Great Expectations

Civic Leadership
Dan Tangherlini '85
City Administrator, Washington, D.C.

Expectations: Dan Tangherlini plotted their impact when he studied macroeconomics. Now, the power of expectations helps him explain how Washington, D.C. has changed, where it’s headed, and why.

Expectations for visiting the nation’s capital city, or for living and working there, have flipped from negative to positive, which is “pretty cool,” Dan confides. That process has occurred in the last eight to 10 years at the hands of talented and committed leaders throughout the city’s civic structure. Dan has played key roles—as the chief financial officer for the Metropolitan Police Department; as the director of the District’s Department of Transportation; and, most recently, as the general manager of the Metropolitan Area Transit Authority (or METRO system).

Today, Dan Tangherlini is the city administrator of Washington, D.C. Mayor Adrian Fenty (37) tapped Dan last October, after Fenty had won the Democratic primary, but before the November 7 general election. According to the Washington Post, Adrian Fenty “introduced [Dan] Tangherlini as the man who would help him run the District government. After talking about their common visions, enthusiasm and energy, the two disappeared into city hall to discuss transition plans.…‘He will be involved with every agency, every decision under my direct authority,’ Fenty said. ‘Dan is an ideas man. He knows the city government, and he will challenge the bureaucracy and the old ways of doing things.’”

Mayor Fenty and City Administrator Tangherlini lost no time implementing their management ideas—operating the city more like a business, leaving behind the proverbial entrenched bureaucracy and setting up processes that focus relentlessly on four themes: responsibility, accountability, transparency and efficiency.

Streamlining the city organization, the mayor eliminated three deputy mayors, retaining only the city administrator and deputy for planning and economic development. In this flattened structure, Dan says he is “the mayor’s air traffic controller;” all city agencies report to the mayor through Dan.

With their team, the two work in a bullpen city office, in the Michael Bloomberg–New York City style, where, Dan explains, there’s light and air, a strong sense of teamwork, and constant, efficient access to one another. BlackBerries are critical; email, Web-based discussion forums and outreach tools connect the administration with the city’s people—their concerns, their ideas, their experiences.

Each week, a rotating schedule of city agencies meets with Dan and the mayor to make a formal presentation of data that responds to the agency’s projects. “There’s a great deal of discipline about deadlines,” Dan says. “These meetings allow us to ‘stress test’ issues that the officials raise, give policy direction, figure out what metrics should be used to measure outcomes, and, most importantly, provide face-to-face accountability for achieving what we agreed should get done.”

How does an issue become a project? “Sometimes it happens in these meetings, depending on how the insight emerges about the priority problems,” Dan says. “For example, if we are discussing the broader issue of homelessness, we might decide that tackling chronic homelessness is a priority. ‘Give me a plan in 90 days for how we should deal with chronic homelessness,’ we would charge the agency head. That’s a liberating challenge. We’ve given that agency head the message, ‘You’re my expert.’ He or she understands that ‘I’m the person’ they’re counting on to come up with a workable plan, a plan that needs to be implemented successfully.”

The distinction of being “the District” complicates the urban challenges that Washington faces. One of Washington’s crippling legacies is rooted in the city’s political birth. The establishment of Washington as the nation’s capital was the result of a hard-fought and bitter compromise between the Republicans and the Federalists. Constant criticism of the site as an undeveloped, unpleasant backwater persisted over time. Washington was a hardship assignment for members of Congress; they had to go back home for good food, rest and relaxation.
“Combine that history with the core challenges of the ’70s, ’80s and ’90s, and it was easy for any of the ‘feds’ to get a cheap shot off. Having us as a national model of what’s wrong was more useful than a model of what’s right. People were more interested in seeing the city as a failure than as a success,” Dan says.

