, a left-leaning think tank, cringed as he watched the initial budget debate. In a phone conversation ahead of the Council’s second budget meeting this week, Lazere laid out what he believes are some potential improvements to the process.

First, Lazere believes the Council chairman should be required to submit the budget proposal with enough time for the members (and the public) to understand what’s in it before the first vote. A week ought to be enough time, he says.

Of particular concern for Lazere and others this year was Mendelson’s proposed tax

increases, which he included without a public hearing where policy experts or the people impacted by the taxes could weigh in. (Allen, Nadeau, and White’s tax legislation were also introduced without the typical public vetting.)

Faithful budget watchers will recall that Cheh tried last year to require Mendelson to publicize the budget 48 hours before the first budget vote.

Mendelson argued against Cheh’s proposal, saying that the short timeline (which the Council sets) and the amount of work that goes into assembling the budget makes it impossible to publicize it with that much notice. The chairman even dragged former chairman and current Ward 7 Councilmember Vince Gray into his argument, saying Gray “famously got one budget out, I think it was after midnight.”

In a phone call this week, Mendelson argues that Cheh’s proposed rule change would have imposed a constraint that doesn’t exist with other legislation and would give councilmembers even more opportunity to make changes to his budget.

“If there were four or five amendments after I circulated [the proposal] the day before [the vote], then if I were to circulate on July 3 or 4, I can guarantee there would be more amendments, more disorganization, more confusion,” Mendelson tells LL. “And it would be harder for the public to follow.”

Lazere believes that, by dividing the mayor’s budget into committees, the Council is tying its own hands. Currently, each committee works with a finite pile of money based on the budgets the mayor proposes for the agencies in their jurisdiction.

That set-up forces committee chairs to take money from one agency in order to fund another, which means major priorities could get shortchanged, Lazere says. He uses an example from last year’s budget, when At-Large Councilmember Anita Bonds struggled to find money for repairs to public housing. Mendelson plugged that hole with money from Events DC’s reserves, but Bonds didn’t have that ability, because Events DC isn’t in her committee’s jurisdiction.

“When you have the whole budget, you can find resources across the whole budget,” Lazere says. “When it’s within your committee, it’s harder to find big sums of money to fix big problems.” As an example, Lazere mentions the additional $13.6 million child care advocates requested but did not get.

Instead, Lazere proposes the Council identify its major priorities during a public hearing and fund them completely by drawing from the entire available budget.

Mendelson says Lazere’s proposal would be difficult to execute.

“It’s really hard in a group setting,” the chairman says. “If you put five of your friends around the kitchen table, and you say, ‘We have $16 billion, how do we spend it,’ it’s going to be difficult for you all to come to an agreement.”

Mendelson says that’s the point of the budget work session, a non-voting meeting where each councilmember lays out their

NEWS committee’s recommendation. It’s during that discussion that Mendelson says he gets a sense of his colleagues’ priorities, which helps him assemble the budget.

To that, Lazere replies, “Bullshit. Most of the day is spent just presenting what the committees did. Anybody who watches those conversations would not say they are a serious give-and-take about how to fix problems across committees. That may be the intent. But that’s not the way it works out.”

Allen, who chairs the Committee on Judiciary and Public Safety, says committees and their staffs develop expertise and therefore play an important role in setting agency budgets.

A mber Harding, a law yer for t he Washington Legal Clinic for the Homeless who has tracked the District’s past 16 budget cycles, says another issue with the budget process stems from what she believes is a lack of effective Council oversight of executive agencies.

She uses a $12.6 million cut from the mayor’s homeless services budget as an example.

“No one has been able to say what the impact is,” Harding says. “The administration says they’re going to try to have contract negotiations and bring that down in a way that won’t impact services, but there’s not much more detail on it.”

LL is sure councilmembers will scoff at the

notion that their oversight of executive agencies is subpar. But according to D.C. Auditor Kathy Patterson, Harding isn’t far off.

In a 2019 report, Patterson declared that the entire D.C. government isn’t following the law.

In 2001, the Council passed legislation setting up the budgeting process once it was free of the federal control board. The law identifies three tiers of government operations—programs, activities, and services—and seeks to tie funding to the two deepest tiers: activities and services. The law requires agencies to submit detailed “strategic business plans” that explain how they’re spending money down to the service level and allow lawmakers to budget from zero rather than the previous year’s figures.

For example, investigative services is a program within the Metropolitan Police Department. Child investigations is one of the five activities within that program. And within that activity are three services: child abuse investigations, missing child investigations, and juvenile processing, according to Patterson’s report.

The framework, known as performancebased budgeting, is intended to give lawmakers a more precise idea of how much each service costs taxpayers. The law was supposed to be fully implemented in 2006. But by 2008, under Mayor Adrian Fenty’s administration, the detailed strategic business plans “came

to be described as cumbersome” and were replaced with a new version of performance plans, Patterson’s report says. Patterson counted 12,000 services in the District government, but the required business plans hadn’t been submitted for several years.

“What has been lost, in a very practical sense, is to be able to tell taxpayers what they are paying for,” Patterson writes in the report.

“They’re paying for salaries, by and large, with little further definition.”

This week, Mendelson says he was surprised to learn the night before the Council’s second budget debate, on July 21, that his ad sales tax had some unintended consequences.

And that’s exactly the point, as several of his colleagues let him know.

As written, the legislation would tax every step in the process to create advertisements, rather than only the purchase of ad space from a newspaper or broadcaster. The chairman moved an amendment to fix the issue, reducing the estimated revenue by about $1 million, which Mendelson proposed to take out of the public libraries’ budget. Then all hell broke loose.

Allen pointed out that the Council rejected his amendment to raise taxes on the wealthy, and with Mendelson’s ad tax rollback, lawmakers were preparing to take money from the libraries, which serve as a significant resource

for people without reliable internet access.

Ward 2 Councilmember Brooke Pinto, who at that point had been an elected councilmember for a total of 24 days, chided the three-term chairman for his “dangerous” tax policy “as evidenced by your comments a moment ago, respectfully, that it just came to your attention last night that it would negatively impact ad agencies.”

McDuffie echoed Pinto and repeated his concern about the impact the ad tax could have on small business and media outlets such as the Washington Informer. (City Paper would also be negatively impacted by the ad tax and its leadership has spoken against it.)

Gray asked what effect the tax would have on the Informer, a question Mendelson couldn’t completely answer.

Ultimately, Mendelson’s solution was to recess the meeting until Thursday while he digs through each committee’s budget to try and come up with $18 million in cuts to make up for lost revenue from the ad tax. Several councilmembers objected, saying the closeddoor budget maneuvers fly in the face of good governing.

Allen asked Mendelson to explain the process for making cuts and presenting them to the Council.

“The process is as clear as milk,” the chairman said. “I will circulate something before we come back.”

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10:49:03 AM washingtoncitypaper.com 7/14/2020 july 24, 2020 5

NEWS CITY DESK

Stick It to the Unions

Darrow Montgomery/File

Unions representing thousands of school workers say they were “not invited to the table” to talk about possibly returning to in-person learning in late August.

DC Public Schools Chancellor Dr. Lewis Ferebee

By Amanda Michelle Gomez @AmanduhGomez Unions representing thousands of DC Public Schools employees say their members have had no real inf luence on whether they will return to work in-person in late August, or what that should look like if they even wanted to come back to the classroom. The Bowser administration is calling all the shots, union leaders say, even though DCPS workers will be tasked with executing whatever plan the executive ultimately selects.

During a July 16 press conference about reopening schools, DCPS Chancellor Dr. Lewis Ferebee said his staff has been “in regular conversation” with unions about what the 2020-2021 academic year could look like for workers. There appears to be a difference of opinion on what conversation means.

“Throughout this process, things have been proposed and then we are charged to react to

them,” says Richard Jackson, the president of the Council of School Officers, a 750-member union that represents principals and other school administrators.

This has largely been the experience of all five unions representing workers, from principals to education aides to school nurses, across all of the District’s 115 traditional public schools.

Mayor Muriel Bowser has yet to announce whether schools will reopen when the academic year begins August 31; a decision is expected July 31. But before her health department expressed concerns over increasing COVID-19 cases, Bowser was leaning toward a hybrid of in-person and remote education, and released a proposal July 16 that would have small groups of students and staff return to campuses for one to two days of learning every week. Bowser controls only DCPS, not public charter schools.

“We find out what is going on when the public finds out what is going on,” Jackson tells City Paper. “And, as we’ve shared with DC Public Schools leadership, that is the most

6 july 24, 2020 washingtoncitypaper.com

impractical way to do this, because then what happens is all the challenges are discussed in public, as opposed to if they really coordinated with their labor partners, we could front-load some of the challenges before they make public announcements.”

The presidents for two unions, the Council of School Officers and the Washington Teachers’ Union, say learning should be 100 percent virtual until outstanding questions around operations and safety are answered. DCPS and the mayor’s office declined to comment.

“Our teachers have expressed the need to get back to their classrooms for in-person teaching,” says WTU President Elizabeth Davis.

Her union represents roughly 5,000 active and retired teachers. “But they want to do it in a manner that is going to be safe for themselves and for their students. That is not a hard ask.”

The teachers’ union released its own report in late June about how to reopen schools safely.

The compilation of survey findings and guidance authored by nearly 200 teachers makes a

number of recommendations, including having a licensed nurse present at all times students and staff are on campus, and providing hazard pay to educators expected to return to in-person instruction. DCPS has acknowledged and thanked WTU for its 20-page report, according to Davis, but has not indicated whether or not it will be including the recommendations in its own planning. Now the union is trying to get DCPS to codify recommendations in a memorandum of agreement, or an addendum to its new collective bargaining agreement. WTU has been in contract negotiations with DCPS since May 2019.

Davis wants the Council to get involved.

Unions writ large have reached out to members to discuss worker safety, and some leaders spoke with At-Large Councilmember Elissa Silverman, who chairs the labor committee, on Wednesday to go over possible solutions.

“We need to listen to teachers. They should be at the forefront of any plan developed for reopening schools, and the school district has not been very good about listening to teachers,” says Davis. “Authentic collaboration requires more than just telling me what you’re going to do and expecting me to comply.”

So far, the teachers’ union has filed two “unfair labor practice” complaints with the Public Employee Relations Board against DCPS for how it’s treated workers under the pandemic. The first complaint, filed May 19, alleges that DCPS violated D.C. law for refusing to bargain in good faith by delaying contract negotiations and blaming the pandemic; the board agreed. The second complaint, filed July 8, alleges that DCPS violated D.C. law for “unilaterally imposing changes on bargaining unit members without bargaining” by asking them to sign a “return to in person work intent form” in late June. The complaint says the union met with DCPS to go over its report on how to reopen schools safely just four days before officials sent the intent form, and DCPS made no mention of it. The board has yet to issue a decision.

WTU told its members not to sign the intent form, which asked them to say whether they’ll be returning to in-person work or applying for leave by July 10. The Council of School Officers and the local chapter of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees—a union representing 1,600 DCPS support workers, like clerical and educational aides—asked the same of their members. It was unclear to union leaders whether workers would be paid or penalized if they opted out of in-person work. It was also unclear what DCPS’ plans were to ensure it is safe for workers to return to in-person work.

Davis was the only school union leader to be a part of the mayor’s handpicked ReOpen DC Advisory Group. While she is still struggling to collaborate with DCPS, Davis believes being on the group’s education committee enabled the creation of her union’s own report on safely reopening schools. She was only invited to join after public outcry over her initial exclusion from the education committee, which is devoid of any principals or parents, and mostly made up of CEOs and executive directors of

NEWS education-related organizations. The other school unions were not invited to be a part of the advisory group and some continue to feel slighted. Robert Alston, president of AFSCME Local 2921, called his union’s exclusion from the group’s education committee “disrespectful.”

Alston says DCPS only started engaging in conversations with his union after he advised members not to sign the intent form. It became clear to him during two conference calls with DCPS that school leaders had not taken into consideration what returning to in-person work would mean for the people he represented.

School leaders could not provide satisfying answers to multiple questions: What happens if an education aide’s student is unable to wear a mask for reasons relating to disability?

Seeing as this student can still carry the virus, what accommodations will this aide receive?

Or what would happen if a student just simply refuses to wear a mask? Alston, who is a school suspension coordinator, is still not clear on whether staff would be responsible for penalizing students if they do not want to wear masks or face coverings.

“Everybody’s concerned,” Alston tells City Paper. “We have family members who have underlying health conditions at home. We ourselves have underlying health conditions.”

He continues, “I hope [Bowser] is listening to the unions and the people who do the work day to day and understand the things that need to be put in place, not just for the workers, but for our students.”

The lack of input from workers was clear to some of those watching the July 16 press conference. Bowser called a reporter’s question about whether staff could opt out of in-person learning “premature.”

“We don’t know how many children and parents are going to opt in to in-person. And so when we know that, we will know the matching parent preferences and teacher preferences,” Bowser said, adding that D.C. government employees already have 16 weeks of paid leave for COVID-19 related reasons.

Jackson, the president for the principals’ union, describes the mayor’s response to this question as “shortsighted.”

“It’s pretty illusionary on the part of the mayor, because over 80 percent of our workforce comes from surrounding jurisdictions, where most—other than Fairfax—have said they are going to do all virtual learning,” says Jackson. (City Paper spoke with him before the Fairfax County Schools superintendent, on Tuesday, recommended beginning the school year virtually.)

In conversations with Jackson, DCPS could not describe what, if any, accommodations will be given if a significant amount of the workforce cannot attend schools in person because they have a child at home and no child care. “At the best of times, getting subs is a difficult process,” says Jackson. “In the middle of a pandemic, it’s almost laughable, and that was their answer to us when we asked that question.”

Multiple union leaders also say DCPS was unprepared to answer questions about how social distancing would be enforced in the

cafeteria or bathrooms, or if there would be regular air-quality checks since research suggests the coronavirus spreads more easily in poorly ventilated spaces.

