New D.C. Mayor Adrian Fenty plans to keep two prominent gay appointees from the Williams administration, but the head of the city’s AIDS office announced plans to leave her post. (Photo by Lauren Victoria Burke/AP)
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LOU CHIBBARO J
Friday, January 05, 2007
D.C.’s new mayor is keeping two of his predecessor’s most senior openly gay appointees but is transferring them to different positions.
Mayor Adrian Fenty has also named new directors for the city’s Latino, Asian-Pacific Islander and African affairs offices, but has yet to announce whether he would retain or replace lesbian activist Darlene Nipper as head of the Office of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual & Transgender Affairs.
Fenty said at a Dec. 28 news conference that a decision would be made this week but nothing had been announced by the time the Blade went to press Wednesday. Fenty also announced at the news conference that he would appoint Patrick Canavan, former Mayor Anthony Williams’ openly gay director of the Department of Consumer & Regulatory Affairs, as the new chief operating officer of St. Elizabeth’s Hospital, the city’s public psychiatric hospital.
The following day, Fenty named Lars Etzkorn, the openly gay deputy director of the Department of Transportation under Williams, as the new director of the city’s Office of Property Management.
Fenty also announced he would retain Dr. Gregg Pane as director of the Department of Health but decided to replace Marsha Martin as head of the Administration for HIV Policy & Programs, which falls under the jurisdiction of the health department.
“As a Williams appointee, it is my time to leave the government and I do so with great respect and admiration for this agency,” Martin said in a Jan. 3 e-mail to her staff. “Together, you have changed and re-ignited the conversation about the HIV epidemic in Washington, D.C.”
Martin had received mixed reviews since assuming the post as head of the AIDS administration in 2005. She had been praised for initiating a massive campaign to have nearly all city residents tested for HIV as a means of curtailing the spread of the disease. But an audit by the District’s Inspector General’s office in October found continuing problems with the administration’s monitoring of grants and contracts totaling millions of dollars.
And critics recently pointed out that one year after Martin took office, the city’s process for monitoring the number of HIV cases through epidemiological tracking procedures required by the federal government remained behind by several years, preventing the city from knowing how many residents have HIV. Martin’s supporters say she inherited most of these problems and should be credited with taking steps to begin fixing them.
Canavan and Etzkorn are among more than a dozen high-level officials from the Williams administration that Fenty has chosen to retain, either in their current or in new positions.
The two gay officials will be moving from larger to smaller city agencies, a development that might raise speculation about whether the changes could be considered a demotion.
Peter Rosenstein, a gay Fenty campaign adviser who also served on Fenty’s mayoral transition team, said that while St. Elizabeth’s Hospital and the Office of Property Management are smaller agencies than the ones Canavan and Etzkorn worked for under Williams, each are considered vital to the city. The two agencies also face considerable problems and Fenty’s decision to tap Canavan and Etzkorn to head them shows the new mayor has full confidence in their ability to make needed improvements, Rosenstein said.
“I don’t think these appointments can be considered a demotion,” Rosenstein said.
Canavan and Etzkorn could not be reached by press time.
Canavan is a licensed clinical psychologist with a doctorate degree in psychology and special training in forensic psychology. He also studied public administration at George Washington and Harvard Universities and received certification as a public manager.
He began his tenure with the District of Columbia government as a clinical administrator at St. Elizabeth’s Hospital. From there, Williams moved him to the Office of the City Administrator and later named him director of the city’s Office of Neighborhood Services.
Fenty said Canavan’s experience in the field of psychology and public administration makes him especially suitable to head the sprawling St. Elizabeth’s campus located in Southeast Washington.
Etzkorn, an attorney, worked as an economic development official for St. Louis, where he directed various downtown development projects, before Williams appointed him in 2000 as associate director of the D.C. Department of Transportation. In that post, Etzkorn headed the department’s public space management division, which included snow removal and street and bridge maintenance, among other duties. In July, he moved up to the position of the department’s deputy director.
The Office of Property Management, which Etzkorn will now head, is charged with managing the city’s public lands and buildings. Among other things, the office manages 334 facilities or buildings that house at least 64 city agencies or offices.
During the past six months, the Office of Property Management has been assisting gay entertainment businesses in their effort to find suitable places to move after the city’s new baseball stadium displaced them from their old locations on or near O Street, S.E. Gay activists and the gay business owners will likely approach Etzkorn for support in their request for zoning exemptions that activists say are needed to enable the businesses to reopen.
