Councilmember Nadeau made the following remarks at the start of the public oversight hearing for the Department of Public Works in the Committee on Public Works & Operations, which she chairs.
The Department of Public Work’s mission is to provide critical municipal services that are both ecologically sound and cost effective, including solid waste management, parking enforcement, fleet management, and snow removal.
DPW is one of the District’s most public-facing agencies, and one of the most important agencies in this committee. When DPW does its job well, there are fewer rats, fewer scofflaw vehicles on the street – cleaner, safer, and more vibrant neighborhoods.
DPW’s work is seen and evaluated every single day – because of this, the Committee has significant help from concerned residents, advocates, and stakeholders in our oversight of the agency. We’re often told very quickly when things go wrong, but hearing from the public on days like today is so important because it gives us an opportunity to dig into agency functions in more detail.
I also want to spend time digging into where things are going right, and where processes are improving. While performance and budget oversight hearings are the most public way we do oversight, my team is doing oversight work for the agency year-round, and I want to highlight that the entire DPW leadership team has been very responsive to me and my team. I make no excuses for where things have gone wrong, but I do appreciate this willingness to work with and be open with us.
I’m proud to say that the end of the last two-year Council period saw this committee move two major pieces of legislation related to DPW:
The CLEAN Collections Amendment Act of 2024 requires minimum standards for solid waste disposal capacity at multi-family properties, and commissions DPW to study waste management zones to improve and simplify commercial collections.
The Fraudulent Vehicle Tag and Parking Enforcement Modernization Amendment Act of 2024 is a top-to-bottom reorganization of D.C. statute related to parking enforcement that also brings the District’s parking enforcement law into the 21st Century. DPW is empowered to more swiftly impound vehicles with missing, obscured, or fraudulent plates, and a new vehicle point system is created as a more equitable new standard for determining whether vehicles are boot- or tow-eligible.
These two laws won’t change things overnight, as they still have to be funded and rolled out but I believe they set the agency up for continued success and improvement, and I am looking forward to working on their implementation with the agency.
This is also an exciting time for new legislation.
Last month, I was joined by 10 of my colleagues to introduce the Recycling Refund and Litter Reduction Amendment Act of 2025, which establishes a beverage container deposit program in the District with a 10-cent deposit on applicable beverages, with consumers refunded when they return those containers to be recycled. If the bill passes, D.C. would be the first state in over 20 years to implement a beverage container deposit bill. Plastic bottles alone account for 60 percent of the weight of all trash retrieved from the Anacostia River. Many of these containers end up going to landfill rather than getting recycled. A container deposit system like the one I’ve proposed is the only policy of appropriate scale to really tackle this problem. While the program would be overseen by the Department of Energy and Environment, it closely implicates DPW’s work.
Also on my radar during this year’s performance oversight are the various pilot programs run by DPW: curbside compost collections, the public restroom program, and the scofflaw vehicle enforcement pilot. All three have shown major success and generally had very high resident satisfaction, which means we should be thinking through how to wind down pilots and start to implement permanent agency programs and policies.
I look forward to hearing from both our public witnesses today on these and other issues related to DPW. I greatly value your input.
