Advisory Neighborhood Commissions

What's an ANC? New arrivals in the neighborhood commonly ask that, because these seem to be unique to the District of Columbia. According to the District's Home Rule Charter, the District is to be divided up into “commission areas”, and each such commission “may advise the District government on matters of public policy including decisions regarding planning, streets, recreation, social services programs, health, safety, and sanitation in that neighborhood commission area”.

“Advise” is the operative word. The ANC is not your neighborhood government, and it has none of the powers of either the legislative nor the executive branches of government. All it does is consider proposed District actions affecting a neighborhood, and offer advice to the District government concerning those actions. The District agency receiving such advice is supposed to give that advice “great weight”. Some are reasonably responsive to ANC advice; others pretty much ignore it, and there's no penalty for that.

There are 37 ANCs in the District (here's a map of them), and a total of 270 elected commissioners. The position is unpaid, and it's hard to find people willing to spend a lot of their time at this job, for nothing. I paid little attention to our ANC, until they surprised me with an unfortunate decision affecting me and my immediate neighbors in 2000. They were unrepentant, and in 2002 I decided that our ANC needed a new voice. If the ANC system has a failing, it is that these positions tend to be dominated by a handful of neighborhood activists, while the great majority of residents are much too busy with home, family, and jobs to spend time on neighborhood “politics”. It's proven to be quite difficult to make our ANC truly representative of the neighborhood, because so few residents have the time and energy to take on the unpaid task.

In 2002, with my physics career winding down, I decided to run for our Mount Pleasant ANC, and found myself elected to that position. Curiously, in that election year, all six Mount Pleasant commissioners declined to run for re-election, so the new ANC started work in January, 2003, with six novice commissioners.

I brought about two significant changes. First, I provide a monthly newsletter for my constituents, listing all of the ANC actions, so that they can know what their ANC is doing, even if they never attend a meeting. Nobody's ever done that before, and, so far as I know, I'm still the only ANC commissioner in the District doing that. Second, I publish every ANC resolution on two Mount Pleasant Web sites, so that everyone in the neighborhood – those with Internet access, anyway, which these days means a pretty substantial number – can keep track of what their ANC does.

Mount Pleasant ANC commissioners: