Everything you need to know about D.C.'s Advisory Neighborhood Commissions

D.C.’s Advisory Neighborhood Commissions are loved, hated, misunderstood, and widely unknown – all at once. This hyperlocal layer of democratic representation has been around D.C. for 50 years, serving as the city’s eyes-on-the-street and, occasionally, a launching pad for higher office. (Both Mayor Muriel Bowser and D.C. Council Chairman Phil Mendelson started off as ANC commissioners.) But what do ANCs actually do? And should you run for one? (Spoiler: Yes, do it!). Read on for those answers, and much more.

What exactly are Advisory Neighborhood Commissions?

ANCs are neighborhood associations of sorts, but with some actual authority. 

Advisory Neighborhood Commissioners are unpaid, non-partisan elected officials who are charged with representing the 2,000 or so residents who live in what are known as single-member districts. They serve as something of a bridge between normal people (and their everyday concerns and complaints) and the D.C. government at large.

There are 345 elected Advisory Neighborhood Commissioners across D.C. who are grouped into 46 commissions that largely align with the city’s eight wards. For example, Ward 1 has five commissions – 1A through 1E – of varying sizes, from the 10 commissioners in 1A to the seven in 1E. Each of those commissions meets monthly, acting as something of a hyperlocal legislative body. 

Where did ANCs come from?

They’ve been around since D.C. gained home rule – an elected mayor and council – in 1973, but ANCs were initially something of a political experiment. 

At the time that Congress was debating what D.C.’s elected government would look like, there was concern among some elected officials that residents of many U.S. cities were growing more and more distant from and disenchanted with their elected representatives. One solution pitched by local left-wing scholar Milton Kotler was a new layer of representation between residents and what would eventually become the D.C. Council. The idea caught the attention of Rep. Don Fraser (D-Minnesota), who wrote it into D.C.’s Home Rule Charter. He saw ANCs as the “spokesman and advocates [neighborhoods] often lack today.”

D.C.’s 50-year-old experiment with hyperlocal representation is as novel today as it was then – there’s no real structure or system that can be compared to ANCs pretty much anywhere in the U.S.

So what do ANCs actually do?

At a very basic level, your Advisory Neighborhood Commissioner is the neighborhood’s eyes and ears, and the mechanism to tip people higher up in the government if something isn’t working. That relationship also flows in the other direction: D.C. agencies often have to come before ANCs to, say, present plans on a new traffic pattern for a specific street, allowing for residents to be notified and share their input in one place. 

This also gets to the more formalized role that ANCs play in D.C.’s democratic system. The commissions are empowered to weigh in on a variety of decisions that the city wants to make – everything from zoning changes and development projects to liquor license approvals. That means that if a new restaurant is going to open in your neighborhood, your ANC will be given a formal role during the hearing held by the liquor board on whether it should get a license to sell alcohol – and whether any strings should be attached. (This is why those hopeful bar owners will often come to ANCs first and hash out an agreement in exchange for their support when it comes time to go to the liquor board.) The same goes for zoning issues; if the city wants to rezone a large parcel of land for a higher-density residential project, your ANC will be given the formal opportunity to speak on the issue when it comes before the Zoning Commission. 

When it comes to zoning, ANCs are also critical in another way: They’re often the mechanism by which developers negotiate community benefits as part of broader development projects. If a developer wants to rezone a large parcel of land, for example, they’ll work with the impacted ANC on a package of community benefits (such as affordable housing or a new playground) in exchange for the commission’s support during the approval process. (This recently happened with the old Fletcher-Johnson school site in Ward 7, where a Community Benefits Agreement included promises of local hiring for construction jobs, affordable space for retail and workforce development, and $350,000 in charitable giving to local organizations.)

Now, none of this means that ANCs have veto power – they don’t. (Hence the “Advisory” in their names.) But in many cases, their opinions are supposed to be given “great weight” by city boards and agencies. 

What’s ‘great weight’?

It mostly sounds like what it is: When ANCs weigh in on something the city wants to do, those recommendations or opinions should be given more consideration than that of a single resident, group of neighbors, or civic association. 

This power of the great weight has its limits, though. It has to come from a full commission (individual commissioners aren’t granted great weight), it has to touch on a formal action that an agency or board has notified the commission about (like a zoning change or liquor license application), and it isn’t binding on what the agency or board ultimately does. Still, those same boards and agencies are required to respond in writing to any concerns raised by the ANC. 

This is how D.C. Attorney General Brian Schwalb, quoting from various court decisions, spells it out: 

“Giving great weight means that the government entity making the decision must ‘articulate its decision in writing.’ It must acknowledge the ANC as the source of the recommendations and explicitly reference each of the ANC’s issues and concerns. Although the agency is not ‘obliged to follow the ANC’s recommendations or adopt its views,’ its written decision must explain ‘with particularity and precision the reasons why the Commission does or does not offer persuasive advice under the circumstances,’ accompanying that explanation with “specific findings and conclusions with respect to each issue and concern” the ANC has raised.”

(If you’re more the visual type, there’s a video explaining what great weight is.) 

Does an ANC throwing around that great weight ever make a difference?

It certainly can! A 2020 report from the D.C. Auditor found that in four of the 10 cases it reviewed, a proposed D.C. action was changed based on what the ANC recommended. The report said that the Alcoholic Beverage and Cannabis Administration, Zoning Commission, and Board of Zoning Adjustment most consistently followed the great weight protocol, while the D.C. Department of Transportation fared most poorly.