Robin Burns, president of the school nurses’ union within the DC Nurses Association (DCNA), is especially concerned about the school facilities, which can have tight, indoor spaces with little air flow, particularly in the rooms where nurses work. The union met with Children’s National in mid-July because the hospital, not DCPS, manages their contract.

The two groups went over new job responsibilities for the upcoming school year, after nurses had been reassigned to COVID-19 testing or contact tracing and reported to DC Health over the summer. Those who refused the reassignment were temporarily laid off, and ultimately dozens were forced to make this decision.

“There are a lot of questions that have been unanswered by management, and we are going to seek answers and advocate for ourselves to the D.C. health department,” says Burns. The nurses are forming a task force, as the teacher’s union did, and intend to send recommendations to DC Health very soon.

DCNA wants assurances that nurses will have a position of employment this time around if someone decides to opt out of in-person work for reasons related to their health status or the health status of those they live with. Many school nurses are older than 60, says Burns, and risk getting seriously ill if they contract COVID-19. How might this work if the teachers’ union is calling on DCPS to have at least one nurse in every school whenever staff or students are on campus? Not every school is staffed with a nurse, and some nurses split their time between schools. Burns says this is yet another unanswered question, and the beginning of the school year is just weeks away.

Meanwhile, the local chapter of Teamsters, the union representing custodial workers and cafeteria workers, says it will support whatever the mayor decides, be it 100 percent virtual learning or a hybrid of in-person and remote education. John Long, the shop steward for Teamsters Local 639, says many of his members never stopped working in-person during the public health emergency. Long, for example, is a custodial foreman who has been reporting almost daily to Martha’s Table, where the D.C. government is offering free food and child care to select individuals. He’s felt relatively safe going into work so far, as the city has provided him with a mask and gloves.

To reward workers for their efforts, Long says the Bowser administration offered his members a stipend. All DCPS custodial staff returned to in-person work as of the first week of July. Long is always concerned about safety and the consequences his members will face if students and additional staff return to schools in just over a month’s time. He is also concerned about pay for his workers, and what it would mean to go 100 percent virtual when his members can only perform their jobs in person. These are all difficult decisions.

“I just want us to be safe—that is the main objective,” Long says. washingtoncitypaper.com july 24, 2020 7

Courtesy of Cedar Lane Unitarian Universalist Church

NEWS

Rosa Gutierrez Lopez and her children

On ICE

Rosa Gutierrez Lopez has spent 18 months avoiding ICE at a Maryland church. She hopes the COVID-19 quarantine will help people better understand her ordeal.

By Will Lennon and Anahi Hurtado Contibuting Writers While much of the United States saw spikes in COVID-19 infections, infection rates in D.C. and its suburbs skewed downward in June. Judging from cell phone data, the key to the trend may have been social distancing.

Maryland and D.C. residents spent much of their first month of summer indoors.

As a result of the decline, both Maryland and the District are taking cautious steps toward lifting restrictions. For some, it’s not happening fast enough. The Reopen Maryland Facebook group describes itself as a coalition of “citizens concerned about the impact of mass shutdowns … committed to peaceful advocacy for public health measures that respect Marylanders’ civil rights and economic well being.” The group has roughly 6,400 members. (In an ironic twist, one of its founders tested positive for COVID-19 in late June.)

Things are moving in Reopen Maryland’s preferred direction, though probably not

as quickly as they’d like. Non-essential businesses, including nail salons and tattoo parlors, have opened their doors with social distancing measures in place. In many parts of the District and Maryland, people are back to shopping, getting manicures, and hitting the casinos.

Among those cautiously venturing outdoors is Rosa Gutierrez Lopez, a longtime area resident and an immigrant from El Salvador. In the past few weeks, Gutierrez Lopez has donned a mask and gone out into her community to take short walks with her three children.

The difference between Gutierrez Lopez’s situation and others is this: Most of those breathing a sigh of relief after stints in quarantine have been sheltering in place for a matter of months, while Gutierrez Lopez has taken sanctuary at Cedar Lane Unitarian Universalist Church in Bethesda for more than a year.

When Gutierrez Lopez immigrated from El Salvador in 2005, she requested asylum.

She misunderstood the paperwork given

8 july 24, 2020 washingtoncitypaper.com

to her by a Texas court—it was written in English and she primarily spoke Spanish— and the misunderstanding led to a missed court date. The court then ordered Gutierrez Lopez deported, and since she wasn’t present to hear the order issued, she didn’t find out about the deportation order until several years later.

Gutierrez Lopez found a lawyer in 2014 who was able to keep Immigration and Customs Enforcement at bay for a few years, but in 2017 she was given a deadline to return to El Salvador, a country she had fled after being subjected to threats and harassment. By that time, she had put down roots in Virginia, where she was living with her children and working as a cook in an Italian restaurant.

Gutierrez Lopez nearly complied with the deportation order and had already bought a plane ticket back to El Salvador when she discovered another option that would allow her to avoid being separated from her kids.

ICE designates churches as one of the “sensitive locations” where the agency

rarely conducts enforcement. The policy turns church properties into sanctuaries for an undocumented person trying to avoid deportation offficers, provided the church is willing to provide the person with room and board.

Cedar Lane voted to offer undocumented people sanctuary a year and a half prior to Gutierrez Lopez’s hour of need.

“As a congregation, we are living our faith, resisting the unjust and family-fracturing immigration policies of our government, and broadening our social justice community,” says a page describing the sanctuary policy on Cedar Lane’s website.

Gutierrez Lopez missed her flight to El Salvador and became the first undocumented person to take the church up on their offer.

On Cedar Lane’s property, she could be safe.

Leaving for even a day would mean exposure to ICE and potential deportation.

Fortunately, the church is located on a sprawling, green campus just outside the Beltway. Before the COVID-19 crisis, a robust coalition of volunteers helped Gutierrez Lopez with errands and groceries and shuttled her children to and from doctors’ appointments, shopping trips, and even afternoon outings to zoos and museums. Meanwhile, Gutierrez Lopez kept busy. Aside from taking care of her children, she used her skills as a cook and organizer to help the church with fundraisers. She also took an interest in learning about the histories of oppressive governments that rose to power in the 1940s.

The pandemic’s arrival in Maryland exacerbated the challenges of living in sanctuary. The volunteer network that had once helped Gutierrez Lopez get her children to and from their appointments was forced to mostly disband.

“Now we need to stay home,” Gutierrez Lopez says in an interview conducted via Zoom. “We sometimes walk around in the grounds, but never too far. We always have that fear of getting sick … I am at risk to the virus because I have a high sugar level, and my son is at risk because with his Down syndrome he has a low immune system.”

Gutierrez Lopez’s son with Down syndrome is her youngest. He and his brother are still in elementary school. Their sister recently became a teenager. Before the pandemic, the three were able to transfer to public schools in Montgomery County and join their mother in sanctuary. (Before that, they lived with pastors from Gutierrez Lopez’s church in Virginia.)

Like others threatened by the virus, Gutierrez Lopez is experiencing both the relief of leaving her shelter for the first time in months and the threat posed

by COVID-19. But fears of the virus are compounded by fears of ICE, of the conditions inside the agency’s notorious detention centers (many of which have seen COVID outbreaks), and of the threat of deportation to El Salvador, a country racked with civil unrest and gang violence.

NEWS and its protection allows her to venture beyond the church’s property line, free from the imminent threat of ICE. Still, Guttierez Lopez’s movements remain severely restricted. She has to communicate with ICEto support Housing Up A virtual benefit about any plans to leave the D.C. area for more than 48 hours, and she has to wear a October 5, 2020 at 7 PM GPS tracking bracelet wherever she goes.

Living in the City in DC. us in building thriving Gutierrez Lopez’s Join lawyer told DCist Living in thecommunities City that her client’s children were a major A virtual benefit to support Housing Up A virtual benefit to support Housing Up factor in ICE’s decision. If Gutierrez Lopez remained restricted to Cedar Lane’s A benefit to support Housing Up October 5, 2020 at 7 PM A virtual virtual October 5, 2020 at 7 PM benefit to support Housing Up Join us in building thriving communities in DC. campus, she would have been unableJoin to us in building thriving communities in DC. accompany her kids to the hospital if they A vOctober irtual b5,5, e2020 October at77sPM PM n2020 efitat contracted COVID-19. (Although both to u ppcommunities Join us in building thriving DC. Visit housingup.org/LITC to register! rt Housinginin Join us in building thrivingocommunities churches and hospitals are “sensitive UpDC. locations,” the trip from one to the other October 5 , 202to0register! housingup.org/LITC register! at 7 to Visit housingup.org/LITC could be treacherous.)

PM Join Visit u s in building th Until the end of July, Gutierrez riving comm Lopez is free to cautiously move about unities in D C. her community, not so unlike other Visit housingup.org/LITC to register!

Marylanders. After the stay expires, ICE Visit housingup.org/LITC to register! could renew it for another two months. Her A virtual benefit to support Housing Up deportation order could be nullified and the Board of Immigration Appeals could reopen it housin5,gu2020 at 7 PM her asylum case. That would present her Vis October p.org/LITC with a path toward leaving Cedar Lane and to regcommunities ister!

Join us in building thriving in remaining in the United States.

Or, none of that could happen, and Gutierrez Lopez could wind up back at Cedar Lane, stuck in sanctuary for an indefinite period. According to Associate Minister Rev. Katie Romano Griffin, the church is prepared to offer sanctuary until Gutierrez Lopez “is able to be treated with Justice, Equity and Compassion by our Visit housingup.org/LITC to register! legal system.”

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“Being here in the church, I can’t leave, but I know that my life is protected, that nothing will happen to me,” Guttierez Lopez says. “That is the difference between being in El Salvador and being here.”

Gutierrez Lopez often communicates with her niece who is still in El Salvador through WhatsApp. The two are as close as mother and daughter and speak every day.

Earlier this month, El Salvador was devastated when Tropical Storm Amanda gave way to flooding and mudslides.

Fourteen people were killed before the storm softened into a tropical depression.

Gutierrez Lopez’s niece was unharmed, as was the rest of her family, but it pained Gutierrez Lopez to see people in El Salvador suffering and dying.

“I would cry when I watched the news because I felt such an impotence since I couldn’t help,” Gutierrez Lopez says. “I could only pray for these people that lost their lives and the ones that are left with nothing, pray that the government can give them a hand and help them.”

Gutierrez Lopez also frequently speaks with friends from a group chat she has with other women living in sanctuary. Recently, they discussed how an experience with quarantine might help Americans better understand the trials of undocumented people who find their movements restricted by forces beyond their control.

“The perspective has changed a lot because people have never been in quarantine. They’ve never been in a situation like mine,” Gutierrez Lopez says. “They say, ‘It’s so hard to be in a house and not leave.’ …

At least they have the privilege to go to stores to buy necessities, go out to buy food, or go walk outside with a mask. We do not have that privilege.”

Being restricted to the church was Gutierrez Lopez’s reality for more than a year, but recently her situation has changed.

Since May, she has been able to cautiously venture outside, thanks to a stay of removal secured by her lawyer. The stay freezes her deportation order for 60 days.

Ironically, by the time the stay of removal was granted, much of the world that Gutierrez Lopez had sealed herself off from in 2018 had been shut down due to COVID-19. Even more ironic: It was COVID-19 that helped set the conditions for Gutierrez Lopez to secure her stay of removal in the first place.

One of the main reasons Gutierrez Lopez couldn’t do anything about the removal order in her name was because, to request a stay of removal, she would have had to appear at an ICE field office. This presented a classic Catch-22, since an undocumented immigrant showing up at an ICE field office was liable to get detained and deported based on the very order they were trying to get deferred.

However, because of a change in ICE policy made in the wake of the pandemic, Gutierrez Lopez was able to request a stay of removal by mail. The request was granted,

OVER 3.4 MILLION Visit housingup.org/LITC to register!

IN TOTAL CASH PRIZES!

Despite progress made in June, reopening is far from a sure thing in Maryland. July has seen the rate of Maryland’s positive COVID-19 tests hit their highest levels in a month. (The state reported 925 new cases on Sunday, July 19.)

Maryland has not announced plans to roll back in-progress reopening measures, but Governor Larry Hogan put out a press release encouraging bars and restaurants to double down on enforcing capacity and social-distancing restrictions. Different states have handled similar situations in their own ways—Texas paused its reopening after a spike in late June, but when Florida saw a spike, they went on with reopening Disneyworld.

Even in the best-case scenario, in which social distancing reduces the spread of COVID-19 until a safe vaccine is synthesized, mass-produced, and distributed equitably across the United States, Gutierrez Lopez may still face uncertainty. The forces that threaten to keep her locked indoors are as pervasive as any virus, and they threaten to linger long after her neighbors can go maskless to Safeway and Starbucks.

“Maybe now that people are in quarantine, they will see how difficult it is to be in one place without leaving,” Gutierrez Lopez says. “I have been here a year and a half and I have not despaired. I wait patiently.”

Wash.

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SPORTS BASEBALL

Home Run

By Kelyn Soong @KelynSoong Baseball didn’t really appeal to Julian McPherson.

Growing up in Southeast D.C, he played T-ball for a year, but like many other kids in his neighborhood, he preferred basketball and football. When his parents registered McPherson and his younger brother, Jonah, for programs at the Washington Nationals Youth Baseball Academy near their home in Fort Dupont, McPherson figured he’d try baseball out for a year before moving on.

Plus, he thought, playing baseball meant standing out uncomfortably as one of the few Black kids in a sport that is predominantly White.

“It’s weird when you’re the only Black guy,” McPherson says, “and that would be new for me, because I’ve been playing around all Black people most of my life with sports.”

His unease faded once he saw that other Black kids in the city joined the program, and the sport that McPherson was reluctant to try only a few years ago now consumes his life.

