This Washington Post article discusses the year-long wait and frustrations of a couple who sought a license to lease a condo in Washington, DC.
To Marina and Mark Marich, the task seemed simple, just one item on their long to-do list: get a license from the District to rent out their Capitol Hill condo. They thought it would take a month.
Instead, it took a year.
In February, March and April, their phone messages to schedule an inspection went unanswered. In June, the inspector was a no-show, after he called the wrong number. In July, when Mark called to complain that the inspector had failed to show for a second time, a city worker answering the phone hung up, telling him, "Call the mayor."
And in December, after Marina's call was bounced to four people, she turned to her neighbors.
"I am in desperate need of help," Marina wrote in an e-mail to her Shepherd Park neighborhood Yahoo group that included a timeline with the names, phone numbers and dates of her interactions with D.C.'s Department of Consumer and Regulatory Affairs. "It is beyond frustrating."
For Linda Argo, who runs the department, it was worse than that.
"It's inexcusable. How can you defend it?" said Argo, pretending to pull out her short blond hair. Especially when Argo has worked for the past three years, with some success, to eliminate such headaches for residents and to shake the sprawling agency's reputation for unresponsive bureaucrats and long lines.
The complete article discusses these frustrations and the work by DC politicians and bureaucrats to correct the problems, but nowhere does the author ask the simple question, "Why are DC residents required to obtain a license to lease their property to begin with?"
Here is all the inspector who, after more than a year of waiting, found:
The apartment failed inspection; it needed upgrades to the kitchen and bathroom outlets, and a new smoke detector.
And I'd be willing to bet a week's salary that there was actually nothing wrong with either the outlets or the smoke detector. As two cops have told me, they can pull over any car and find something that violates some law or code. So much for the rule of law.
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