Another Race Essentialism Grift Gift from the DNC Patronage PMC Toadies
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DC Water may have “delivered equity” by filling a less diverse area with sewage.
After complaining about a water industry that was terrible because it “had too many white men at the top”, DC Water CEO David Gadis bragged that, “My executive team, you know, looks exactly like the community… people of color.”
7 out of 9 members of the DC Water leadership team are black. 5 are women.
This hasn’t done anything to get the sewage back in the pipe. Or decontaminate the Potomac.
The DC Water 2023 report was titled ‘Water Equity for All’ and had Gadis bragging that “in recent years, DC Water has established itself as the national gold standard when it comes to delivering water equity.”
DC Water is now at the epicenter of the massive Potomac sewage spill in which hundreds of millions of gallons of wastewater poured into the river in one of the worst sewage spills in American history. But at least the D.C. Water’s executive team “looks exactly like the community” whose lives they’re wrecking.
Or do they?
CEO Gadis had pitched his focus on contracting with “minority and women-owned businesses”. The report promised that “infrastructure decisions” would be made “equitably” so that rather than just analyzing “the risks of infrastructure failures”, the Authority would be looking at them within the context of social and environmental vulnerabilities” and would “protect the needs of the most vulnerable communities from impacts such as flooding and sewage overflows.”
Did DC Water let the Potomac disaster happen because it prioritized sewage management around equity and the ‘Interceptor’ that dumped massive amounts of sewage may have been seen as a risk, but not a sufficient risk to a sufficiently diverse “vulnerable community”?
The areas affected by the sewage spill are primarily in Montgomery County which are less ‘diverse’ than D.C. itself with only a 18% black population and nearly half white population.
Did DC Water prioritize infrastructure risks to more properly ‘diverse’ areas leading to this disaster? Even with the disaster underway, DC Water has been accused of stonewalling and refusing to cooperate with other agencies, including the Potomac riverkeeper, trying to figure out the magnitude of the disaster. That is highly suspicious behavior for an innocent organization.
As federal investigators look for answers, they may want to consider starting with that question.
DC Water described its mission not as delivering water, but as “delivering equity”. Now DC Water may have “delivered equity” by filling a less diverse area with sewage.
But it’s not as if the DC Water leadership doesn’t have some experience with that sort of thing.
David Gadis, the first black CEO of a “major water utility”, had last been in the news during his tenure with Veolia Water. During that time, Veolia was accused of helping cover up the water disaster in Flint, Michigan in that city’s water crisis.
Veolia later paid out $78 million to tens of thousands of Flint residents.
“We are honored to support your community with our technical expertise so that together we can ensure water quality for the people of the city of Flint,” Gadis had promised Flint residents.
Gadis had assured Flint residents that the water was safe even as emails mentioned the presence of lead. Why, after that disaster, did D.C. Water choose him out of 100 candidates?
One might think that the priority would be picking a CEO who wasn’t at the center of the most notorious tainted urban water crisis (including one involving minorities) in the whole country.
But as the DC Water press release mentioned, Gadis “was the first African American CEO to lead a major utility in Indianapolis.” And really, who cares about anything else?
Perhaps taking a man who had a basketball scholarship to Southern Methodist and had been “entirely focused on the prospect of a basketball career” before losing the NCAA National Tournament and then being lucky “that the abilities he developed on the basketball court—such as leadership, responsibility, and preparation—also applied well to the… water industry” was not a great plan. Even if Gadis had the supreme virtue of looking “exactly like the community.”
DC Water, like many cities, had badly aged infrastructure. Instead of focusing on that, Gadis bragged about his commitment to meaningless buzzwords like “sustainability” and “equity”.
The ‘Authority’ would have done better to focus on functionality and safety instead.
While DC Water focused on its “first-ever appearances at the Capital Pride Block Party”, the “Women of Water” (WOW) program and celebrating “the many cultures, languages, and ethnicities represented at the Authority”, a disaster was approaching that could not be met with DEI, but with real-world hard work before the Potomac river was full of sewage.
Rather than discuss the magnitude of its actual tasks, DC Water’s reports redefined everything as equity. When DC Water described its water hookups, it rebranded this system as “one of the most direct ways DC Water delivers equity to customers is through the service lines that connect the water mains in the street to their homes and businesses.” This cultlike Marxist language fundamentally shifted away from its actual mission to a symbolic ideological one.
And ideology, as the Soviet Union could have told the DEIrs, is no substitute for results.
DC Water may have had “82% BIPOC representation”, but what it didn’t have was a plan to safely move around water and sewage through a badly aging system that needed thorough overhauls and close monitoring. And sadly enough it’s not at all unique in that regard.
Many government and private organizations have developed a leadership class that neglects its actual responsibilities and spends all of its time babbling about its commitments to environmental sustainability and equity to the exclusion of doing anything that might be useful.
Political virtue signaling is often a convenient cover for incompetence in failing organizations.
This politicization of everything is a systemic threat to the economy and to public safety and lives. Americans deserve organizations that prioritize their jobs, not their own politics.
Areas whose organizations drown in political sewage will eventually drown in real sewage.
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