For the second year in a row, Mayor Adrian M. Fenty has proved himself faster than the city’s premier alt-weekly local-politics columnist.

This morning, congressional/bureaucratic/judicial/media types gathered at Anacostia Park for the yearly Capital Challenge three-mile race, a fundraiser benefiting the D.C. Special Olympics. Fenty, a special guest participant, finished the race in approximately 18 minutes flat (official results haven’t been posted yet, and since Fenty was a VIP entrant, his time won’t be posted anyway). LL came in at about 21:50.

That’s a pretty good improvement for Fenty, who was in the 18:40s last year, good enough to beat the previous LL’s 20:14. (Fenty’s improvement, though, wasn’t as stark as the current LL’s, who ran a 26:38 last year.)

Other great accomplishment for Fenty: He beat LL’s boss this year. Last year, Mr. Fuego y Frio turned in an 18:35; this year, he was in the low 18:20s. Not good enough to beat Hizzoner this time around.

And Fenty can rest assured knowing his rep precedes him—overheard several times among skinny cross-country types gabbing shortly after the race: “I can’t believe you beat Fenty!”

PS: Apologies to Dave Namamura Nakamura for stealing your shtick here.

D.C. Foodies has a nice little scoop on Murky Coffee, which City Desk has been following like a lost dog. It appears many of Murky’s assets have been bought by a local businessman who plans to open a coffee shop near the Big Chair in Anacostia. A little digging unearths the Big Chair Coffee Business Plan, put together by sole owner Ayehubizu Yimenu, who appears to live in Greenbelt, Md. Left a message for him, but here’s the deal:

• The coffeeshop will open at 2122 Martin Luther King Jr. Ave. SE and plans to serve sandwiches, salads, and pastries. Customer base includes employees across the street at D.C. Lottery and the Taxicab Commission.
• It’ll be open Monday through Friday until 6 p.m., closed Saturday, and open 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. on Sunday, “delivering superior service to a community other coffee shops do not operate in.” Indeed Big Chair Coffee counts as its only competition a carryout deli half a block away.
• Beverage prices will range from $1.64 (12 oz coffee) to $3.92 (20 oz latte). Beans will come from California Coffee Roasters. Cold sandwiches made in-house will go for $5.49, salads run to $6.29.
• There will be indoor and outdoor seating.
• Employees will include two managers and four to eight more workers. Free samples and a marketing blitz are planned for the neighborhood.

Photo by jgoldmania

Ward 8 Councilmember Marion Barry has still more competition in his re-election bid.

Charles E. Wilson, a 32-year-old Anacostia resident, tells LL he’s going to be challenging Barry for the Democratic nomination to the Ward 8 council seat. He joins longtime also-ran Sandra “S.S.” Seegars and Yavocka Young, the head of the Main Street Anacostia nonprofit.

Wilson’s lived in the ward for two years, after moving from Ward 5. He’s the co-founder of the Historic Anacostia Block Association, which helps clean up the neighborhood. Wilson says his biggest success was taking advantage of a dormant city program that aims to help homeowners fix up historically significant homes.

“I’m proud of the success that we’ve had on a smaller level,” he says. “I believe that we can do it on a much larger level.”

Wilson, however, declines to speak ill of the incumbent. “I’m not gonna run based on me running against Marion Barry,” he says. “I have a tremendous amount of respect for the man, but the theme of the campaign is, We set the tone.”

Wilson, who holds a law degree and works as a consultant for an accounting firm, says his message has three prongs: “The [Greater Southeast Community] hospital, economic development, and creating jobs for residents—that’s gonna be pretty much my platform,” he says.

Sounds a lot like Young’s platform to LL’s ears. What are Wilson’s chances against Barry—who finally started raising money last week? Hard to say: Asked how much money he’s raised to date or to name any supporters, Wilson declined.

Councilmember Marion Barry might have some real competition in Ward 8. Yavocka Young, an Anacostia resident and longtime local business booster, tells LL she’s gearing up for a Democratic council run against the mayor-for-life. She expects to file her papers before the end of the week.

Asked about the incumbent, Young plays nice. “I think there are many people like me that feel that a change in leadership is necessary in order to move the ward to the next level. In life, you’re effective at certain things for certain times,” she says. “I’m looking at it more as…a baton pass.”