Do ANCs get involved in policymaking?

Yes and no. ANCs aren’t mini-legislatures; they can’t pass regulations or ordinances that apply only to specific single-member districts or commissions. But they can serve to opine on issues of the day – whether or not they are being actively debated by the D.C. Council – especially if commissions pass resolutions specifically taking a stance on something. 

For example, ANC 3F – which represents Van Ness, North Cleveland Park, and parts of Chevy Chase – recently passed a resolution encouraging D.C. to prohibit smoking in multi-family buildings. In December, ANC 8F – representing Navy Yard – argued that the council should fully fund the implementation of ranked-choice voting. Last October, ANC 4B – which incorporates Takoma, Manor Park, Brightwood Park, and Brightwood – approved a resolution calling for  full-time nurses at all D.C. schools. While these resolutions don’t have any formal weight, they can serve as a more organized opportunity for residents to get their voices heard.

Do ANCs get paid? Do they have budgets?

Your local Advisory Neighborhood Commissioner is doing the job out of the goodness of their heart. (Or some weird thirst for not a whole lot of power.) 

But commissions do have access to public money. In the last fiscal year (Oct. 2023-Sept. 2024), $916,000 was budgeted for distribution to the 46 commissions – though how much each commission gets can vary based on the number of people they represent. ANCs can use this money for administrative expenses, to hire staff, rent an office, pay for attorneys, and to issue grants for projects or initiatives in the areas they represent.

Now, there is some basic financial oversight. ANCs have to submit a proposed budget and regular financial reports. If they don’t, their money can be clawed back. Last year, for example, ANC 4C (which represents parts of Petworth) lost its entire allotment of more than $18,500 for failing to follow the rules. And just last month the D.C. Auditor issued a report identifying questionable spending by some commissioners in ANC 8E.

Over the years plenty of ANCs have had individual payments disallowed for not abiding by the regulations and, in some isolated cases, individual commissioners have been caught embezzling the public funds they receive.

What challenges do ANCs face?

Despite being elected officials, ANCs are effectively volunteer neighborhood leaders. They are expected to be responsive to their constituents’ concerns, they are supposed to run at least monthly meetings, they have to follow established rules and guidelines (the ANC handbook outlining all of these is 54 pages long), and they have to run for reelection every two years. 

They do all of this without any formal pay, often with limited resources or centralized guidance (and sometimes on highly technical matters, such as zoning issues), and are often subjected to the political realities of Sayre’s law – the lower the stakes are in any given issue, the more petty things can get.  

“ANCs are volunteer, uncompensated positions that we do in addition to our day jobs,” Ward 2 ANC Commissioner Vincent Slatt told the Washington Blade last year. “There is an extremely high turnover rate due to the lack of support we receive from the executive agencies, and the perception of our neighbors that we provide constituent services that our councilmembers provide.”

Turnover can be a real problem. In the 2022 election cycle, for example, more than half of the ANC seats in D.C. had new commissioners elected to them.

Because of these challenges, ANC quality can vary dramatically across D.C. Some of them hire administrative staff and have websites that are constantly updated, while others can struggle to keep up with the daily demands of the unpaid job.

So, are ANCs any good, or should they be changed?

D.C.’s Advisory Neighborhood Commissions are a textbook example of how challenging it can be to effectively implement seemingly good ideas – in this case, hyperlocal representation. 

ANCs face very obvious structural challenges (they’re elected officials with very few of the resources or formal power), and how effectively they can do their jobs can come down to little more than the resourcefulness, hardheadedness, and patience of individual elected officials. In that sense, ANCs are a perfect microcosm of democracy as a whole: It’s a highly imperfect system, but the alternatives aren’t any less imperfect. 

“I like the concept of hyperlocal representation and there are some GREAT reps but in practice, it’s often small teams of busybodies with weird grudges who hate each other,” one commenter wrote on a Reddit thread about ANCs last year.

“Half of ANCs are the unsung heroes of local government – dedicated people doing thankless work for no tangible reward,” responded another commenter. “The other half are the worst kind of petty tyrants.”

Late last year, Washington Post columnist Colbert King said that on balance, ANCs are good for the city. They have “come to represent D.C. government at the grass roots. They are where real problems, quirky policies, clumsy programs and the will of the people converge – and often collide,” he wrote.

That’s not to say that there haven’t been proposals to structurally reform the entire ANC system. Some of those are small: better define what great weight actually means, maybe actually pay commissioners for their service, or decrease the number of commissions citywide. And there have been internal efforts to give commissions more centralized guidance and support; the small Office of Advisory Neighborhood Commissions has been working to change this. 

And then there are much more sweeping ideas for change: either vastly increase resources available to ANCs to allow them to serve as something of a lower chamber of the D.C. Council, or scrap the whole concept altogether. Some people may cheer that last idea, but it’s always worth considering this: Busybodies with plenty of time and resources to make a stink will always exist – at least with ANCs, you can vote them out if you really don’t think they’re representing your interests. Or, you can just run yourself.

OK, fine. How can I run for ANC?

That’s the spirit! All it takes to run for ANC is to have lived in the single-member district you want to represent for 60 days and to collect 25 valid signatures from residents in that district to get you on the ballot. The positions are non-partisan, so there’s no primary election.