The 15-year-old rising sophomore at McKinley Technology High School plays baseball about 11 months out of the year. He competes on several youth teams and played for Mamie Johnson Little League a year before its 12-and-under allstar squad made national headlines in 2018 for becoming the first majority Black team to win the D.C. Little League championships.

McPherson, who goes by the nickname “Juice,” has embraced a sport that still struggles with Black representation. Only 8.4 percent of active Major League Baseball players on the 2018 Opening Day rosters were Black, according to the Institute for Diversity and Ethics in Sport, and it’s even lower in the NCAA, as only approximately 6 percent of the 10,816 baseball players last year were Black.

But locally, at least, the concerted efforts and success of youth programs have led to promising results. Two years after Mamie Johnson’s breakthrough, participation in both the Washington Nationals Baseball Academy’s YBA PLAY program and the Mamie Johnson Little League team that practices out of the academy’s facility in Ward 7 have grown exponentially. Local members of the baseball community are hopeful that while the novel coronavirus pandemic has halted competitive play for Little League, high school, and youth travel teams, progress will continue.

Darrow Montgomery

Two years ago, Mamie Johnson Little League made history.

We’re starting to see the impact of its D.C. championship.

Julian McPherson “I started getting emails from people going, ‘Hey, I heard your kid plays baseball with Mamie Johnson, can you tell me about it?’” McPherson’s mother, Ebon, says. “When I meet families and I happen to be wearing the [Mamie Johnson] jersey, they would ask, ‘Hey, is that the team that made it to the championship?’ Then they’d ask more.”

Raphael Lockett wears many hats in the local youth baseball scene. He’s the head coach for Mamie Johnson, serves as a pitching coach at Bishop McNamara High School in Forestville, and helps coach the Nationals Youth Baseball Academy’s YBA Hustle travel teams as a roving instructor.

Two summers ago, he launched Deuces Wild, a travel baseball team that brings in kids from Wards 7 and 8 and Prince George’s County, in part because of the growing demand for baseball in Southeast. Mamie Johnson’s president and founder, Keith Barnes, says that there were about 330 kids registered for his team last year, compared to 200 in 2018, and 135 in 2017.

“We definitely saw growth,” Lockett says. “I think we would’ve seen even more had coronavirus not taken out our season this year at the league and at the high school level.”

Rocco Gilbert, one of the players on the 2018 Mamie Johnson team and a rising freshman at Bishop McNamara who now competes for Deuces Wild and YBA Hustle, has had a front row view of the evolution. Like McPherson, Gilbert, 14, initially thought the sport was boring after playing T-ball.

The excitement of the past two years has helped change that perception.

“Some wards of D.C., most of the kids are African American, they don’t have a really big interest in baseball,” Gilbert says. “But I think after we had won, it was really huge. I think we inspired a lot of kids, they’re just like us. And a lot of them are starting to play baseball now.”

The players on Deuces Wild, who range in age from 13 to 15 years old, compete in tournaments locally and as far north as New York, giving players like McPherson an opportunity to refine their skills in a competitive setting after they age out of Little League.

10 july 24, 2020 washingtoncitypaper.com

Lockett estimates that 90 to 95 percent of players on the team are Black. Many of them, he says, have only played organized baseball for a few years. (Studies have shown that sports competition often begin as early as age 6.) McPherson, for one, only joined the Nationals Youth Baseball Academy’s after-school program five years ago.

The fact that McPherson is now a year-round baseball player comes as a surprise to Lockett.

He knows that exposure to the sport has been limited in many Southeast neighborhoods, and that makes it difficult for him to convince kids used to the constant action of basketball and the physical nature of football to give baseball a try.

Players like McPherson, who is 5-foot-2, have learned to appreciate the finer aspects of the game that they couldn’t see at first.

“I enjoy the mental part of the game,” he says.

“And the fact that it can be slow sometimes, but then sometimes it can be fast. You can change the pace of the game.”

Lockett, who joined Mamie Johnson in 2017, wants to maximize the kids’ potential and sees Deuces Wild as not only a pipeline to local high schools, which can lead to college coaches recruiting players, but as a resource for the kids outside of the sport, as well. In addition to Lockett, there are four other coaches and the team consists of about 35 players. They take players on college visits and give them an opportunity to explore areas outside of D.C. “It doesn’t have an all-star player all the time,” Lockett says. “Obviously we’ll accept those, but you want guys, at the end of the day, who want to learn about life, and that’s kind of what we’re trying to teach them, teach them life through the game of baseball.”

The team would’ve started the season this spring, with practices at the academy or at Leckie Elementary School, but the pandemic has forced them—like most youth athletes—to practice at home.

It only took a week for McPherson, a versatile player who pitches and plays second base, shortstop, and in the outfield, to start getting restless. In a normal season, he would be seeing his friends and teammates at the academy

four to five times a week for practice. In addition to Deuces Wild, McPherson plays for the academy’s YBA Hustle 16-and-under travel team. He graduated from the academy’s summer school and after-school program last year.

“I didn’t realize how much time [baseball] took up of my day. ‘Cause, like, for the first week, I could just [play video games] all day,” McPherson says.

“I could game and watch anime all day. And then after that, I started getting bored. I was like, I really have nothing to do because I’m usually playing baseball at this time.”

To maintain fitness, he threw a baseball around with his younger brother, Jonah, in the neighborhood, and coaches from Deuces Wild and the academy kept in touch via Zoom.

Lockett demonstrated how to practice throwing against a T-shirt placed on a fence with tape on it representing the different strike zones.

Last month, as the city went into Phase Two of the coronavirus reopenings, the academy started to allow small groups of players to practice on the fields with coaches. McPherson is now at the academy twice a week.

Nick Sussman, the director of baseball and softball operations at the academy, joined the organization four years ago, and has a picture of McPherson sitting at a computer. The then baseball rookie had been there all day as a scholar-athlete in the academy’s summer program, and during a break in the day to recharge, Sussman noticed that McPherson was watching YouTube while wearing his baseball glove.

“I realized that was me when I was his age, because I loved baseball too, and I just had my glove on all the time,” Sussman says. “And that was a moment where I went, I think we’re going to do something special here on the baseball field.”

A few years later, the Mamie Johnson Little League team would be celebrating its first D.C. Little League championship title. Sussman credits Mamie Johnson with increasing interest in the academy and also baseball in Southeast— even more so than the Nationals’ World Series title last fall.

“I love that World Series run,” he says. “I was hanging on every pitch of that run, but if I’m comparing it to what our what our boys did with the Mamie Johnson team, that was just massive, because we had kids who were able to look onto a baseball field to see other kids that look like them, who are having success, winning a championship, and getting to go up to Bristol and be on ESPN.” In terms of measuring the sport’s growth in the past two years, Sussman points to the participation number in YBA Play, the academy’s largest program that provides structured baseball and softball development and free instructional league during the summer months for kids ages 5 to 12. In that time span, the participation has increased from 600 kids in 2018 to around 1,200 last year, Sussman says, adding that last winter was the “best winter in terms of player development that we’ve ever had,” during his time with the academy.

And just last year, McPherson got the chance to attend Game 4 of the World Series at Nationals Park for free with his father. He had just been named the Nationals Youth Baseball Academy’s youth of the year.

FOOD YOUNG & HUNGRY

Virtual Insanity

equipment. Whether you order a cheeseburger from Mid-Atlantic Seafood or Burger Land, the food will taste the same and the money will land in Mid-Atlantic Seafood’s account.

Sometimes operators will test out entirely new cuisines if they’re thinking of opening another brick-and-mortar venture in the future.

Virtual restaurants allow them to do so with little overhead costs or risks. Others will repackage their current menus using existing ingredients and dishes to reach new customers and boost revenue.

“We decided to reach more customers under different categories,” Song says. “Some people think we only carry seafood because of our name. But we have ribs, chicken, sandwiches, and salads.” Other patrons, Song says, don’t realize that Mid-Atlantic Seafood serves breakfast, so they rolled out at least five virtual breakfast restaurants. Employees say delivery drivers frequently arrive for pickups with confused looks on their faces.

It’s easy to conflate virtual restaurants with another buzzy term—ghost kitchens. The lat-

Takoma Park’s Mid-Atlantic Seafood is home to at least 25 virtual restaurants.

By Laura Hayes @LauraHayesDC

Mid-Atlantic Seafood in Takoma Park

Laura Hayes

Nearly all food writers aspire to know about all the restaurants that exist in the city or region they cover. We might not be able to try them all because of time or caloric constraints, but should you, dear reader, ask if we’ve heard of a spot, the answer better be, “Yes.” On one particularly hangry night during this pandemic, this food writer found herself scrolling through third-party delivery platforms and ogling all the options like a single person swiping right and left on dating apps.

With shock, I encountered restaurant after restaurant in my delivery radius in Ward 4 that I’d never covered, let alone recognized.

Had I let you down? Some sounded like band names stoners came up with while having a munchies-fueled jam session in someone’s garage: Yeah Yeah Chicken, HaHa Wings, Burger Mansion, and Fry Me a River. I had to know more.

These restaurants don’t have websites, and you can’t find them on reservation sites such as OpenTable. Google doesn’t even return a physical address when you search for them. That’s because these businesses have never had tables and chairs, servers and bartenders, or printed menus in the first place.

Examining the fine print on Uber Eats revealed clues. Some listings said “Crafted by Mid-Atlantic Seafood (Takoma Park)” and others simply listed Mid-Atlantic Seafood’s address at 6500 New Hampshire Avenue. Not all apps are as forthcoming, at least on mobile.

No address or information about Fry Me a River comes up when I look it up on DoorDash on my phone. Only on a desktop computer can I scroll down to the bottom of the restaurant’s listing to spot Mid-Atlantic Seafood’s address.

There are at least 25 “virtual restaurants” operating out of the small local chain’s Takoma Park location. Have you tried GastroPub, Nonstop Breakfast Club, Burger Land, or Caroline’s Country Fried Cafe? How about Big MaMa’s Seafood & Soul Food, Rainbow Smoothie, Just Wing It, On A Bun, or Giant Breakfast Burrito?

The restaurant’s general manager, Eric Song, explains that they’ve been experimenting with virtual restaurants for about two years. A virtual restaurant operates out of an existing licensed eatery’s kitchen using the same labor and

restaurant partners,” a company representative tells City Paper. Uber Eats even has an employee, Kristen Adamowski, dedicated to virtual restaurant development.

Restaurants can go to the Uber Eats website and sign up to have a 15-minute consultation on how to launch a virtual restaurant. “Our team can dive into the data to identify dishes and cuisines that customers are searching for in your area,” the Uber Eats website says. “If moonlighting as an empanada shop will help your bakery increase sales, we can let you know.”

Uber Eats confirms they worked with MidAtlantic Seafood on virtual restaurant development, but otherwise did not respond to City Paper’s requests for comment on specifics such as who comes up with the names of the virtual restaurants and what Uber Eats gets out of the arrangement, other than more money in commission fees when customers place orders. MidAtlantic Seafood’s virtual restaurants not only show up on Uber Eats, they’re also available on other platforms, including GrubHub and Postmates.

ter is a commissary facility that plays host to a number of food businesses which pay rent and other fees to prepare food for delivery or pick-up only. Companies such as Kitchen United, Reef Kitchens, and CloudKitchens have set up ghost kitchens across the country. Chick-Fil-A, The Halal Guys, and Dog Haus have all opened ghost kitchens with Kitchen United.

There are also grassroots ghost kitchens. In September, local restaurateur Aaron Gordon plans to open a “ghost food hall” where Town Hall once stood in Glover Park. It’ll feature everything from fried chicken from Chef Rock Harper to Tex-Mex from Chef Naomi Gallego.

Gordon’s project deviates from the norm by having some seats for dining on the premises.

Third-party delivery companies don’t just encourage businesses to launch virtual restaurants—in some cases they facilitate their creation by providing data on consumer spending habits. “Virtual restaurants are often a result of direct engagement between Uber Eats and

Song says Mid-Atlantic Seafood came up with the catchy names for its myriad virtual restaurants, but that may not be the case. A virtual restaurant called Caroline’s Country Fried Cafe operates in Tempe, Arizona, and Chicago is also home to a virtual restaurant dubbed Just Wing It. Of the 400,000 restaurants Uber Eats has on its platform worldwide, 7,000 are virtual restaurants. There are roughly 3,000 in the U.S. and Canada alone.

Virtual restaurants carry plusses and minuses. A DoorDash representative reiterates that it’s a great way for established brands to test a new cuisine to see if there’s local appetite for it. Adding brands can also help a restaurant dominate a food category. If I’m craving chicken fingers and type “fried chicken” into the search bar in a third-party app, all of MidAtlantic Seafood’s virtual restaurants with fried chicken on the menu will populate, increasing the likelihood of the restaurant making a sale.

Song says the strategy is working. “It’s pretty

good,” he says. “It’s helping us. Right now is a difficult time in the pandemic. People are ordering delivery more.” He wouldn’t talk numbers, but a San Francisco restaurateur told the New York Times that after he introduced four virtual restaurants inside Top Round Roast Beef, his delivery sales went from being a quarter of his business to 75 percent.

On the surface, an increase in delivery sales may seem positive, but keep in mind that thirdparty delivery companies charge up to 30 percent commission on all orders. Some jurisdictions have passed delivery fee caps during the pandemic, but Montgomery County, where Mid-Atlantic Seafood is located, isn’t one of them.

Restaurants operate on slim profit margins and often report that they only break even on delivery orders. They sign on for the marketing and exposure or because loyal customers have pressed them to offer delivery and it would be too expensive to hire their own drivers. Even the delivery companies themselves largely haven’t figured out how to make money off of the model.

In addition to commission fees, virtual restaurants also suffer because they’re constrained to reaching customers within a certain delivery range. With an actual restaurant, people can travel from further away to pick up food to-go or to dine in. There is zero signage inside the Takoma Park Mid-Atlantic Seafood advertising its virtual restaurants or their menus.