Her priorities? “Quality-of-life issues and economic development” is about as specific as it gets at this point.

Young, 39, wouldn’t name any of her supporters, but did describe her base as “basically young urban professionals,” plus “some longtime Anacostians who know my history in the ward.” Young, 39, has been a homeowner for 15 years and has held positions with the Anacostia Economic Development Corp., the East of the River newspaper, and, currently, the Main Street Anacostia nonprofit. (WCP reporter Amanda S. Miller wrote up her efforts to pretty up Historic Anacostia back in 2006.)

Thus far, the only other official entrant in the Ward 8 race is Congress Heights rabble-rouser and perennial also-ran Sandra “S.S.” Seegars, who couldn’t quite gain five percent against Barry four years ago.

Photo by Pilar Vergara

Yesterday, we posted some comments on our website from Ward 8 residents stating their positions on the soccer stadium proposed for Poplar Point. From what I’ve heard, local leaders seem to be lining up behind the stadium, while regular residents are a bit more skeptical. Back in September, local non-profit One DC released results from a survey about the stadium. Some three hundred Anacostia residents participated. NBC News 4 covered the story. At that time, 87 percent of those questioned opposed the stadium construction (no matter how it was funded). Here’s a brochure detailing Clark Realty’s proposed development of Poplar Point. Be sure to check out the Metro Soccer District (p. 20), and then see what some folks are saying about it.

For the few who may have missed it (I mean who wasn’t watching the Rose Parade on New Year’s Day?), HGTV announced the results of its contest “Save the World: Start at Home,” naming our very own Anacostia as one of four winners out of 10 finalists for a series of spruce-up projects. (The contest actually has five winners, but New Orleans was a lock. Whatever.) Several weeks of online voting were required to nudge the other four into the money. D.C. went up against Atlanta, Baltimore, Boston, Denver, Long Island, Portland, San Fran, and the Twin Cities. Ballmer also won. Go Ballmer!

The deal is that the network Home Depot built will now hand over grants to local branches of Rebuilding Together, a national org of mostly volunteers that helps low-income folks fix up their houses. In D.C., the Anacostia project includes three elements, one at Anacostia park, the second at Bethel Christian Fellowship Child Development Center, and a third at individual homes on S Street SE.

Harold and Mary Brown, owners of one of those homes, are featured on the HGTV Web site. A camera crew arrived several weeks ago to film Mr. Brown, who has been taking sponge baths for years and living on the first floor because he can’t climb the stairs to the bathroom and the rest of his house. Mary Brown, when I called her a few days after the announcement, was delighted to hear people were actually coming over to her house to do some work. Since this has been such a slick and interactive campaign involving a bunch of money and, presumably future TV shows and Home Depot ads, I didn’t expect to be the one to tell Mrs. Brown that she and Mr. Brown were getting a fancy new chairlift. But, hey, they’re coming and they’re doing a nice thing for the Browns and for Anacostia.

If Janice T. Stango, executive director of Rebuilding Together of Washington, D.C., didn’t call the Browns right away, she should be forgiven. Stango was busy in the leadup to the announcement getting everyone she knew and plenty of people she didn’t to hop on HGTV.com and pick D.C. She put fliers on bulletin boards, handed them out in dog parks, and roped in students who needed to fulfill community service requirements. Around 11 p.m. two nights before Thanksgiving, she was in a Shoppers Food Warehouse in Fairfax and noticed a couple of ladies buying what looked like the staples for a food bank holiday. “I ran out to the car and got some fliers and they distributed them for me.”

“This did not just happen,” she said about winning the prize. And it hasn’t happened yet. Rebuilding Together is now looking for volunteers to do the work, especially during the last weekend in April (the 26th and 27th). Let’s face it: Saving the world and being on HGTV is a helluva lot better than watching it.

This afternoon, Chief Financial Officer Natwar M. Gandhi tucked his tail between his legs—as he has been doing often the past six weeks—and made his way down to the Anacostia Community Museum to address the members of the Anacostia Coordinating Council about the $40 million tax scandal.

The speech was notable because Gandhi’s been essentially tight-lipped about the scandal to the press since the story broke and because it represents part of his effort to save his job in the wake of the greatest municipal embezzlement scandal in the city’s history. Gandhi asked to address this group, and he showed up today with D.C. Treasurer Lasana Mack and spokesperson Karyn-Siobhan Robinson in front of a crowd several dozen strong.

