Chinh Le, Legal Director Jim Springer,

Jim Springer, Volunteer Attorney

Legal Aid volunteer attorney James Springer was one of the three lawyers featured in recent articles published by the  National Law Journal and the ABA Journal about attorneys who, after retiring from distinguished careers in private practice, dedicated their time and skills to a public interest legal services organization. Since 2005, Jim has been conducting intake and working part-time in Legal Aid’s public benefits unit, handling a variety of Social Security, Medicaid, and food stamps matters. He was previously a partner at Dickstein Shapiro Morin & Oshinsky LLP, where he handled antitrust and other litigation for both plaintiffs and defendants, with a particular emphasis on appellate practice. In June 2007, Jim was named pro bono lawyer of the year by the District of Columbia Bar.

Eric Angel, Executive Director

 When the Generous Associates Campaign Co-Chairs set the highly ambitious goal of “711 in 2011” – $711,000 in 2011 – it seemed hard to believe we could ever get there.  The Campaign is officially over, the results are in, and the District’s associates have surpassed themselves!  We are so grateful to our supporters, who raised over three quarters of a million dollars to help us make justice real for the District’s most vulnerable residents. 

 Click here to read our press release and here to see the final tallies!

BJ Shannon, Alston & Bird LLP

As we approach the half-way point of this year’s Generous Associates Campaign, I’ve been thinking about what has kept me so enthusiastic about the Campaign for so many years now.

I’m reminded of a recent conversation with a non-lawyer friend who asked what Legal Aid does with the money raised during the Campaign. I explained that, even though we often hear on television that “you have the right to an attorney,” you actually only have this right in criminal cases. Then I asked, what happens if you need to go to court because your landlord is wrongfully threatening eviction? What happens if your Medicaid benefits are suddenly cut off? What happens if your children’s father stops paying child support? Now imagine that you must provide for yourself and two children with an annual income of barely $10,000, so you can’t possibly afford a lawyer. Are you prepared to fight these battles alone?

As law firm associates, we can take on this responsibility in many different forms. Some associates will handle a case and stand up in court against counsel for the client’s landlord. Others will help prepare and file paperwork required to restore a client’s Medicaid benefits. Still others will help by providing financial support.

Supporting the Campaign is one way I take on some of this responsibility, and I’m so excited that so many law firm associates across the District have made the choice to help in this way too. By educating our colleagues about the people Legal Aid serves and about the importance of the Campaign in making these services possible, by creating fun or competitive opportunities for lawyers in our firms to participate, and by sharing our ideas and successes with other coordinators, we’re not just raising money; we’re making access to justice a reality for DC’s most vulnerable residents.

Thank you to all the wonderful volunteers who are part of this important effort!

BJ Shannon
Alston & Bird LLP

Eric Angel, Executive Director

In addition to recognizing Brooksley Born as a Servant of Justice at this year’s Awards Dinner, we are honored to be able to recognize Assistant Attorney General Thomas E. Perez with this same distinction.  Mr. Perez has spent his entire career in public service, largely working as a champion of civil rights.

In 2009, Mr. Perez was sworn in as the Assistant Attorney General for the Civil Rights Division at the United States Department of Justice.  Since then, his goal has been to restore and transform the Division, in the spirit of its traditional role as the “conscience of the nation,” to further fulfill the promise of our nation’s most treasured laws – advancing equal opportunity, leveling the playing field, and protecting the rights of all.

Prior to his nomination, he served as the Secretary of Maryland’s Department of Labor, Licensing and Regulation – an agency that safeguards critical consumer and worker protections – and was a principal architect of a sweeping reform package to address his state’s foreclosure crisis.  In 2002, he became the first Latino elected to the Montgomery County Council, serving until 2006.

Thomas E. Perez

Earlier in his career, Mr. Perez spent 12 years in federal public service, mainly as a career attorney in the Civil Rights Division he now leads.  In that role, he prosecuted, or supervised the prosecution of, some of the Division’s highest-profile civil rights cases, including a hate crimes case in Texas involving a group of white supremacists who went on a deadly, racially-motivated crime spree.  Mr. Perez later served as Deputy Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights under Attorney General Janet Reno, chairing the interagency Worker Exploitation Task Force, which oversaw a variety of initiatives designed to protect vulnerable workers.  He also served as Special Counsel to the late Senator Edward Kennedy, acting as Senator Kennedy’s principal adviser on civil rights, criminal justice and constitutional issues.  For the final two years of the Clinton administration, Mr. Perez served as the Director of the Office for Civil Rights at the United States Department of Health and Human Services.