Another issue is transparency. Even Chuck E. Cheese entered the virtual restaurant game when they quietly listed Pasqually’s Pizza & Wings on delivery platforms across the country in the spring. A customer in Philadelphia wasn’t pleased when she learned the pies she ordered actually came from a chain most frequently associated with children’s birthday parties. A delivery customer might think they were supporting a small, independent restaurant instead of a chain whose parent company filed for bankruptcy in June.

Virtual restaurants and ghost kitchens aren’t new. The New York Times reports that deliveryonly establishments in America date back to at least 2013, when a startup began work on a ghost kitchen in New York. But they’re becoming increasingly popular, according to a DoorDash representative. The company tells City Paper virtual restaurants have been proliferating, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Many Washingtonians remain uncomfortable with the idea of dining out. They fear contracting or transmitting the virus and may have concerns about whether the servers and bartenders taking care of them are just as afraid.

Delivery allows customers to support their favorite restaurants from a safer distance.

We’re also more married to our immediate neighborhoods than ever before. People are rediscovering the eateries nearest to their homes because it’s easy to swing by to pick up dinner to-go or place a delivery order that doesn’t require a driver to travel too far. Virtual restaurants offer these restaurants a chance to shake things up and present their food in new ways to a captive audience that may not know what’s happening behind the scenes.

washingtoncitypaper.com july 24, 2020 11

Fort Totten trash transfer station

WASTE MISMANAGEMENT D.C.’s trash transfer stations are in drastic need of repair.

Low fees to use them are depriving the system of millions of dollars.

By Cuneyt Dil Photographs by Darrow Montgomery Sanitation workers get no break from the pandemic. The epitome of essential, they show up in the morning light to collect waste and garbage from our homes, offices, and street corners. Trucks from the District’s Department of Public Works pick up trash from single-family homes and small multifamily dwellings, and private companies collect waste from apartment buildings, offices, and commercial properties.

All that trash ends up passing through the District’s massive garbage collection facilities, known as trash transfer stations.

But every time a private waste hauler pulls up to dump trash at one of the District’s two trash transfer stations—cavernous warehouses where city workers process waste and move it to trucks that haul the garbage to incinerators or landfills—D.C. loses money. For the past decade, every ton of garbage in every private trash truck on city streets has cost D.C. up to $36 more than it should. Taxpayer losses in 2018 alone totaled $8,585,484, according to an 18-month investigation of the waste system.

In total, the District has lost nearly $53.8 million since 2010, thanks to drastically undercharging private trash haulers for access to the city’s public transfer stations.

For years, top District leaders have known and downplayed the fact that the District does not recoup its costs from its business with private haulers, according to a review of internal documents, public testimony, and interviews with officials. Several directors of the Department of Public Works did nothing to stop the bleeding and even denied in public that the city was ever losing money. Ward 3 Councilmember Mary Cheh, who chairs the D.C. Council committee overseeing DPW, at times acknowledged the losses during the last two years, but did not seek legislative fixes until this spring.

This investigation calculated the first-ever accounting of how much the District has lost in processing trash for private waste haulers.

The economics of trash hauling and disposal are complicated, but the reason the District loses money is simple: It costs more for DPW to process the waste that enters its public transfer stations than the agency charges private trash haulers in usage fees. In other words, the District is getting ripped off.

The losses stem from two separate sources.

First, between 2010 and late 2019, the District charged about $50 to take in a ton of trash at its public transfer stations, but its expenses were upward of $86 to process that ton of trash and haul it to an incinerator in Lorton, Virginia, according to a review of city documents.

District taxpayers bore the $36 difference per ton, which quickly added up to millions. Even after a $10 hike in the fee last year, the District still loses money today.

Second, since 2002, D.C. has been losing even more money because of settlement agreements with the country’s two largest trash haulers, agreements that boost the bottom lines of Waste Management, Inc. and Republic Services, Inc. The settlement agreements handed the two corporations a significant discount to use the city’s trash transfer stations, estimated to be savings worth about $25-perton from 2010 onwards.

“It’s a subsidy to some of the largest trash haulers in the country, plain and simple,” says Neil Seldman, co-founder of the Districtbased Institute for Local Self-Reliance. As director of the environmental group’s Waste to Wealth Initiative, Seldman has studied and testified about D.C.’s trash and recycling operations since the 1990s. “This is a prima facie case of malfeasance,” he says.

Based on documents obtained through Freedom of Information Act requests, court

12 july 24, 2020 washingtoncitypaper.com

settlements, interviews, and public testimony, this investigation found: • The taxpayer losses were raised to leaders at DPW for years. Since early 2018, Cheh has periodically brought up the issue with DPW directors at public hearings. But as the chair of the committee with oversight over the agency, Cheh never sought a study of the problem. Early this year, she accepted the word of current DPW Director Chris Geldart, who claimed, without citing data, that the settlement agreements weren’t leading to losses. In the District’s Fiscal Year 2021 budget, she, for the first time, proposed a hike in the transfer station fees to stem part of the losses.

• An outside report from 2016 that was acquired through a public records request told the city administrator’s office to consider ending its agreement with Republic Services when it expired at the end of 2018 due to continued losses. The District has continued to renew the agreement since its initial term ended in 2013.

• The bargain rates for private trash companies are more than just a loss for taxpayers.

The District’s low fee to use its public transfer stations have incentivized trucks from neighboring counties to drive truckloads of waste into the city. D.C. stands out in the region for allowing the import of trash into its public stations from beyond its borders.

• Geldart admits dismay with the District importing trash, but the city has not examined the scope of the problem. It is currently unknown how many tons of trash the city accepts from neighboring counties each year. One estimate from a city-commissioned 2011 report said it could be tens of thousands of tons annually.

“It’s a huge environmental problem,” says Chris Weiss, director of the D.C. Environmen-

tal Network. “Think about all the trucks coming through the District—the diesel exhaust, the wear and tear on our roads.”

Geldart knows that D.C. serves as a regional dumping ground.

“You can see the trucks that come in that haven’t picked up trash in the District of Columbia,” Geldart said in an interview last year. “It’s less expensive for them to dump here.”

The District’s low fees for private haulers have not only cost taxpayers millions of dollars. They have also impoverished D.C.’s trash processing system. One of the two city-owned transfer stations is “in dire need of being torn down,” according to Mayor Muriel Bowser’s most recent budget request, and “presents a safety hazard to the employees.” Yet the facility on Benning Road NE will have to function for another five years before it can be rebuilt with larger capacity. D.C. also faces the potential of millions of dollars in fines from the Environmental Protection Agency for stormwater pollution from the facility, Geldart revealed at a D.C. Council hearing in May. In his May budget testimony, City Administrator Rashad Young said the transfer station will need to be held together “with a little bit of bubble gum and tape.”

Seldman believes the troubled system is primarily a result of the low fees for private haulers. “Not only are we not getting basic operating costs in the transaction, but we’re not getting maintenance and replacement costs back,” he says. “Any city should do that.”

The 2002 settlement agreements were negotiated to give Waste Management and Republic Services low flat fees in exchange for the two companies closing some of their privately owned transfer stations in the city. Private stations near residential neighborhoods were nuisances that city and neighborhood leaders

wanted to shutter. But environmentalists and experts say the discounts given in return for the station closures went way too far, and on for too long.

The settlement agreement with Republic Services has been renewed several times since its original term ended at the close of 2013, including most recently at the beginning of this January, leading to continued losses.

Cheh has raised these issues to DPW directors in public hearings, but often without much fanfare. Asked after a January 2020 oversight hearing why she didn’t hold Geldart accountable for the lost funds, she said, “It’s a mystery to me. I should have pressed them more today.

That’s a stream of money.”

The “stream of money” is especially significant in the current budget picture, when revenue losses from the COVID-19 pandemic have forced the mayor and Council to freeze government workers’ pay in order to balance the District’s budget, due for a final vote on July 23. Over the years, the D.C. waste business’ average annual loss of $6.45 million would have been enough to help fund additional investments in early childhood education, the establishment of a compost system, or the repair of the city’s decrepit transfer stations.

“We’re just giving money away,” Weiss says.

“Dollars are being wasted.”

Like in most big cities, waste is collected in two ways in the nation’s capital.

The Department of Public Works has its own publicly run fleet. Every weekday morning, more than 50 of the city’s orange trucks— owned, operated, and maintained by the District—ply dozens of routes to collect trash and recycling from residential neighborhoods.

D.C. workers also collect solid waste from public schools and multi-family dwellings with three or fewer units.

Garbage trucks owned and operated by private trash companies pick up and dump solid waste from dumpsters behind commercial complexes, restaurants, condos, office buildings, department stores, and other large structures. In 2018, the private companies handled 302,000 tons of solid waste, more than twice what DPW’s trucks handled, according to data obtained through a public records request.

Trash hauling is a high-cost and highly competitive business. A new trash compacting truck can cost as much as $350,000, and the workers that operate the equipment are welltrained in the dangerous occupation. At least 71 trash companies are licensed to operate in the District, according to DPW’s latest figures.

Two mega-companies dominate D.C.’s private hauling system. Republic Services, the second-largest waste hauler in the country, drives the most trash into D.C.’s transfer stations, followed by Waste Management, the largest trash company in the U.S. When public and private trucks finish picking up trash and recycling, they all pull up to a transfer station. The District of Columbia has no landfills. Every trash truck has to dump its load into one of four transfer stations. DPW operates two of the stations; the other two are privately owned, but the District’s stations are more advantageous to use due to their capacity and low usage fee. Each truck drives up, stops at a weigh station, dumps its load, and returns to its route.

D.C. charges private haulers a fee, called a tipping fee, for dumping trash at one of its two transfer stations, one at Fort Totten and the other on Benning Road NE. The District bears the costs for weighing trucks, managing trash in the transfer stations, storage maintenance, staffing, and loading solid waste into the tractor trailers that haul it to incinerators and landfills. D.C. also pays to truck slightly less than half of the waste received at stations to an incineration plant in Lorton known as Covanta Fairfax, as well as the cost of burning it there.

Waste Management and Republic independently handle the transport of their waste from transfer stations to landfills, dropping it at a D.C. transfer station and coming back later to haul the same amount out.

This investigation found that the District has lost between $5.59 million and $8.58 million a year in the trash business over the past decade because low tipping fees and the two settlement agreements for private companies did not cover the cost of the service provided at the public transfer stations.

The bulk of the total losses are due to the settlement agreements for Republic and Waste Management, which undercharge them, on average, more than $4,662,000 a year. The agreement with Waste Management doesn’t expire until 2022. Both companies reject the notion the fees are a discount to them, arguing the city doesn’t lose money because the companies themselves haul their own waste to a landfill.

Taken together, excluding 2015 and 2017, the District lost $53,789,667 from 2010 to October 2019, according to an analysis of the past decade.

Any private company or public agency might be expected to account for its costs in providing a service. Yet the District has never examined its solid waste processing operations, ascertained their costs, and published the results. DPW has never tabulated the costs of labor or the capital and operating costs of receiving, processing, transferring, trucking, and incinerating trash.

According to a 2014 law, the Sustainable Solid Waste Management Amendment Act, the mayor “shall impose a fee on the disposal of solid waste at a solid waste disposal facility owned by the District sufficient to cover the costs of operating, maintaining, and improving the solid waste facilities.”

Despite that law, for years the tipping fee at D.C.’s public transfer stations has not and continues not to cover those costs.

Since the District does not have readily available figures showing the overhead costs of its entire waste management operation, this investigation relied on public data and documents to arrive at a calculation.

The only recent and most accurate accounting of D.C.’s cost of processing trash comes from an April 2017 report commissioned by DPW that studies options for starting a composting program. In estimating the cost of gathering and processing compost, Resource Recycling Systems researched and reported the costs of operating D.C. transfer stations.

RRS arrived at a processing cost of $33.70 per ton of solid waste, which became the basis for this investigation’s accounting.

DPW accepted that report and did not

challenge the number in public hearings or interviews. Councilmember Cheh has cited the $33.70 per ton figure for at least the past two years in her committee oversight hearings, in front of DPW officials.

Beyond the cost of processing trash in transfer stations, the District must also pay for two other trash disposal services: trucking the waste and disposal. (Waste Management and Republic drive their trash to landfills themselves, so these costs do not apply to them.

But the District disposes of waste for all other private operators.)

Between 2010 and October 2019, all trash haulers but Waste Management and Republic were paying the District a tipping fee of about $50 per ton to dump trash at transfer stations.

Adding in the cost of D.C.’s contracts with companies that truck trash from public transfer stations to the Covanta Fairfax incinerator site and the contracted costs for incineration, the cost to the District to receive, process, haul, and dispose of a ton of trash has been around $85 for the past three years.

The difference of $35 per ton was a deficit paid by District taxpayers and what critics call a subsidy to private trash haulers.

The Department of Public Works did not respond to a list of questions about its business with private trash companies and whether it supported raising fees to recover more costs.

The two-part reason why D.C. loses money in its dealings with private waste haulers starts with the settlement agreements inked with Waste Management and Republic in 2002.

In the early 1990s, the D.C. government was operating in the red and careening toward insolvency. Like other cities at the time, D.C. attempted to corner the market on trash

dumping, aiming to raise more revenue. It established what’s known in industry parlance as a “flow control” program, which essentially forced all haulers, public and private, to bring their trash to city-owned transfer stations, located then, as now, at Fort Totten and Benning Road.

To bring in even more revenue, DPW raised tipping fees about $24 to make it $64 a ton.

That worked until the Supreme Court in 1994 struck down a flow control ordinance in a town in New York, ruling its regulations violated the Constitution’s commerce clause.

Chaos ensued.

Private transfer stations popped up in warehouses and vacant lots across Ward 5 in Northeast D.C., along the Prince George’s County line. The District passed strict regulations on siting and handling trash to close down almost all of the assorted garbage dumps.

Most of the smaller ones closed, but two large transfer stations refused to fold. One transfer station was owned by Waste Management. The other was managed by BFI, which now goes by Republic Services.

