Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, April 14, 1991 TAG: 9104140332
SECTION: HORIZON PAGE: B-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: By Dixon B. DRUMMOND AYRES JR./ THE NEW YORK TIMES
DATELINE: WASHINGTON LENGTH: Long
The city's budget shortfall was pushing past $300 million, with no letup in sight in the demand for more governmental services.
At least as serious, the city's once-shiny civic reputation had been tarnished by Dixon's predecessor, Marion Barry, whose personal and political transgressions had resulted in a drug conviction and voter rejection.
More than three months after her inauguration, at which she declared that "nothing is beyond our reach," Dixon appears to have made significant progress toward solving both her major problems: persuading Congress to help the city balance its budget and persuading many of the city's dispirited citizens that a new political age has arrived.
But there is still much work to do, many more municipal obstacles and much more municipal ennui to surmount.
The next few weeks, when many new appointments will be made and a new budget will be hammered out with the independent-minded City Council, could be the most crucial of Dixon's tenure.
Mixing symbolism and substance and still enjoying the political honeymoon accorded the newly inaugurated, the 46-year-old mayor already has managed major cuts in the deficit, though the demand for social services and the lagging local economy threaten to keep the red ink flowing.
She has sweet-talked a once-skeptical Congress into giving the city an extra $100 million to help it pay its debts, promising in return to slash bloated city personnel rolls and wasteful city programs.
At the same time, she has suffused the city with a real, if tenuous, "can do" spirit, something long absent.
Show her a podium or a clutch of a few people and instantly she implores her audience to get involved in city affairs and to believe that the city can polish away the tarnish and solve its deep problems of poverty, crime, housing, health, schooling and racial prejudice.
She has dropped in unannounced on numerous city offices, including the notoriously poky motor vehicle agency, serving notice that efficiency will be rewarded but slackers and shirkers face the ax.
She has traded in the imperiously long mayoral limousine for a standard-issue city sedan.
"Things are going well, very well," she said one day, hurrying through City Hall toward another meeting and another round of debate about how to raise more money, cut more programs and get more work out of a smaller bureaucracy.
There are critics.
Some say the mayor is too aloof, too inclined to ignore power brokers, too dependent on aides short on political savvy.
Worst of all, the critics contend, she has no governing plan or vision other than cuts and reductions of top-heavy programs and agencies inherited from the Barry administration.
They argue that Dixon still sounds like a candidate instead of a mayor and has yet to demonstrate that she can master the fractious City Council or the huge municipal bureaucracy.
They say she is confrontational and needlessly becomes involved in fights.
"She has worked impressively with Congress, and she has set a good tone of governing," said Joslyn Williams, the head of the Democratic Party in the District of Columbia and a local labor leader.
"But she's being too much of a loner, and she's trying to balance the budget on the backs of city workers and the poor. The honeymoon she's enjoying is likely to end . . . as she and the City Council finish thrashing out next year's budget."
There are signs that the honeymoon already is ending.
In apparent response to complaints that she did not have enough hard-nosed political insiders in her advisory circle, she recently replaced her chief of staff, Joseph Caldwell, a lawyer, with Patricia Worthy, the chairman of the city's Public Service Commission.
But that move failed to quiet the critics, who contended that Worthy also was inexperienced politically, a contention that drew a sharp counterattack from Dixon.
"We are doing things differently from the way some of the power brokers are accustomed to things being done," she said, picking up some of the rhetoric she had used in her campaign.
"If it means it doesn't translate in terms of their support at the end of four years, so be it. It will be clear at the end of the four years that we were here, we made a difference."
Another sign that the honeymoon is ending comes from the new chairman of the City Council, John Wilson.
Of the budget talks, he said, "The mayor is talking cuts but no more taxes. I'm not sure you can do it that way. People are going to have to put it on the political line before this is over."
But for the moment, the mayor's critics are in the minority, overshadowed by her successes and a seeming willingness by others who may harbor doubts to let the honeymoon run a bit longer.
In fact, some of the city's toughest critics - members of the Congress, which oversees all city business - say Dixon's progress has been nothing less than remarkable.
In approving the $100 million gift and agreeing to consider further grants in coming years, numerous members of the House and Senate, Democrats and Republicans, effusively praised Dixon, a Democrat, for setting a new tone in the governance of the District of Columbia and for re-establishing a strong link between City Hall and Capitol Hill.
"Mayor Dixon is a breath of fresh air," said Sen. Brock Adams, the Washington state Democrat who is chairman of the Senate Subcommittee on D.C. Appropriations.
"People want her to succeed. The $100 million is directly attributable to her willingness to reach out and meet with scores of legislators and her willingness to cut and trim and remake. All that was absent in the last city administration."
Rep. Thomas J. Bliley Jr., a Virginian and the ranking Republican on the House District Committee, said Dixon's hard lobbying on Capitol Hill had put a stop to "District bashing" by legislators.
The new mayor, he added, had paid him more visits in her first two months than had her predecessor, Barry, in the better part of 10 years.
President Bush, whose administration was an acerbic critic of the Barry administration, has indicated that he will go along with the congressional gift to the Dixon administration, providing that other sections of the bill unrelated to the District are acceptable.
In fact, the president struck up a working relationship with Mayor Dixon well before Congress by inviting her to breakfast two days after her inauguration.
"She's off to a good start," said Mark Plotkin, who was active in Democratic Party affairs and now does political commentary for a local public radio station.
by CNB