Mr. Perez, who has been a law professor at University of Maryland School of Law and a part-time professor at the George Washington School of Public Health, received a Bachelor’s degree from Brown University in 1983, a Master’s of Public Policy from the John F. Kennedy School of Government in 1987, and a Juris Doctorate from Harvard Law School in 1987.  Mr. Perez is married to life-long poverty lawyer Anne Marie Staudenmaier, who has been advocating for persons living in poverty in the District of Columbia at the Washington Legal Clinic for the Homeless since 1996.

Monica Bell, Liman Fellow

In an earlier blog post, Legal Aid noted that the District’s failure to monitor compliance with the First Source Employment Agreement (a District law passed in 1984 which requires that 51% of the employees hired for City-funded development projects be District residents and that the jobs pay a living wage) has cost District residents jobs at a time when 1 in 10 District residents, and about 30% of Ward 8 residents, are unemployed. On January 18, 2011, D.C. Council Chair Kwame Brown, along with Councilmembers Michael Brown (At-Large) and Harry Thomas, Jr. (Ward 5), introduced legislation that aims to remedy this problem.

B19-0050, the “District of Columbia Workforce Intermediary Establishment and Reform of First Source and Living Wage Act of 2011,” proposes to strengthen the First Source and Living Wage laws by, among other things:

• Mandating that 20% of non-construction hours worked on government-assisted projects be performed by District residents;
• Requiring that each government-assisted construction project totaling $300,000 or more allocate certain numbers of hours to District residents;
• Requiring documentation of best efforts to comply with the First Source law before receiving a waiver from it; and
• Stiffening the penalty for willful noncompliance, raising the potential fine from 5% to 10% of direct and indirect contract labor costs.

Read the full text of the proposed legislation here. While at first glance, the bill seems positive, we note that the law will only be effective if the District dramatically improves its monitoring of compliance with the First Source and Living Wage laws. Developing a more effective enforcement mechanism will be essential if the District plans to rely on First Source to stem its high and unequally distributed unemployment rate.

To learn more about efforts to reform First Source, see the following resources:

• Washington Post, D.C. Council Chairman Proposes Higher Residency Requirements for City Contractors
• DC Employment Justice Center, DC Appleseed, and DC Fiscal Policy Institute, Reforming First Source: Strengthening the Link Between Economic Development and Jobs (recent policy brief)

Deborah Cuevas Hill, Senior Staff Attorney

On November 3, 2010, Debbie Cuevas Hill, staff attorney at the Legal Aid Society of the District of Columbia, testified before the D.C. City Council in support of Bill 18-863 which would extend the Rental Housing Act of 1985 (“the Act”) for 10 years.  See Bill 18-863 – Rental Housing Commission Reform Amendment Act of 2010.  (The Act originally had a sunset provision of twenty years, meaning the Act was set to expire in 2005.  The Act was extended for another 5 years in 2005.)  The Act includes crucial rent control protections for tenants. 

In 1985, when the Act was passed, the Council made the following findings:

(1) There is a severe shortage of rental housing available to citizens of the District of Columbia (“District”).

   (2) The shortage of housing is growing due to the withdrawal of housing units from the housing market, deterioration of existing housing units, and the lack of development of new or rehabilitation of vacant housing units.

   (3) The shortage of housing is felt most acutely among low- and moderate-income renters, who are finding a shrinking pool of available dwellings.

   (4) The cost of basic accommodation is so high as to cause undue hardship for many citizens of the District of Columbia.

In our testimony, Legal Aid bemoaned the fact that the stark findings that were true in 1985 are even more true today.  A recent DC Fiscal Policy Institute study found that nearly all low-income DC households have unaffordable housing costs.  (See  D.C. Fiscal Policy Institute, Nowhere to Go (Feb. 5, 2010) at 4 .  Therefore, Legal Aid not only supported an extension of 10 years, but also urged the Council to provide a more permanent extension to the Act until the need for such legislation no longer exists.

Monica Bell, Arthur Liman Public Interest Fellow

The D.C. Council is considering a bill that would drastically change the District’s standards for suspending the driver’s licenses and other licenses and registrations of parents who fail to pay child support. 