Waste Management and Republic sued the District. In the resulting 2002 settlement agreements, Waste Management agreed to close one of its transfer stations and make improvements to another on Queens Chapel Road NE. Republic agreed to give up management of a transfer station on W Street NE, a facility it was leasing.

In exchange, the District agreed to charge each company a set amount of $6 per ton as a tipping fee, subject to annual adjustments for inflation, to use its two public waste transfer stations. Waste Management’s agreement runs until 2022, while D.C. has renewed Republic’s deal since 2014.

By 2010, that fee rose to $8.44 per ton, but

Republic Services truck leaving Fort Totten after tipping a load

washingtoncitypaper.com july 24, 2020 13

the cost to D.C. for the two companies to use its public transfer station was about $30 per ton, according to City Paper’s analysis.

That disparity in costs has run up to a loss of $41,647,206 since 2010. (That accounting does not include 2015, because, despite public records requests, the District government did not turn over data showing tons of trash the two companies brought into public transfer stations that year.)

In a statement to City Paper, Waste Management says the company “is not receiving a discounted rate compared to what other companies are paying that deliver waste to the District’s two solid waste transfer stations.”

The statement says Waste Management pays a small rate at the public transfer stations because it drives its own waste out, unlike other independent private companies, which leave the trash there for D.C. to dispose of at an incinerator.

Republic Services concurred in its own statement: “Comparing the District’s cost to operate its transfer stations to Republic’s costs under the settlement agreement is like comparing apples to oranges.”

After covering the cost of disposing of its trash at a landfill, “Republic actually offers the city value by providing revenue to cover their fixed costs for loading at the transfer stations,” the statement continues.

But the December 2016 report prepared for the Office of the City Administrator said that the city should consider cutting its settlement agreement with Republic Services in 2018 to ensure D.C. recouped more of its costs.

“The District may consider revisiting the cost of service analysis at those junctures to determine adjustments to settlement agreement fees for greater cost recovery,” stated the report by Public Financial Management, a firm that advises cities. The report confirmed that D.C. was losing money on the settlement agreement fees.

“Underlying costs of service are conservatively estimated to be far higher than the current fee level,” the report said.

Briefed on the cost differential, DPW Director Geldart has accepted the roughly $30 disparity. In an interview last July, he said the department hadn’t conducted its own analysis.

He repeatedly said that he expects a major hike in fees for Waste Management and Republic in 2022. “It may be $40,” he said. “I can guarantee you that it won’t be the same numbers, if I’m here.”

But then he walked back his vows in public.

At a January 2020 D.C. Council oversight hearing chaired by Cheh, he declared, “I honestly can’t answer at this point what we’re going to do in 2022.”

At that hearing, Cheh did not question Geldart’s statements, made under sworn oath, that the District was “making $8.33 per ton off of that” settlement agreement with Republic.

In a brief interview after the oversight hearing, Geldart said, “I did not admit it was losing money” last year.

When pressed about the 2016 report to the city administrator showing that the low fee from the settlement agreement was not recovering the District’s costs, and his previous statements from last year, Geldart replied, “It could be. What I said is, we’re looking at it.” He added he intends to renew the Republic deal on

a year-to-year basis.

It’s “not quite a sweetheart deal” for the two companies, Geldart said last year. The settlement agreements, he noted, meant Waste Management and Republic had to shutter their own money-making transfer stations in D.C. But Seldman and Weiss say Waste Management and Republic did not give up enough to make the settlement agreements even.

“It was a trade-off, and the District gave away far too much on their side of the trade,” Seldman says.

Seldman was a consultant for the D.C. Council throughout the process of closing down many private transfer stations. “Why the mayor signed a sweetheart deal with these two companies is a mystery to me,” Seldman says.

“I definitely recall moving to curtail transfer stations,” says Anthony Williams, D.C.’s mayor from 1999 to 2007, “but don’t recall any discussions about fees. As a rule, I didn’t get involved with negotiations and procurements for obvious reasons.

and Covanta. Between 2010 and 2018, the city spent on average $25 more per ton to process all that trash and send it to an incinerator than it charged companies for unloading at the transfer stations.

Between 2010 and 2018, that ballooned to a total loss of $12,142,461. (That accounting does not include the years 2015, for which D.C. did not provide data, and 2017, when a fire at Covanta Fairfax disrupted the city’s trash flow.)

Meanwhile, some local haulers are crying foul over the settlement terms for Waste Management and Republic, arguing D.C. should also allow them a similar arrangement.

“We would love that deal,” says Barney Shapiro, owner of Tenleytown Trash. He says he has long sought the same arrangement given to the two major haulers: a low fee to unload at the transfer station and the ability to truck his own waste back out to a landfill within 24 hours. “I could be saving myself $3 to $4 a ton if I could operate the same way,” he says.

Geldart understands those smaller haulers

Waste Management dumpster in Adams Morgan “I accept responsibility for the good and bad of my administration,” he adds.

On top of the cash drain due to the settlement agreements, the District separately loses money because the tipping fee for everyone else at its two public transfer stations is less than what it costs to run the operation.

The rate to drop off a ton of trash at the stations was about $50 for most of the past decade.

Workers at D.C.’s transfer station take in the waste and load it onto large trucks later in the day to carry it to the Covanta Fairfax incinerator, where the city pays to permanently get rid of the waste.

But D.C. was spending more than $50 on that entire operation, according to an analysis of the city’s contracts with a trucking company

14 july 24, 2020 washingtoncitypaper.com

are upset with the discounted arrangements given to Waste Management and Republic. But he believes they have their own favorable deal because his agency charges so little at its public transfer stations.

“They’re getting a sweetheart deal compared to other privates that are collecting out in Montgomery County, in Prince George’s County, in Arlington, and places like that, because those guys are paying $20, $30 more a ton to do their job,” Geldart said.

In September 2011, DPW set tipping fees for private haulers at about $50 per ton, down from as high as $71 in 2008. That $50 fee remained unchanged for eight years until October 2019, when DPW finally increased it to $60.62 per ton.

If that price covered the cost of trucking

out and burning the trash, D.C. wouldn’t lose money. A few times every weekday, huge tractor trailers under contract with Lucky Dog Industries pull up to the back of D.C. transfer stations.

DPW operators load them with trash and garbage, and they haul away the load. Lucky Dog has had the contract since at least 2010.

Trucking costs rose gradually over the past decade, from $10 a ton in 2010 to $17.20 currently, according to contract agreements.

The District also has to bear the cost of incinerating waste at Covanta Fairfax. Those costs have risen as well. In 2019, D.C. was paying Covanta around $35.50 to incinerate a ton of trash, up from $29 in 2010.

Yet while the District’s costs of trucking and burning waste increased, DPW never passed the extra costs on to trash haulers. The tipping fees at D.C.’s two public transfer stations remained steady at $50 per ton.

With private haulers bringing in roughly 96,000 tons of trash in 2018, the District’s losses came to $3.45 million.

Two years after first raising the issue publicly, Cheh, during this budget cycle, inserted a provision into the Council’s budget bill to raise fees at the transfer stations to $70.62, another $10 hike. It would take effect in October, about a year after Geldart’s increase to $60.62. At that rate, it will take at least two more years until the District breaks even.

Her budget language doesn’t mince words about the current $60.62 rate: “This is an improvement, but still lower than the region, and lower than the costs to the District of disposal.”

Another issue, leaders admit, is the city accepting trash originating from outside the District in the first place.

Over the past two decades, the District’s revitalization has been marked by glass highrises and budget surpluses. But at the city’s nadir in the mid-1990s, the District opened its gates to becoming a quasi-trash dump for the entire region. Until 1994, trash and recycling “generally was not imported into the District of Columbia,” according to a 2000 report commissioned by D.C. But since then, the amount of outside waste entering the city has skyrocketed. The 2000 report projected that in 1999, the city took in 366,900 tons of imported waste, 58 percent more than what was generated by District residents and businesses.

Moreover, until late 2019, the District, for about a decade, was the cheapest place to dump trash in the region. This investigation compared fees for public transfer stations across the region and found that haulers in recent years saved as much as $25 a ton by crossing the border and dumping their haul in D.C. public transfer stations. To take advantage of D.C.’s low dumping fees, trash haulers truck garbage across the Maryland border in the early hours of the morning, beating rush hour traffic on thoroughfares like Route 50.

The District’s unique status as the region’s trash repository is not lost on Geldart. He’s witnessed it while sitting at transfer stations.

“You can see the trucks that come in that haven’t picked up trash in the District of Columbia,” he said in the July 2019 interview.

“Because it’s less expensive for them to dump

here. We do need to get our tipped fees close to our regional partners.”

Geldart said that independent haulers should be paying more. “We’re probably somewhere in the $20 to $25—maybe a little bit more than that—per ton below our regional partners right now,” he said. Going by Geldart’s numbers, trash haulers saved $250 for a 10-ton load by dumping in D.C. rather than in Prince George’s County, for example.

One month after that interview, Geldart moved to raise the price of dumping a ton of waste by $10. With an additional $1 surcharge, all private haulers other than Waste Management and Republic are expected to pay $61.62 to unload a ton of waste, according to a District notice published on Aug. 23, 2019.

“The increase of the Solid Waste Disposal Fee ensures that the fee charged by the District more accurately reflects the cost to operate the facility,” a final notice of the new fee said on Oct. 18, 2019.

But the $10 hike is only half as much as what Geldart said was needed. The $61.62 fee still does not meet the cost of running the facility, transporting the received waste to an incinerator, and the city’s contract with Covanta Fairfax.

In fact, Geldart suggested in a January interview that the fee hike wasn’t detering trucks from bringing waste generated outside the city into D.C.’s transfer stations. “We’re still seeing the same tonnages, which would lead to be we’re still seeing the same trucks coming in,” he said.

“We need to continue to raise our fees,” he added.

The two public transfer stations remain money-losing operations at a critical time.

Both stations need repairs and upgrades to make up for deferred maintenance. The District is budgeting $4,100,000 next year for additional upgrades to the Fort Totten station, where renovations are currently ongoing.

“All the trash coming in from the suburbs just compounds the injury and insult,” says Seldman.

The 2002 settlement agreements exacerbate the trouble. Settlement terms with Waste Management allow the company to bring 25,000 tons of trash a month from outside the city into D.C.’s transfer stations. Republic can bring in up to 6,900 tons a month from outside the District—much less than its competitor, but still a large amount. (For reference, Republic hauled a monthly average of 8,048 tons of total waste into D.C. transfer stations in 2017, according to DPW records.)

Settlement terms for Republic, known as BFI in 2002, for imported waste go further than Waste Management’s agreement. “Any such load shall be treated as waste generated inside the District of Columbia,” its agreement says.

Having opened itself up to trash from beyond its border, the District has no way of tracking or tracing its origins.

The only recent study of the issue comes in a passing reference in a 2011 report commissioned by DPW. “Based on responses from private haulers received to date, it is estimated that approximately 10 percent of the waste processed at the DCDPW facilities is imported from outside the District,”

said the study, produced by consulting firm ARCADIS/Malcolm Pirnie.

Geldart said the agency hasn’t yet examined how much trash is trucked into the District.

“We will, as we go through the process of doing our solid waste management plan,” Geldart pledged last year. “I don’t care where it’s coming from, but if you didn’t collect it inside the 62 square miles of the District, kind of good to know.”

On March 8, 2018, Councilmember Cheh convened the annual oversight hearing for the Department of Public Works.

The hearing featured testimony from thenDPW Director Christopher Shorter, whom Mayor Bowser appointed in June 2015.

As chair of the Council’s Committee on Transportation and the Environment, Cheh has built a reputation as the Council’s principal legislator on environmental matters. She has proposed or passed legislation on recycling, solid

distance between the 50 and 83 I think is really significant,” Cheh replied.

Under Shorter, DPW did not raise fees.

Cheh’s questioning did not result in fee increases until Geldart raised the tipping fee in October 2019.

Last year, Cheh acknowledged that Waste Management and Republic pay a “very low fee” as a result of the 2002 settlement agreement, but did not take action until this spring.

Last month, her committee wrote in its budget recommendations to “terminate or revise settlement agreements with private waste management companies.”

Lisa Kardell, a spokesperson for Waste Management, disputes the Compost Feasibility Study’s findings that it cost D.C. transfer stations $30.70 to process a ton of solid waste.

“I can’t comment on the District’s actual operating costs,” she says.

Environmental advocates and lobbyists for private trash haulers for years implored Cheh, DPW, and the city administrator to renegoti-

Waste Management truck leaving the Benning Road trash transfer station waste disposal and, most recently, composting.

At the 2018 oversight hearing, Cheh questioned Shorter on the cost of processing trash compared with the fees D.C. charges haulers.

“Even when the haulers pay $50.50 a ton, it still looks like we’re losing money,” Cheh said.

“Because, as I understand it, the total cost of handling waste in the District is approximately $83 a ton, based on the Compost Feasibility Study.”

Shorter agreed. “There’s some work to do there, and I should say there’s an opportunity to raise fees,” he said. “We do consider those haulers who dispose at our transfer station, tip at our station, as our customers. And so we’re evaluating the fees, and there likely will be changes in the coming years.”

“OK, well, I would hope so, because the

ate Republic’s deal when it expired in 2018.

The District could have raised fees on Republic, but chose to retain the money-losing arrangement.

Young’s office forwarded questions to the Office of Deputy Mayor for Operations and Infrastructure, which replied in a statement: “The District government will not comment on past or upcoming contractual negotiations with private-sector contractors.”

A Ju ly 2018 “ Trash Tra nsfer Stat ion Fact Sheet” circulated by DPW claims the District actually profits from the settlement agreements with Republic and Waste Management.

“The District realizes significant revenue as a result of the Agreements which is not guaranteed should the agreement (s) be ter-

minated,” the fact sheet declares.

