Mixed views of Gray's DHS work

By Ann E. Marimow, Henri E. Cauvin and Tim Craig

Thursday, September 9, 2010; A1



When Sharon Pratt ran for mayor in 1990, she proclaimed herself a reformer, promising to clean up the District bureaucracy "with a shovel, not a broom."

One of her first tasks after her election was persuading Vincent C. Gray, not then a member of the city's governing class, to take over the troubled Department of Human Services, a sprawling agency that was widely viewed as lacking the structure, discipline and funds to fulfill its responsibilities to those who relied on it for medical care, food stamps and shelter.

Nearly two decades later, as Gray challenges incumbent Adrian M. Fenty for the Democratic mayoral nomination, Fenty and others have seized on Gray's record at DHS, saying he was an ineffective bureaucrat who mismanaged funds and helped bring the District to the brink of bankruptcy.

In interviews with more than two dozen former and current activists, lawyers and government officials, however, most said that Gray - now the D.C. Council chairman - delivered incremental progress at DHS and that he was a hands-on manager who cared for those whom the department sought to help.

But Gray, whose service as DHS director was bookended by administrations of four-term mayor Marion Barry (D), did not transform an agency that by all accounts needed nothing less. He did not make significant, lasting changes, according to observers, in part because his ambitions were no match for the deep-rooted fiscal and political challenges of governing the District during the national recession of the early 1990s.

"They weren't moving full enough or fast enough, but it was a government bureaucracy. They were more responsive than the Barry administration and the administration after that," said Donna Wulkan, who was an attorney in a class-action lawsuit against the District over conditions at juvenile detention facilities. "We were on opposite sides of the fence. . . . But I still felt he was advocating for the kids."

When he was appointed in 1991, Gray was the department's 11th director in 12 years, and the agency he inherited was the city's largest. It cost $1 billion a year to run the department, which employed more than 8,000 people and had a far-reaching portfolio that included juvenile justice, foster care, homelessness, AIDS and mental health. And the department was fraught with problems: 14 important functions had been declared substandard and placed under some form of federal court oversight. By the time Gray left, there would be two more.

Gray's undertaking was made more difficult by a record number of homeless families, one of the country's fastest-growing AIDS rates and a government payroll that had ballooned under Barry, now the council member for Ward 8. The deterioration of the city's finances had begun before Gray and Pratt arrived, not because of them, as Fenty has suggested.

"She was handed this disaster," said economist Alice M. Rivlin, who helped orchestrate the congressional takeover of the city government as President Bill Clinton's budget director after Pratt left office. But Rivlin noted that the financial situation under Pratt "did not get any better, that's for sure, and by 1995, the city was in free fall."

Rivlin, who supports Gray's mayoral candidacy, said it would not be "fair to blame the disaster on Sharon, much less Gray." But Rivlin said Pratt lacked the "strong political base" to lead a financial turnaround because "she wasn't an experienced politician."

Pratt, who also backs Gray, declined to be interviewed. But in a series of e-mails, she praised Gray for doing a "remarkable job of addressing entrenched, difficult issues."

For his part, Gray points to various accomplishments. On his watch, the city increased the number of social workers to shrink their caseloads; it shuttered the long-troubled Forest Haven center and transferred developmentally disabled people to community-based settings; the infant mortality rate declined. A list of achievements Gray provided, which runs eight pages and ranges from the minute to the monumental, underscores the breadth of the challenges he faced.

The structure of DHS compounded the problem. Six of its agencies were eventually spun off into Cabinet-level departments. Gray and Pratt knew at the outset that the agency's size and scope were untenable. But they were unable to persuade the council to break it up.

"It was well past the point where something really significant was going to happen," Gray said. "It was politics."

When Pratt called to recruit Gray for the job, he was executive director of the the Arc of DC, a nonprofit organization that advocates for people with developmental disabilities. Gray initially said no.

One of the people he called for advice was Reginald F. Wells, then the head of what was the city's Mental Retardation and Developmental Disabilities Administration. Wells said he cautioned Gray that the bureaucracy lacked the flexibility of the nonprofit world he was accustomed to.

"You're going to win some and lose some, and change is going to be very incremental," Wells recalled telling Gray. Wells said Gray's response was: "If he only got four years, he would at least get things started in a better direction, and he really made good on that promise."

Within his first 18 months, Gray said, he realized that four years would not be enough time to fix a "severely broken" system. "In the time that was available, I don't think it was possible to completely reform all of those agencies," Gray said. "But if you go through every agency, you will find progress having been made."

Gray said he recognized the problems coming in, but not the extent of the deficiencies of an agency where child-welfare information was kept on 3-by-5-inch cards in files piled on the floor of an office on H Street NE. "It wasn't as if the needs were going to stand still while you had to do this," Gray said. "You were trying to create the bicycle and ride it at the same time.

To Fenty's supporters, for Gray to say he was dealt a bad hand is no excuse. At the time, one of the leading advocates for people with mental illness was Peter Nickles, an attorney for the plaintiffs in a class-action lawsuit and now Fenty's attorney general. Nickles recalled visiting Gray in his temporary office in a double-wide trailer on the grounds of St. Elizabeths, the city's psychiatric hospital, to try to shake loose payments for the private providers who were helping his clients.