Bill 18-925, the “Child Support Enforcement and License Suspension Amendment Act of 2010,”   would allow the District to suspend any government-issued license or registration of a non-custodial parent who has been ordered to pay child support, regardless of whether that parent has any income.  The legislation would give the District’s child support enforcement agency broad discretion to penalize any child support obligor who it decides is “able to work,” regardless of that person’s employment status, educational background, skill level, or financial circumstances.

Legal Aid, with Bread for the City, offered oral and written testimony in opposition to the bill at a public hearing before the Committee on Public Safety and the Judiciary on October 6, 2010.  Although we share the Council’s underlying concerns and strongly support their efforts to improve the collection of child support, we believe that the license suspension bill is an excessively punitive, blunt instrument that would ultimately fall short of its aspirations.  Bill-18-925, as written, would produce several unintended negative consequences for District families.  The bill would: 

• Strip unemployed non-custodial parents of the very tools they need to secure a job and support their children during these challenging economic times – their driver’s licenses and vehicle registrations;
• Give the Child Support Services Division (CSSD) virtually unchecked authority to determine who is “able to work”;
• Eliminate procedural safeguards for non-custodial parents who have been threatened with license suspension; and
• Fail to provide non-custodial parents with meaningful access to a forum to appeal these sanctions.

Legal Aid and Bread for the City are particularly concerned about the timing of this bill.  One in ten District residents is unemployed, and nearly 30% of the residents of Ward 8 are unable to find a job.  The brunt of recession-related job loss in the District has fallen on low-wage workers.  This bill would unfairly penalize non-custodial parents who, through no fault of their own, have lost their income but who, according to CSSD, are “able to work.”

In our testimony, Legal Aid and Bread for the City urged the Council to take more time to confer with child support agency officials, child support advocates, and the public before enacting this sweeping and punitive bill.

Chief Operations Officer

On Monday afternoon, Legal Aid was privileged to host five participants in the U.S. Department of State-sponsored Legacy International Legislative Fellows Program.  This program links community leaders from the U.S. with their counterparts from Kuwait and Oman.  The Fellows are involved in public policy formulation and implementation in their respective countries.  While they are working in Congressional offices for the majority of their time in the U.S., they also are offered the opportunity to visit organizations like Legal Aid.

 Pictured:   Basmah Al-Kiyumi (Oman), Khalid al Haribi (Oman), Mashael Alhajeri, (Kuwait ),
KathyHays Sara M. Alasousi, (Kuwait), Jodi Feldman  and Ali Abdullah Al-Saidi (Oman).

Jodi Feldman, Director of Pro Bono and Intake Services, and myself were able to spend time speaking with our guests about the type of work that is done here at Legal Aid.  The Fellows were very interested in the free legal services that we provide and how we fund our work.  Legal Aid’s Pro Bono Program was also a topic of great interest, particularly with regard to how we refer cases and mentor the probono attorneys.  While our guests were here to find out about our organization, we found that we learned a great deal from them about how similar work is conducted in their respective countries.  

 We enjoyed our time with this delegation and were proud to share with them the great work that is done at Legal Aid.

State and local government employment has been battered by the recession. Thousands of teacher, firefighter, police and other jobs have been eliminated as a consequence of the rapid decline in tax revenues. The Center for Budget and Policies Priorities calculates that 231,000 government positions have been eliminated since 2008. In an effort to offer assistance to the states to staunch the job loss, the jobs bill would have extended the enhanced Medicaid match that was contained in the original stimulus bill. Over the next year, these benefits would provide $15 billion in assistance.

The District just completed its budget for fiscal year 2011. As part of its revenue projections, the District assumed that the enhanced Medicaid match would be renewed. (About two-thirds of the states have also assumed that Congress would renew the program). The loss of these funds will open up a $54 million hole in the District’s budget. Unfortunately, when the District has been forced to fill gaps like these in the past, social services have been the first to be cut.

This is a double hit for people living in poverty in the District. Unemployment is extraordinarily high in low-income neighborhoods, long term unemployment is especially acute, federal benefits have been cut and the District will have fewer resources to provide a safety net. One can only imagine if those who opposed this legislation have Thomas Hobbes’ state of nature in mind for those at the bottom of our economic scale: "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short."