The fact sheet does acknowledge D.C.’s status as a dumping ground for trash beyond its borders, but the most telling line comes under “Goodwill,” where the fact sheet says: “The parties are the major players in an industry with very few players; the District will have to work with them continually in one form or another.”

Cheh does not go as far as advocates like Seldman who believe the arrangement is malfeasance. “I’m not seeing anything nefarious there,” she said.

Republic will continue to benefit from reduced tipping fees for at least another year.

Despite his past criticism of what Seldman blasts as a “sweetheart deal,” Geldart signed an amendment on January 1, 2020, that effectively renewed the original arrangement for another year.

And despite Geldart’s past promises, DPW did not respond to questions about whether it intends to raise tipping fees for private haulers to reduce the District’s losses.

Even with tipping fees at about $60— proposed to increase by $10 in the new city budget—it doesn’t fully cover the cost of D.C.’s operation of the transfer station and its contracts to incinerate the waste, leaving taxpayers on the hook for about $26 a ton.

Plus, the District might lose another $10 million in EPA fines.

On May 21, during a budget oversight hearing of the Transportation and the Environment Committee, Cheh questioned Geldart about “safety hazards” at D.C.’s transfer station on Benning Road NE. The mayor’s budget doesn’t plan a major overhaul of the facility until 2026.

Geldart acknowledged hazards at the station, but suggested the city’s economic picture currently makes it unlikely the overhaul will be moved up.

He then said pollution caused by stormwater drainage at the station has led to the Environmental Protection Agency to consider fines in “around the $10 million range.”

“Have we paid any fines yet?” Cheh asked.

Geldart said his team was working to rectify the runoff to satisfy EPA inspectors and forestall the fines. He added that the EPA would revisit the facility after fixes were made and before issuing a fine.

“That sounds good,” was Cheh’s response before she moved on to questions about plans for a new recycling facility.

The EPA and DPW did not answer questions about the potential fines and status of pollution at the station by press time.

Meanwhile, Seldman, who advises cities across the country in solid waste disposal and recycling, sees a windfall if the District would fix its facilities and realign its fees and costs with private trash haulers.

“The two transfer stations are a gold mine for future revenue,” he says. “If D.C. adjusted the rates charged at its public trash transfer stations, the revenues could be dedicated to waste reduction, recycling, reuse, and composting programs.”

This story was published with the support of Spotlight DC—Capital City Fund for Investigative Journalism.

washingtoncitypaper.com july 24, 2020 15

ARTS

Accessibility Insights The Smithsonian’s director of accessibility explains an inclusive reopening strategy as the Americans with Disabilities Act turns 30.

By Jennifer Anne Mitchell Contributing Writer the 30th anniversary of the signing of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA). The landmark legislation made it illegal to discriminate against people with disabilities, and established accessibility requirements for public accommodations (like retail stores and recreation centers), government services, facilities, transportation, and telecommunications. When President George H. W. Bush signed the bill in 1990, he said it “signals the end to the unjustified segregation and exclusion of persons with disabilities from the mainstream of American life.”

As the director of Access Smithsonian, the branch of the Smithsonian dedicated to disability and accessibility issues, Beth Ziebarth leads the country’s efforts to make museums inclusive.

Ziebarth herself is a wheelchair user.

“Civil rights are something that you have to protect,” she says.

Her office oversees policies, practices, and procedures; includes elements like sign language interpretation, captioning, and braille in museum offerings; and trains staff.

Their guides on accessibility and inclusive design have been translated into multiple languages.

Access Smithsonian’s programs include Morning at the Museum, for families with kids who have disabilities, and Project Search, a job training program that places adults with intellectual and developmental disabilities in internships alongside classroom learning. Half of the program’s graduates have secured employment.

“That’s a pretty high percentage for people with this type of disability,” Ziebarth explains. “People with disabilities are underemployed in general, but [for] young people who have intellectual or developmental disabilities, it’s a really tough road.”

The coronavirus pandemic has led to some positive changes in accessibility, like online options for people who are unable to physically visit the museum. At the same time, new safety standards like no-touch options exclude some people with disabilities who rely on tactile experiences at exhibitions. Ziebarth and her team are advocating for inclusivity as the Smithsonian discusses how it will operate in a post-pandemic world.

City Paper spoke with Ziebarth to learn more about her and her work at this pivotal point.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

at the Smithsonian (exhibitions, public programs, publications, etc.). From there, when a position became available in 1995, I started working full time on accessibility.

JULY 26 MARKS

WCP: When did you get started advocating for accessibility and inclusion?

Beth Ziebarth: I was in a car accident when I was 16 and acquired a spinal cord injury—so that was my introduction to disability and accessibility. I started using a wheelchair and kind of made do as I went to college with accessibility, and the same thing in the first few years that I lived in D.C. [In] my early 30s, I [gained] more of a disability identity. I started working at the Smithsonian in 1988. I worked in two different parts of the institution before I worked specifically in the accessibility program [Access Smithsonian]. When the accessibility office was first formed, I helped the director to develop a baseline survey of the accessibility of the programming 16 july 24, 2020 washingtoncitypaper.com

WCP: What do you hope changes over the next 30 years?

BZ: I think there is still room in exhibition design and program design, and digital offerings, to increase access, particularly for people who have brain-based disabilities.

That’s been an area where museums have more recently started to think about how well label content is understood by

BZ: I think that my best tip would be that you need to do the foundational work of accessibility, but you need to go beyond the bare minimums that are reflected in federal and accessibility standards. Go beyond that into inclusive design and thinking about how you can meet the needs of a full spectrum of visitors through your facility and program and digital offering design.

WCP: Can you speak more about the impact of disability representation from a museum angle?

BZ: I think that whenever a museum hopes to work with a community or an audience, it’s really key to not just be sitting in your office dreaming up a program and saying, “This will be the best thing for [them],” without having the input of the people you want to serve.

Museums have realized that for quite a few years now. But it feels like it’s only been relatively recently that we’ve really looked at that in terms of disability, too. Just like any other group of people, having stories in museums that reflect your lived experience is one of the reasons you visit a museum.

You want to see yourself represented or your story reflected in history or culture or art or science. You want to think about disability as an identity in addition to posing an accessibility challenge to barriers like physical access, information access.

You have to have both things: disability and accessibility as part of your inclusion equation.

Motoko Hioki

WCP: The pandemic has changed the way our society operates. What positive changes in accessibility and inclusion have you seen during this time and what do you hope stays?

Beth Ziebarth different audiences and [consider] a multi-model approach— so if someone is more of a tactile learner that they can get information that way.

Personally, as a person with a disability and then also as a museum professional, I look at opportunities that we still have to increase the access to what we offer. But I also think about the original disability rights advocates who are now older after 30-some years. It’s really important for the younger generation of people with disabilities, what we call the ADA generation, people who grew up always experiencing accessibility in their lives, that the ADA generation knows their history and wants to protect it. That they feel the need to politically engage to make sure we don’t go backward.

WCP: What tip would you give people who are interested in learning about accessibility and inclusion?

BZ: A good example of that is another program that we do called See Me at the Smithsonian for individuals with dementia and their caretakers. We’ve been doing the See Me program for two years, and then in the spring we started doing it online. It is actually really beneficial for a lot of our regulars who come to our See Me at the Smithsonian ingallery experiences at museums to have it online because they’re older adults, generally, and they’re vulnerable during a pandemic—even when we reopen—until we have a vaccine.

There have always been issues of transportation and parking, and just moving around a museum can be a challenge.

So this has given us an opportunity to do programming that is reaching people in their homes at a time when they can’t go out. [It] relieves some of the isolation and gives the care partner and the person with dementia a very present moment. They don’t have to be talking about whether they finished all their lunch that day or finished their medicine or some of the medical aspects of dementia. It’s a moment in time when they can talk about art objects or things from the collection of American history. We will continue online after museums are open because we can do both and it will continue to reach a broad audience.

WCP: What role does technology play in your work?

BZ: I think that’s one of the things that, at the Smithsonian, all the museums are really focused on right now. We have a lot of digital interactives. We have a lot of touch screens. We also have mechanical interactives, where you spin a wheel or turn pages on a storybook, or tactile experiences.

Thinking about how technology can assist with the changes that feel necessary right now [during the pandemic]: You have to remind people to follow the protocol of wearing a mask, washing their hands, using the hand sanitizer, and social distancing. But on the technology side you can do things like for a touch screen, you can have a proximity sensor. The program will start playing because you’re in

ARTS proximity to the touch screen. So you remove the need to do touch. Or you can use different types of sensors, [like] hand gestures, that will initiate a program.

For people who are blind or have low vision, when they go to a museum, they can use a service called Aira Access where, through their smartphone, they connect to a live agent and the live agent uses a camera on the phone or your smart glasses to give you information based on what they see. So they can help guide you through the museum.

They can even tell you about the objects that are on display.

When you think about how important that is right now for the visitors, understanding the social distance that’s required, Aira’s one of the things that I think will be very useful for us.

Courtesy of the National Museum of American History

WCP: Any other thoughts?

9.875” Universal Access Flag Lap Blanket by ADAPT, gift of Carol Jones

BZ: As we’re developing our reopening strategies and thinking about what the future of museums looks like, it’s really critical to listen to the voices of people with disabilities so that they don’t get left out in how we address kind of immediate needs of safety, with potentially shutting off some of the touch kinds of experiences in museums.

There’s the short-range strategy pre-vaccine and there’s the longer term post-vaccine. And we don’t want to go back to museums that are objects in glass cases without a lot of experiences and opportunities for visitors. We’ve worked too hard, not just for people with disabilities, but for all visitors, to make museums more welcoming than that. So we need to find that good balance between safety and also still being able to do experiential kinds of things at the museums.

DC Public

Library

Phase 2 Reopen Services

Anacostia | Benning | Cleveland Park | Mt. Pleasant | Northeast | Shepherd Park | West End | Woodridge

Library Hours: Mon – Fri: 11 a.m. – 7 p.m.

Closed for Daily Cleaning: 2 – 3 p.m.

Saturday and Sunday: Closed

Takeout services include: ■ Book Pick up ■ Remote Print Job Pick up ■ Computer Access ■ Full service printing

These locations are now open for Takeout services.

Bellevue | Capitol View | Francis A. Gregory | Petworth | Shaw | Tenley-Friendship Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Library reopening on Sept. 24.

Customers must continue to wear a face mask and practice social distancing.

For more information on additional services and branch re-openings, please visit dclibrary.org/reopen. washingtoncitypaper.com july 24, 2020 17

5.541

ARTS FILM REVIEW

ARTS BOOK REVIEW

Sunburn The All-Night Sun

By Diane Zinna Random House, 336 pages

Candid Camera The Rental Directed by Dave Franco There is an unintentional cruelty in the timing of The Rental, the new horror thriller directed and co-written by Dave Franco: In a world where travel is significantly curtailed, this is a film about how you cannot trust the owner of your Airbnb. Current circumstances create an additional sting to the film, and that is a good thing, because there is not much else going for it. Franco is a competent enough filmmaker, except his talents are in service of broad characters and predictability.

A neat inversion defines the opening scene, one that carries through the rest of the film.

Charlie (Dan Stevens) is browsing vacation listings online with Mina (Sheila Vand) looking over his shoulder. They are friendly, even intimate, as she rests her arms on his shoulders.

But the scene unfolds further, and the viewer realizes Charlie and Mina are not an item. They are friends and business partners, plus Mina is dating Charlie’s brother Josh (Jeremy Allen White). Along with Charlie’s wife Michelle (Alison Brie), the two couples head for a handsome rental home, complete with a cliffside view and a Jacuzzi. The trouble starts almost immediately: Mina thinks the property manager Taylor (Toby Huss) is racist, and no one can agree on what to do once they get there. Soon passive aggressive behavior turns into full-on hostility, and that is before Mina discovers the hidden cameras.

Franco and his co-writer, the filmmaker Joe Swanberg, are deliberate in how they conflate the relationship drama with the genre requirements. We already see the chemistry between Mina and Charlie, so that has to resolve in a

plausible way that ultimately hurts everyone involved. There is a long stretch in The Rental when these four find themselves in a situation they could not have anticipated, and have no good options left.

All this should be exciting, and yet there is little connection to the characters beyond the lazy ways we are meant to identify with them.

No one is especially likable or clever, so once the climax kicks into gear and their lives are in danger, it becomes clear that the relationship drama has more suspense than a killer lurking in the shadows. Franco internalizes the formal requirements of the horror genre, without fully understanding what those tropes are in service of.

The actors do well with what they’ve got.

Between The Guest and Eurovision Song Contest: The Story of Fire Saga, Stevens has shown he can easily balance between charm and menace. There is some of that here, except the dialogue is rote, so that denies him nuance. Brie and White are given even less, since they’re the “others” in the thinly-veiled tension between Charlie and Mina (the only subtle scene is where they are trying not to flirt, and failing at it). Franco has the right look for the film, with a palette of dark colors and pools of hopeless, wan light. In terms of its eventual payoff, The Rental is somewhat similar to The Invitation, a 2016 thriller directed by Karyn Kusama. The difference is those characters express anxieties and values beyond horny and annoyed.

People were afraid to go back in the water after they saw Jaws. People were afraid of their own homes after they saw Poltergeist. In The Rental, Dave Franco is hoping that reasonably affluent 30-somethings will be afraid to go for a weekend at a country Airbnb. I am his target demographic, and having seen the film, I don’t have misgivings about a future weekend trip to an Airbnb in West Virginia. At least his movie is too forgettable, too self-satisfied to provoke that kind of reaction.

—Alan Zilberman The Rental is available Friday on VOD.

