Something called the Urban Institute has found that the District’s relationship with nonprofit human-service providers is among the worst in the nation.
The body says the grant-application process is convoluted and that city agencies are routinely late in making payments to the nonprofits.
Imagine that — another report that indicts the bureaucrats of the city.
These unsettling findings come amid an uncertain economic time, when the city is facing a budgetary shortfall and the Romper-Room leaders are looking for creative means to meet the red ink.
The unfortunate connection is not lost on Mary Cheh, the Ward 3 D.C. Councilwoman with the Brezhnev-like eyebrows.
“It is urgent that we fix these problems,” she says of the intractable.
If there is one certainty about the city’s government, it is that it is impervious to reform, if not the celebrated “change” that gripped the nation in 2008.
Nothing functions as it should in the city. And this is not to raise anew the ninnies of DCRA. On second thought, DCRA’s professional clock-watchers, know-nothings and do-nothings have forgotten that they live off the taxpayer dime and should be vaguely responsive and courteous to those who grovel before them and pay their salaries.
Alas, that is not how it works in a one-party city that lives with a political riddle: It embraces small businesses and is distrustful of corporate America in theory. Yet in practice, it lures big boxes to the city with sweet tax breaks and curious land deals and burdens small businesses with regulations galore and an incompetent bureaucracy.
That reality is no consolation for a nonprofit head checking the bank account each day to see if a deposit from a city agency has been made.
Nope. Late again.
That is life in the dysfunctional city.
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