Fenty replaces gay director
In other appointments, Fenty replaced Williams’ openly gay director of the Office of Boards & Commissions, Ron Collins, with Carla Brailey, a Methodist minister and former lecturer in Afro-American Studies at D.C.’s Howard University. During her tenure at Howard, Brailey established the university’s first women’s faith-based ministry.
Brailey’s background differs significantly from that of Collins and most of the previous heads of the politically charged Office of Boards & Commissions, which has been used by all past mayors as their dispenser of political patronage appointments.
Washington political insiders have said past mayors, including Williams, made sure prospective appointees to dozens of such posts as medical, dentistry or cosmetology boards were qualified in their respective fields. But often the appointees also had to be political allies or be sponsored by political allies of the sitting mayor before winning appointment to a prominent board or commission. Many boards and commissions set regulatory guidelines or policies for businesses and professions.
Collins, an attorney, is a veteran Democratic Party activist and member of the city’s Democratic Party State Committee. At Collins’ recommendations, Williams appointed more than 100 gays over the past eight years to various boards and commissions. Among the appointments was Mario Acosta-Velez, president of the Gertrude Stein Democratic Club, the city’s largest gay political group, to the Commission on Human Rights. The commission, among other things, enforces the city law that bans discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity, which covers transgender persons.
Brailey, a native of Houston, holds degrees in criminal justice, divinity and counseling psychology, according to biographical information released by the Fenty transition team. She is a candidate for a doctorate degree at Howard University’s Department of Sociology and Anthropology.
Brailey could not be reached for comment by press time. Representatives of Howard University’s gay student group also could not be reached to determine whether Brailey’s religious beliefs might lead her to object to the appointment of gays to city boards and commissions.
Rosenstein said he was unfamiliar with Brailey’s background or opinions on gay rights but said he was certain she would not hold a bias toward gay appointments.
“Fenty’s the one who makes the decisions on who to appointment,” Rosenstein said. “And he has said all along he is committed to appointing gays to boards and commissions as well as other positions.”
Fenty spokesperson Mafara Hobson said Fenty believes Brailey has the skills to lead the boards and commissions office.
In another appointment of interest to gay activists, Fenty named Brian Lee as interim fire chief, replacing the current chief, Adrian Thompson. Gay and transgender activists have criticized Thompson for not taking adequate steps to provide sensitivity training to fire fighters and emergency medical services personnel on gay- and transgender-related issues.
Fenty said he would appoint at least one gay community representative to an advisory panel charged with helping him select a permanent fire chief. Last week, he said Lee, a battalion chief and 20-year veteran of Washington Fire Department, would be a candidate for the permanent chief’s position.
Rights office gets new leader
The new mayor also replaced the director of the Office of Human Rights, Kenneth Saunders, with Gustavo Velasquez, former director of the D.C. Office of Latino Affairs.
The Gay & Lesbian Activists Alliance has praised Saunders for partially reducing the office’s backlog in discrimination cases and for being sensitive to gay-related cases. The office investigates cases of discrimination, including anti-gay and anti-transgender discrimination, and decides whether to bring such cases before the Commission on Human Rights, which rules on the cases.
GLAA spokesperson Rick Rosendall said the group is concerned that Velasquez may not have the degree of expertise that Saunders has in civil rights law and civil rights issues in general.
Members of the local gay Latino group, Latin@s En Accion, also have expressed concern that Velasquez was not attentive to the needs of the city’s gay Latino community, according to Ruby Corado, the group’s president. Corado said Velasquez was slow to respond to requests by the group for a community grant, even though other local Latino groups received such grants on a regular basis under the office’s grants program.
Fenty said Velasquez demonstrated knowledge of civil rights issues in his role as head of the Office of Latino Affairs and would be well suited for the human rights office post.
“I don’t think it’s an agency that’s driving home investigations, holding the rest of the government accountable, making sure we’re addressing discrimination proactively when it surfaces as well as we can,” Fenty said.
“That’s why we decided to make a change. Mr. Velasquez is not only a great and well-trained manager but a very productive person,” he said. “I think he will go in there with some new energy, bring some new people in and make the changes the community wants to see.”
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