18 july 24, 2020 washingtoncitypaper.com

During the summer in southern Sweden, the sky never goes fully black at night; it only dims to a twilight glow for a few hours. The sun does dip below the horizon, unlike in the north and above the Arctic Circle, where it shines in the sky for 24 hours a day. The light contributes to a general sense of otherworldliness, creating a place without night, where nothing can remain fully hidden in the dark—if only for a few months. Ari Aster’s hit film Midsommar capitalized on this otherworldliness, incorporating Swedish folk customs, language, and geography into its psychological horror. Diane Zinna’s new novel The All-Night Sun, dreamed up nearly a decade before Aster’s film and released July 14, tells a similar story: A lost young woman goes on a trip to a friend’s hometown in Sweden to find herself in the wake of her parents’ tragic deaths; she takes hallucinogenic drugs on the night of the summer solstice and chaos ensues.

But here, the surrealism—and the horror— comes from the way grief warps the passage of time and one’s sense of self.

Before she goes to Sweden, Lauren Cress is a 28-year-old adjunct professor at a fictional Catholic college outside D.C., teaching international students English composition. In that class, she meets 18-year-old Siri Bergström, who quickly becomes more than her student.

Like Lauren, Siri lost both her parents, and she senses “in Siri’s gaze that she knew the parts I’d left unsaid.” There’s much inside Lauren that is unsaid. Since her parents died in an accident when she was 18, she’s been more of a shell than a fully realized person, floating through life without purpose or real connection beyond the men she sometimes brings home to feel something. Siri ignites a passion inside Lauren that looks, and acts, much like romance. Soon they spend all their time together, on campus and in Lauren’s apartment. When the semester’s nearly over and Siri invites Lauren to come to her home over the summer, she jumps at the chance, her career an afterthought.

So far, Lauren has only seen Siri in love-bomb mode, all sweetness and light, but in her hometown she shows a more petulant, cruel, and capricious side to friends and family who are already under her spell. At times, Siri is downright childish, which seems to shock Lauren, but she is, after all, a child. Soon, Lauren experiences that cruelty for herself, and what happens on that brief trip changes her forever. Although only about half the novel is set there, Sweden is a far more vividly imagined setting than any American place, including the book’s hazy and imprecise Long Island and D.C. locales.

Its geography is specific and accurate, perhaps reflecting how Lauren is more alive there than she ever was at home.

Like many works of fiction that deal with— in a phrase—complicated female friendships,

The All-Night Sun depends heavily on tropes of sexual and romantic obsession, but the novel and its narrator coyly refuse to plumb those depths. If Zinna is aware of the resonance, Lauren seems not to be. She at least knows that her attraction to Siri crosses teacher-student boundaries; she encourages Siri and her family not to tell anyone at the college about her trip and she fully unravels when, after tragedy, her colleagues find out she went. When one mentions “inappropriate behavior,” Lauren wonders if Siri’s friend said she’d “harassed” her student, although no one else has used the word harassment. Later, while staring at a painting

by Siri’s older brother Magnus where Lauren and Siri are naked, she’s all too aware of “the incrimination of their nudity.” When Lauren has sex with Magnus, both she and Siri understand that it is a betrayal of their relationship.

But Siri is always “a friend,” until she becomes another ghost haunting Lauren.

Lauren is hard for a reader to hold on to, even with all her rough edges, but that’s because there’s very little keeping her together. It can be frustrating at times, but the wandering narration and her increasingly foggy mental state feel true to the mind-numbing, almost supernatural effects of grief—it sends her time traveling into the past, conjures up ghosts, and creates alternate universes. Only by confronting it can she break its spell and consider the kind of person she can be going forward, or consider that she has a future at all. Ultimately, what’s illuminated by the summer sun and Santa Lucia’s candles in The All-Night Sun is the thorny, surreal nature of grief, both new and old, and the twisting path forward after loss. —Emma Sarappo

CITY LIGHTS City Lights

Check out D.C.’s official tree Summer in D.C. often means that outside looks much nicer than it feels. The key to a pleasant outing is to stay in the shade—and you can soak up some shade, along with some local history, under the dense foliage of the scarlet oak, the official tree of D.C. Named the official tree in 1960, the scarlet oak is native to the D.C. region as well as many of the forests of the eastern United States. It gets its name from the brilliant red color of its leaves in fall. Though it’s too early to catch that particular show, the tree grows tall and wide and provides a beautiful green canopy for those who seek its shade. There are scarlet oaks scattered all over the city’s parks and front yards, if you know how to spot them. For those of us who aren’t tree identification experts, there are two notable places to see the tree. The National Arboretum’s National Grove of State Trees is a sprawling 30-acre plot of land with 51 (thanks, guys) varieties of state trees—or, in some cases, trees that grow better in our climate. If you miss leisurely afternoons at museums, take a few hours to meander and browse the collection. For a more serene experience, head to the southeastern side of American University’s main quad. The largest tree you’ll see there is a scarlet oak that predates the founding of the university in 1893. The grassy quad is open to the public, so bring a book and settle in under the enormous branches of your home tree. The tree can be found across D.C., but notably in the National Arboretum and on American University’s campus. Free. —Ellie Zimmerman

City Lights

Visual Novel Romance Collection for Black Trans Lives

City Lights

Shakespeare Theatre Company’s mock trial

“History teaches us that once an ass, always an ass, but sometimes, being an ass turns out to be an asset.” So goes the opening argument in Shakespeare Theatre Company’s first virtual mock trial. The event, which has real legal professionals adjudicate a dispute from A Midsummer Night’s Dream, was originally presented live on June 22 via Zoom, but thanks to popular demand from people who want to see Merrick B. Garland in a bathrobe, Shakespeare Theatre is offering encore presentations of the trial on July 24 and 25. The pandemic has hit the company in multiple ways: It recently laid off a third of its staff, and this usually in-person event went virtual. In the trial, respondent Peter Quince, leader of an Athenian community theater troupe, defends his right to back out of a performance contract after the Rude Mechanicals’ leading man was transformed into a donkey and the show could not go on. These unprecedented circumstances equate to force majeure, an act of god, argues high-powered D.C. attorney Abbe Lowell. But just because Puck whines about “what fools these mortals be,” that does not make the fairy a god, counters Kathryn Ruemmler, an Obama-era Justice Department appointee who represents the slighted Duke of Athens.

Appearing on your computer screen to settle the matter are four real-life Washington jurists, led by the former Supreme Court nominee Garland. Granted, the Shakespeare puns will be funnier for English majors, but the dialogue is full of cheeky political humor, including references to antifa (antique fairies), PJ, and Squee. Watch for laughs, and for the knowledge that Garland owns the complete works of Shakespeare and a monogrammed “Judge Garland” bathrobe. The show will be broadcast at 8 p.m. on July 24 and 2 p.m. on July 25. Registration is available at shakespearetheatre.org. $10-25; free for students. —Rebecca J. Ritzel

As rising heat and social distancing keep us inside for the summer, the Visual Novel Romance Collection for Black Trans Lives on itch.io offers the chance to explore 14 different video games while supporting a charitable cause. Through the end of July, all proceeds from the $10 bundle will go to The Okra Project, an organization that assists Black trans people experiencing food insecurity. The fundraiser is an independently organized response to itch.io’s Bundle for Racial Justice and Equality, which raised more than $8 million for the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund and the Community Bail Fund; game developer Souha Al-Samkari was inspired to host a second bundle after the first declined to include games with adult content. All 14 games in the Collection for Black Trans Lives feature queer romance, and with the age limit lifted, some even get a little steamy, like Robert Yang’s shower simulator Rinse and Repeat. Of special note are the two visual novels D.C.-area video game company Pillow Fight has contributed to the fundraiser. In the horror game We Know the Devil, a trio of teens stuck at summer camp wait in a secluded cabin for the devil to arrive.

As the night goes on, their overlapping friendships grow closer and further apart, determining who will survive the night and who will be left behind. PC game review site Rock Paper Shotgun called Pillow Fight’s follow-up release Heaven Will Be Mine “2018’s most interesting game” for its combination of flirting and robot-fighting in war-torn outer space.

The sci-fi story imagines a world where trans people have power over both galaxy-wide politics and their love lives, where personal choice is enough to lead to their dream ending. The bundle is available at itch.io. $10 minimum donation.

—Mercedes Hesselroth

City Lights

Virtual Puppet Slam Except for when they are haunted, puppets are fun for the whole family! A washingtoncitypaper.com july 24, 2020 19

good puppet show allows us to tell cartoony stories in a three-dimensional world, one where a talking frog can meet Elton John and sentient robots can riff on B-movies in space. If you’re a felt-head who has been starved for content since the suits hid Muppet Treasure Island behind the Disney+ paywall, there’s good news on the horizon. Thanks to Rhizome DC, a community art space located in Takoma, there’s a virtual puppet slam headed your way via Facebook Live. Normally, Rhizome hosts a range of performance events, including theater, concerts, and poetry readings. Though the space is currently closed due to COVID-19, Rhizome has committed to “offering online programming ... to promote creativity as a force for personal empowerment and community engagement.” You know what that means: puppets. On July 24, local and international puppeteers will come together for a puppet slam you can enjoy from your home. The suggested donation is $10, but you can pay whatever you like, no strings attached—except for the strings holding up the puppets, of course. Those will be firmly attached to the puppets, meaning it will be impossible for them to escape and come after you, not that it matters, because they are not haunted. The virtual puppet slam begins at 7:30 p.m. on July 24. Registration is available at rhizomedc.org. Pay what you want; $10 suggested donation.

—Will Lennon

City Lights

Untenable

City Lights

Urban Waterways Resource Hub The Anacostia is often called the “forgotten river.” Though significant progress has been made in recent years, the Anacostia River has been trash-clogged and toxin-ridden for decades, a casualty of environmental racism. The ongoing cleanup can only be sustained if there are continued efforts to foster an understanding of the river’s importance to neighboring communities and the local biosphere. Urban Waterways, a resource hub and interdisciplinary project created to focus on the Anacostia that has spread to other rivers across the country, helps do that. It tells the story of the river through photos, videos, and interviews. The story is especially clear in “River of Resilience,” a nine-part interactive story that traces the Anacostia from its headwaters to its intersection with the more famous Potomac River. In Chapter 1, you’ll see how a river that splits the nation’s capital begins as a series of trickling streams in sleepy Sandy Spring, Maryland. In Chapter 8, learn about how the toxic residue of military industrial operations in Navy Yard linger in the river to this day. Before it was “forgotten,” the Anacostia was the lifeblood for local wildlife and the Nacotchtank people. With resources like Urban Waterways to help us remember the river’s importance, it could once again become a resource that benefits the people living by its banks. The project is available at anacostia.si.edu.

Free.

—Will Lennon

City Lights

Sarah Weinman discusses Unspeakable Acts If you’ve spent quarantine binge-watching episodes of Tiger King and streaming podcasts like Serial and My Favorite Murder, it’s important to question why true crime stories hold so much appeal. Gripping details and powerful narratives can turn the average audience member into a bona fide detective, and going further than nightly news coverage, true crime stories offer deeply personal details of real-life tragedy. A new true crime anthology from editor Sarah Weinman is an excellent way to balance criticism of the genre with the very stories that make it riveting. Unspeakable Acts: True Tales of Crime, Murder, Deceit, and Obsession goes on sale July 28, and it’s already racking up favorable reviews. The 13-story anthology riffs on Weinman’s career as a so-called “Crime Lady,” weaving in famous narratives from authors like Michelle Dean and Pamela Colloff. Dean’s “Dee Dee Wanted Her Daughter To Be Sick”—the story of Dee Dee Blanchard and her daughter Gypsy Rose—has already inspired a TV show, The Act. Colloff’s “The Reckoning,” an account of the 1966 University of Texas tower shooting, has been described as the “gold standard” for forensic journalism. Although neither work is likely new to hardcore fans of the true crime genre, Weinman’s anthology promises to bring together a collection of must-read stories at a time when true crime and its critics are in the spotlight. If you like reading stories that keep you up at night, join the virtual discussion with Politics and Prose right after the launch date. Plus, contributing authors Emma Copley Eisenberg, Rachel Monroe, Sarah Marshall, and Colloff will join Weinman for the discussion. The virtual discussion begins July 29 at 8 p.m. Registration is available at politics-prose.com. Free; donations encouraged.

—Sarah Smith

City Lights D.C. quartet Bad Moves, formed in 2015, again emphasize speedy pop-punk and power pop tempos on their second album, Untenable. All of the band members are songwriters, and were previously involved in other rough-edged D.C. pop combos, from guitarist David Combs (of The Max Levine Ensemble and Spoonboy), guitarist Katie Park (of Hemline), drummer Daoud Tyler-Ameen (of Art Sorority for Girls), and bassist Emma Cleveland (of Booby Trap). While the Moves’ blend of fuzz pedal guitar and occasional vocal harmonies seems light and peppy in sound, the busy, rapidly uttered verses address how to survive serious issues, from personal anxiety to the woes of capitalism. In “Party With the Kids Who Wanna Party With You,” the band urges solidarity in the face of trouble: “There’s a genocide of the poor, it just might come in a heatwave, and that’s something no one’s trying to hear,” it goes.

“You wash it down with liquor and beer, and spend the night with someone who’s near …” The band also keeps things interesting by frequently switching vocalists from line to line, or by singing together.

While some cuts could still use more catchy choruses, others, like “Working for Free,” about exploited service industry employees, make phrases like, “Do ya, do ya want me, want me smiling, cosigned, the worker, the smothered Dickensian sucker” anthemic. The group briefly slows down on “Settle Into It,” which blends late ‘80s Scrawl-style punk-Americana with 21st century wispy indie-folk. The album was recorded before COVID-19 struck, but album closer “End of Time” seems to capture how some are enduring the pandemic, with its classic “wooh-woo” harmonies and the phrase “We’re still having a good time, or maybe it’s the end of time.” The album is available on Bandcamp and streaming services.

Free—$7.99.

