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CONGRATULATIONS TO Jonetta Rose Barras for her look behind the scenes at how local power is brokered (“Tag Team,”3/17). This town needs more such reporting of how decisions are reached here—and by whom.
Of peculiar interest is the way David Wilmot and Frederick Cooke dedicate not only their professional lives but even their private spending decisions to exacerbate the District’s revenue woes. Not content merely to protect Fannie Mae’s $300-million tax exemption, they take their own weekly grocery spending to the suburbs, where they cruise the Silver Spring Giant aisles discussing “client strategies.” Imagine how the District’s economy and sales-tax intake might be spurred by such heavy spenders were they to shop in their hometown. Or are we to believe that the Giants and Safeways of the District don’t offer enough aisle space for machinating?
Isn’t it remarkable, too, that the District’s stalwart advocate of budget-busting expenditures, Patricia Mullahy Fugere of the Washington Legal Clinic for the Homeless, considers at least one of these tax-dodge proponents “terrific”? She usually has one of the District’s sharpest soundbite tongues, but then again, the rules change when the reputation of your own board member and fund-raiser is at stake: better to compromise your principles than to soundbite the hand that feeds you.
Adams Morgan