Many of the city’s recent problems, Dan believes, are the problems of divestiture. As Congress divested of the politics of the District, it divested of committing time, effort and money on the life of the city. “It was my good fortune to work with Tony Williams in the mid-’90s,” Dan says, the District’s chief financial officer, who brought the city budget back into the black. In 1996 Dan was “on loan” from the U.S. Department of Transportation to Tony Williams. Dan was appointed deputy chief financial officer for the Metropolitan Police Department and ultimately served as chief financial officer when Tony Williams succeeded Marion Barry as mayor.

The sheer visibility of the District—the U.S. capital city—is perhaps the most underappreciated challenge. Every media group and every nation of the world has an outpost here; anything that happens is seen, recorded, replayed. In contrast, before Katrina, only readers of The Times-Picayune knew the dimensions of New Orleans’ problems. The Washington Post alone, apart from the thousands of other media sources, has a huge international readership that follows what goes on in Washington. The media visibility exacerbates the realities here.

Generating and managing resources, the juggernaut for all U.S. cities, are challenges complicated by the District-federal relationship. In 1995, with a fiscal crisis looming at the close of an era of mismanagement, the federal government appointed a financial control board. The agreement struck at that time held the federal government responsible for the District’s pension liability and Medicare costs but the District responsible for all the “broken things,” as Dan describes them, and civic leaders have only limited home rule to execute solutions. In 2001, after four years of balanced budgets, the District regained budgetary control, but Congress must still approve the District’s budget and all local legislation (“a number of federal elected officials frequently use the District as an opportunity for grandstanding,” Dan adds).

“There are plenty of myths out there about federal funding for the District,” says Dan. District residents pay local taxes as well as federal taxes; they now have a congressional representative, but do not have a vote. Much of the property is exempt from property taxes, since it is federally owned, and yet the city must support national rituals, celebrations, political activism of all kinds. Washington is “bi-modally distributed in terms of education and economic capacity; it’s like two cities,” Dan explains. “Our budget relies on the very top income residents of the city. Still, it is the nation’s capital; there can be nothing but the best.

“Milton helped me appreciate the complexity of the city,” Dan reflects. “Boston represented two things: the book stores, coffee shops, college atmosphere of Cambridge; and then politics. Milton is less about politics than about daring to be true. What do you believe in? You get this amazing education at just the right time. You get important skills, too, and power, and the question: How are you going to use those things to make a difference? To be an idealist is to be frustrated often. Among my Milton friends I see a widespread sense of dissatisfaction, because they see that things could be so much better. What are we missing? It seems so simple. 

“It was important to be so challenged. All around us was an intense level of expectation. Milton is what you create—what students and faculty create, together. Sort of through constant repetition you internalize the sense that there’s something great happening here; then you begin to make it so.

“There’s a sense of accomplishment here in Washington now. It’s the team idea: one success, then two successes, and then, it’s a streak. As I learned from Jaime Lerner, former mayor of Curitiba and governor of Paraná in Brazil, an urban planner and political innovator, ‘When you’re poor, you have the freedom to experiment.’ Regarding change in a city, Jaime said, ‘You have to start before you finish planning.’

“City planning is a constant dialogue around what goals are right, now: What is the right thing? We have to use each transaction, each opinion, each dialogue to further a shared philosophy that points to outcomes. We are about to take back responsibility and jurisdiction for the schools, with the city’s energy, and drive to meet expectations. We’re developing ideas for what that will mean in terms of tactical plans and legislation. The District’s plan for education reform is taking on the fiscal and operating weaknesses, getting broad strategic analysis and review—and reaching out to the community: with meetings throughout the District (earlier in the year, such meetings helped the Fenty administration develop priorities), interactive Web forums, and invitations to school staff for their input.

“It’s impossible to be here for a while and not fall in love with this city,” Dan says. “A massive transformation has happened in Washington over the last nine years. It’s all about the e-factor: expectations.”

Cathleen Everett

Dan Tangherlini holds a B.A. and M.P.P. from the University of Chicago. In addition, he holds an M.B.A. from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania.

 

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