—Steve Kiviat 20 july 24, 2020 washingtoncitypaper.com

Muriel Hasbun: Pulse and Memory/Pulso y Memoria In her exhibition as a 2020 Sondheim Artscape Prize finalist, D.C.-based artist Muriel Hasbun offers three separate, but linked, series of works, all touching on her complicated family history; she’s an immigrant who grew up in El Salvador with Palestinian Christian, Polish, and French Jewish heritage. Hasbun’s newest project, “Pulse: New Cultural Registers/Pulso: Nuevos registros culturales,” features “constructed photographs” that draw on relics of her family’s gallery in El Salvador and geometrical abstractions and visualizations of sound waves. The second project, from 2016, is the video “Scheherazade or (Per)forming the Archive,” in which Hasbun unites the sounds of her son’s heartbeats in utero with her mother’s final breaths. The third project, also from 2016, is a selection of photographs from “si je meurs/if I die,” which explores the life of her mother, Janine Janowski, and her career in the arts, using close-ups of hair and eyes as well as such personal effects as film reels and old passport photos. Society’s fabric, Hasbun says, is “made of countless individual stories like mine” that can become “seismic pulses reverberating in the territory of our collective home.” The virtual exhibition is available at artspaces.kunstmatrix.com. The online award ceremony on begins at 7 p.m. on July 25 at promotionandarts.org.

—Louis Jacobson

City Lights

Sarah Gerard discusses True Love

DIVERSIONS CROSSWORD

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In the first sentences of True Love, Sarah Gerard’s latest novel, the heroine, Nina, navigates irreconcilable differences with her estranged mom, sarcastic phone conversations with her best friend, and scintillating sexts with her editor, Brian. It’s Nina in her full paradoxical glory as a college dropout, writer, cheater, and liar in the pursuit of love—or at least, in the pursuit of feeling worthy of something like it. Gerard will discuss her heroine’s desperate quest for some sign of human life and closeness in an age of disconnection as part of Alexandria’s Old Town Books’ reading club, which, like so many of Nina’s encounters, will be virtual. Gerard wrote her book as a commentary on womanhood and identity in the post-Trump world, though much of her expository, earnest take on the human want for affection feels hyper-relevant in the wake of socially distanced living. In its sadness, witticisms, and humor, Gerard’s novel feels in some ways like a follow-up to her prizewinning essay collection, Sunshine State; it even features the same Floridian backdrop. Gerard also curated a playlist in honor of the debut. It gets at the same cocktail of grit and sweetness as the book, and is appropriately (if obviously) titled “True Love.� (Then again, isn’t true love a little obvious?) Gerard is clearly a crafter of big bang openers: The first song, “Oh Nina,� by the ’90s rock band The Muffs, is just as provocative and affirming as the novel’s first pages. The event will begin at 10 a.m. on Aug. 1. RSVP at eventbrite.com. Free. —Emma Francois

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DIVERSIONS SAVAGE LOVE

Need some love advice?

Curious about kinks?

Visit the City Paper website for more Savage Love. washingtoncitypaper.com/ columns

Is it terrible to believe you can still have a truly monogamous and loving relationship with one partner after 20 years? Or can we walk into a relationship knowing that within those decades of being together that situations like infidelity or being attracted to another is completely unavoidable? And if we acknowledge that in some cases it’s truly unavoidable, should we mentally prepare ourselves for this possibility during our “monogamous” stage early on in dating?

—Hopelessly Optimistic Person Enquires Be prepared.

Knowing what we do about infidelity and how common it is over the course of long-term relationships, HOPE, it’s a good idea to have a conversation early in a relationship about what you will do if and/or when one and/or the other and/or both of you should cheat years or decades later. It’s best for this convo to happen at the tail end of the infatuation stage, but before you’ve made any sort of formal commitment—you know, after you’ve had your first fight, but still at that stage when the thought of ever wanting to fuck someone else seems ridiculous. At that point, committing to at least try to work through infidelity doesn’t guarantee the relationship will survive, and it doesn’t obligate you to remain in the relationship. But it ups the chances the relationship will survive infidelity that it could, and perhaps should, survive.

Because remember, when it comes to cheating, some types are worse than others. There are differences in degree. If you found out your husband fucked your sister on your wedding night, well, that’s probably not something you’ll be able to forgive. But an instantly regretted one-off on a business trip (remember those?) or prolonged affair after 20 years and two kids and both partners started taking their sexual connection for granted and allowed it to wither?

That’s something you can work past, and are likelier to work past, if you agreed to at least try to work past it before the kids and the taking for granted and the business trips.

Zooming out for a moment …

Our culture encourages us to see cheating as a relationship-extinction-level event, an unforgivable betrayal, something no relationship can survive, which seems nuts when you pause to consider just how common cheating is.

Defining cheating as always unforgivable sets up otherwise good and loving relationships, which might be able to survive an infidelity, for failure.

If instead of telling us that no relationship could ever survive infidelity, our culture told us that cheating in monogamous or nonmonogamous relationships is always a serious betrayal—it’s not at all trivial—but it’s something a relationship can survive, HOPE, then more relationships that should survive infidelities would—I hope you’re sitting down— actually wind up surviving infidelities. The truth is, many relationships don’t just survive infidelities, but actually end up thriving in the wake of the disclosure or exposure of an affair because the healing process brings the couple closer together. (This is not a good reason to have an affair, of course, nor is it the reason why

22 july 24, 2020 washingtoncitypaper.com

anyone has ever had an affair.) Reinforcing the idea that affairs always destroy relationships: Couples who remain together after an affair usually don’t talk openly about the cheating, while couples who separate or divorce after an affair can hardly bring themselves to talk about anything else.

Now to quickly answer your first questions …

Yes, it is possible for two people to remain monogamous for 20 years. It can be done—of course it can—but there are lots of people out there who think they’ve done it but are mistaken. Some people who think they’ve been in successfully monogamous relationships for 20 years have been cheated on, or they themselves have done something their partners might regard as cheating, and the one-off infidelity or the ongoing affair or the happy endings were never exposed or disclosed.

Our culture encourages us to see cheating as a relationshipextinction-level event, an unforgivable betrayal, something no relationship can survive, which seems nuts when you pause to consider just how common cheating is.

Your partner is inevitably going to find other people attractive, and not in 20 years. Today, right now, your partner is going to lay eyes on someone else they find attractive, HOPE, just as you will probably lay eyes—but only eyes— on someone else you find attractive. Making a monogamous commitment doesn’t mean you don’t wanna fuck other people, it means you will refrain from fucking other people.

If the lie we’re told about love and attraction were true—if being in love with someone left you incapable of finding someone else attractive—we wouldn’t need to make monogamous commitments. We wouldn’t need to promise to not fuck anyone or extract that promise from someone else if being in love rendered us incapable of even noticing how hot your barista is.

—Dan Savage What is the etiquette for breaking up with an escort you’ve been seeing regularly? A little background: I’m married and have been seeing an escort about twice a month for the past three years. The sex is amazing. We’ve developed a friendship and get along very well. The issue is that I’ve gotten

emotionally attached. I constantly think of her and she’s always on my mind. It’s negatively affected my marriage and I need to break it off. I don’t want to hurt her, as I have genuine affection, but I need to stop seeing her. Do I send a note with an explanation? Or do I ghost and stop sending her text messages? I’m the one who initiates contact. She never reaches out to me first. Thanks for your advice.

—It’s Me Not You Don’t thank me, IMNY, thank all the nice sex workers and sex workers’ rights advocates who were kind enough to share their thoughts after I tweeted out your question and asked #SexWorkTwitter to weigh in. The general consensus is for you to send a brief note letting this woman know you won’t be booking her again.

A short selection from the responses: Kalee D. (@GoddessKaleeLA): “I’ve had this happen a few times before and the couple that wrote me a note with honesty were so deeply appreciated. The others, I always wondered what I did wrong or if they died in some freak accident.”

Maya Midnight (@MsMayaMidnight): “I’d be worried if a longtime regular disappeared during a pandemic! Send a quick text or email saying you’re taking a break but you’ve enjoyed your time together. No need for more detail about why. A parting gift would be a nice gesture.”

SoftSandalwood (@SoftSandalwood): “Pro Domme here. Definitely let her know what’s going on, so she doesn’t wonder if you’re OK, if she did something wrong, etc. It’s the job of a pro to understand and respect boundaries.

Thanks for a thoughtful question.”

Daddy Lance (@LanceNavarro): “Agreed 100%. The majority of us are deeply empathetic and prefer closure over mystery.”

A final thought from me: Sex workers value trustworthy regular clients, and FOSTA/ SESTA and the coronavirus pandemic have made it incredibly difficult for sex workers to find new regular clients. Sending this woman a generous final tip—perhaps the price of a session, if you can swing it—would soften the blow of losing you as a regular client and may tide her over until she can replace you.

—DS That was great advice you gave to “Virgin” in last week’s column. I was a 39-year-old virgin and started seeing sex workers. I found one that had the kind of qualities mentioned by the sex worker you quoted in your column. She was a kind, caring, and compassionate person that I saw regularly for a year.

Being with her gave me confidence in my sexual abilities and allowed me to experience physical affection. A little while later I met my future wife. I was even able to tell her about my experiences with sex workers and she wasn’t offended and didn’t shame me. She was actually intrigued. I hope VIRGIN takes your advice. If he finds the right sex worker, like I did, it will change his life.

—One Grateful Client Thanks for sharing, OGC! Email your Savage Love questions to mail@savagelove.net

—DS

CLASSIFIEDS Legal PERRY STREET PREP PUBLIC CHARTER SCHOOL REQUEST FOR PROPOSALS Interactive Whiteboards Issued: July 20, 2020 Perry Street Prep PCS, a tax-exempt DC Public Charter School operating in Washington, DC serving students in grades PK – 8 th grade. Perry Street Prep PCS is soliciting proposals from qualified vendors to provide 30 - 50 Interactive Whiteboards for classroom instruction in person and live streamed that are 70-90 inches with touchscreen capacity and Chromebook integration.

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Perry Street Prep PCS Attn: Director of Operations 1800 Perry Street NE Washington, DC 20018 SUMMONS CASE NO.: FN2020-000770 SUPERIOR COURT OF ARIZONA IN MARICOPA COUNTY Jorge A Ascencio Name of Petitioner / Party A And Suyapa A Ascencio Name of Respondent / Party B WARNING: This is an official document from the court that affects your rights. Read this carefully.

If you do not understand it, contact a lawyer for help.

FROM THE STATE OF ARIZONA TO: Suyapa A Ascencio 1. A lawsuit has been filed against you. A copy of the lawsuit and other court papers are served on you with this “Summons.”

2. If you do not want a judgment or order entered against you without your input, you must file a written “Answer” or a “Response” with the court, and pay the filing fee. Also, the other party may be granted their request by the Court if you do not file an “Answer” or “Response”, or show up in court. To file your “Answer” or “Response” take, or send, it to the: Office of the Clerk of Superior Court, 201 West Jefferson Street, Phoenix, Arizona 850032205 OR

Office of the Clerk of Superior Court, 18380 North 40th Street, Phoenix, Arizona 85032 OR Office of the Clerk of Superior Court, 222 East Javelina Avenue, Mesa, Arizona 85210-6201 OR Office of the Clerk of Superior Court, 14264 West Tierra Buena Lane, Surprise, Arizona 85374.

After filing, mail a copy of your “Response” or “Answer” to the other party at their current address.

3. If this “Summons” and the other court papers were served on you by a registered process server or the Sheriff within the State of Arizona, your “Response” or “Answer” must be filed within TWENTY (20) CALENDAR DAYS from the date you were served, not counting the day you were served.

If you were served by “Acceptance of Service” within the State of Arizona, your “Response” or “Answer” must be filed within TWENTY (20) CALENDAR DAYS from the date that the “Acceptance of Service was filed withthe Clerk of Superior Court. If this “Summons” and the other papers were served on you by a registered process server or the Sheriff outside the State of Arizona, your Response must be filed within THIRTY (30) CALENDAR DAYS from the date you were served, not counting the day you were served. If you were served by “Acceptance of Service” outside the State of Arizona, your “Response” or “Answer” must be filed within THIRTY (30) CALENDAR DAYS from the date that the “Acceptance of Service was filed with the Clerk of Superior Court. Service by a registered process server or the Sheriff is complete when made. Service by Publication is complete thirty(30) days after the date of the first publication.

4. You can get a copy of the court papers filed in this case from the Petitioner at the address listed at the top of the preceding page, or from the Clerk of Superior Court’sCustomer Service Center at: 601 West Jackson, Phoenix, Arizona 85003 or 18380 North 40th Street, Phoenix, Arizona 85032 or 222 East Javelina Avenue, Mesa, Arizona 85210 or 14264 West Tierra Buena Lane, Surprise, Arizona 85374.

5. If this is an action for dis-

solution (divorce), legal separation or annulment, either or both spouses may file a Petition for Conciliation for the purpose of determining whether there is any mutual interest in preserving the marriage or for Mediation to attempt to settle disputes concerning legal decisionmaking (legal custody) and parenting time issues regarding minor children.

6. Requests for reasonable accommodation for persons with disabilities must be made to the division assigned to the case by the party needing accommodation or his/her counsel at least three (3) judicial days in advance of a scheduled proceeding.

7. Requests for an interpreter for persons with limited English profciency must be made to the division assigned to the case by the party needing the interpreter and/or translator or his/her counsel at least ten (10) judicial days in advance of a scheduled court proceeding.

SIGNED AND SEALED this date FEB 05 2020 CLERK OF SUPERIOR COURT

By M. PATTERSON Deputy Clerk of Superior Court 7/10, 7/17, 7/24, 7/31/20 SPECIAL CAUSE/ NOTICE OF PROTEST;PROTESTED/ NO TRESPASS; Thurston County Record,No.3843008 on 6/26/06 AD Washington, declares jeffrey mark of mcmeel’s peaceful, non combatant status in re: TRADING WITH THE ENEMY ACT of 1917-40 Stat. 411. Powers of attorney govern trustees duties to contributing social security beneficiary jeffrey mark/ executor for the estate EIN 84-7037758.

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