"It was a logjam. Nothing seemed to happen, whether it was procurement, personnel or paying bills," Nickles said. "It was bad, and it didn't get any better. The culture of complacency was not changed."

At the end of Gray's tenure, a court-appointed special master in what is now know as Dixon v. Fenty, wrote a scathing review of the city's "persistent pattern" of failing to comply with an agreement to transfer patients from St. Elizabeths to community-based housing.

But Danna Mauch, the special master, said in an interview that it would be too simplistic to blame Gray, given the scope of the challenge.

In an interview, Claudia Schlosberg, who was staff director for the court-appointed monitoring committee in the case, said: "Vince did what he could. . . .There were forces larger than him at work."

A 1993 report from the Washington Legal Clinic for the Homeless outlined the government's record of "refusal and/or inability to administer its own social programs to ensure that poor families and especially poor children are properly cared for and properly sheltered."

For the city's homeless, Gray's tenure was a mixed bag, advocates say. Gray ended the practice of housing homeless families in filthy "welfare hotels" and partnered with the federal government to turn over operations to private providers.

But in his first two years, he also eliminated about 500 shelter beds and reduced spending by at least $10 million. His actions prompted bitter protests largely aimed at the mayor, who was then known as Sharon Pratt Dixon. Two men rappelled down the side of the J.W. Marriott Hotel to unfurl a banner across the street from city hall: "Dixon's Shovel Will Bury the Homeless."

Stephen Cleghorn, a former advocate for the homeless, first encountered Gray as DHS director when Cleghorn and a group of homeless men refused to leave a trailer that was part of a Foggy Bottom shelter that Gray was determined to close. A year later, Cleghorn wrote a harsh critique of the mayor and Gray when the administration refused federal money to shelter families, a decision Gray said was necessary to avoid creating an unsustainable entitlement to shelter.

Cleghorn also served on Pratt's homelessness task force, and he said "not a single recommendation was taken seriously."

Years later, Cleghorn said he has a different view of Gray. "He was in the lead, but his hands were tied to a certain extent by the mayor at whose pleasure he served," said Cleghorn, now a goat farmer in Pennsylvania.

When Gray took the DHS job, child welfare wasn't his specialty. But it quickly became a priority. A few months into the new administration, a federal judge in a class-action suit against the District found that the city's failure to find homes for more than 2,000 children foster care violated the Constitution. The judge called the situation a "travesty."

In his opinion, in a case known asLaShawn, U.S. District Judge Thomas F. Hogan lamented "a lost generation of children whose tragic plight is being repeated every day."

But for a new administration that had pledged to repair the city's safety net, the judge's blistering critique seemed like an opportunity, too. Marcia Robinson Lowry, who has been the lead attorney for the plaintiffs since the case began, said Gray's attitude was remarkably supportive.

"His goal was to come up with an agreement that would give us the best system," she said.

But the initial burst of activity on child welfare trailed off, and in 1994, shortly before Gray's tenure at DHS ended, the judge installed a team of outside administrators to assist the agency. Less than a year later, again acting at the urging of the plaintiffs, Hogan appointed a general receiver to run the agency.

If foster care was an early priority for Gray, the needs of people with developmental disabilities were an enduring passion. As executive director at the ARC, Gray had helped lead the charge to close Forest Haven, a decrepit institution and the target of a class-action lawsuit.

As head of DHS, he not only presided over the closing of Forest Haven in 1991, but he could claim to be the man who made the District the second jurisdiction in the country to end large-scale institutionalization of the developmentally disabled.

But the District, which had avoided closing Forest Haven until a judge held the city in contempt, wasn't prepared for the aftermath. Hundreds of people with profound disabilities needed safe, supportive homes in the community. Not enough experienced providers were in place, and the DHS agency responsible for overseeing the facilities was hardly equipped for the task.

The failings would echo for decades, with reports of chronic abuses in group homes. And just last month, in the latest chapter of the 34-year-old case, which is known today as Evans v. Fenty, a federal judge appointed an independent administrator to help bring the city's developmental disabilities agency into compliance with long-standing court orders covering the care of the nearly 600 former Forest Haven residents still alive.

On the campaign trail, Fenty has criticized Gray's efforts to fight HIV/AIDS at a time when the disease was ravaging the city's gay community. Fenty tells voters that Gray and Pratt failed to devote enough resources and that it "took two years" to appoint someone to the top AIDS job.

In fact, Pratt appointed Caitlin Ryan, a nationally known health-care researcher, six months after taking office. Gray elevated what was the Office of AIDS Activities into a broader agency and won the "public administrator of the year" award from the Whitman-Walker clinic, which was on the front lines of fighting the disease.

But when Ryan took over, she had "no secretary, no contracts officer, no budget officer, no epidemiologist, no fax line, no computer," according to a Post story at the time.

D.C. Council member Jim Graham (D-Ward 1), who headed Whitman-Walker at the time, said Gray did a good job "in the context of what he had." But he also recalled the struggle to get paid by the city in 1992. When the government fell $1 million behind on what it owed the clinic, Graham said he met repeatedly with Gray, who did not control the purse strings.

"It was like pulling wisdom teeth to get that money," said Graham, generally an ally of Fenty. "We went to Gray, and he saw us, and he did his best, but little beyond that."

marimowa@washpost.com cauvinh@waspost.com craigt@washpost.com

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