Robinson says that Gandhi’s addressed “a number of community and business groups” since the scandal. This has been the first where press has been invited (and not by Gandhi).

“More than anything,” he began, “what I have to say is how deeply sorry I am for what happened in the tax department.”

From there began what was essentially a hour-long “my bad.” Some highlights:

• “We basically lost the confidence and the trust of the citizens.”
• “What was [achieved] over the past 10 years was lost in that day, in one day….I’m deeply disgusted about that.”
• “This has been a profound management failure.” (That’s an oldie, but a goodie.)
• “Now all of us are branded as inefficient, incompetent, and worst of all, cheats.”
• “The bottom line is that this scandalous, fraudulent thing has heppened, and it’s tearing me apart.”
• “We have been burned badly.”
• “The most honest answer is, we made a major mistake. We goofed.”

As far as his own job goes, Gandhi stuck to the line he gave the day the scandal broke: I’m here as long as you want me, and I want fix this mess. “As long as I have the confidence of the mayor and the council collectively, I stay in this job, he said. “I’m not going to fight for this job.”

Later Gandhi said, “It would be far easier to go home….It happened on my watch—I must fix it.” At another point, he said quitting “would be a dereliction of my responsibility to the city.”

Gandhi several times reminded the crowd of the sorry state of the District’s financial operations when he arrived a decade ago. He reminded folks that he’d fired 15 tax-office employees already and said it was “quite likely” that more firings were to come. Gandhi also talked up an internal audit committee he’d recently named to look at city fiscal operations and controls, whose members include Sheldon Cohen of investment firm Farr, Miller & Washington, retired Arthur Young & Co. auditor Donald H. Chapin, and Federal City Council CEO John Hill.

More than once Gandhi was asked exactly how widespread the scandal was, to which he replied he didn’t know: Federal investigators have seized all of those paper tax records, and he couldn’t get at them. (In fact, he said, city auditors have had to ask permission to inspect those records to complete this year’s report.)

Ward 6 muckamuck Charles Burger gave him the hardest questioning of the day, essentially asking why the firings stopped at the Office of Tax and Revenue and didn’t ascend into the executive suite. Gandhi managed to dodge the question.

In any case, the Gandhi PR strategy seems to be working: The meeting turned into a lovefest of sorts for Gandhi, with virtually everyone who spoke up expressing support for the CFO.

Longtime activist Eugene Kinlow spoke up for Gandhi, and after the CFO left (in a 15-passenger District van), former Councilmember and ACC Chair Arrington Dixon assessed Gandhi’s performance as “good, very good.”

Ward 8 Councilmember Marion S. Barry Jr., as he is wont to do, walked in just as Gandhi walked out, and proceeded to praise the CFO: “He has been a tremendous asset to the financial health of our city,” he told what was left of the crowd.

Last night, a motley group of businessmen, government types, ministers, and local residents packed into the Birney Elementary gymnasium in Anacostia to witness four developers lay out what they’ve envisioned for Poplar Point—the 130-acre tract on the Anacostia River east of South Capitol Street recently handed over to the District by the federal government.

Each group had 15 minutes to present their plan. They were allowed to have up to two persons do the presentation, and they weren’t allowed to use notes.

The whole exercise was a bit ridiculous, considering that whatever ends up getting built will go through so many approval and review processes, not to mention economic feasibility reviews, that it will likely look little like what hit the PowerPoint screen last night. More than anything, the meeting was a derby between the four developers to see who could ooh-and-aah the crowd the most. What mattered most in that regard: a soccer stadium, which D.C. United owner Victor MacFarlane has apparently successfully sold to Ward 8. Councilmember Marion Barry told the crowd, “We like all four proposals, but we like the one that’ll have a stadium first.”

Keeping that in mind, here’s a rundown:

Archstone-Smith/Madison Marquette: The Archstone Madison posse probably had the best presenter of the night: Calvin Gladney of local outfit Mosaic Urban Partners, who laid out a day at Poplar Point in a cool, well-rehearsed voice. Gladney & Co. promised a “major retail center,” perhaps along the lines of Gallery Place, “where as soon as it’s built people will want to come there.” Other sweeteners: These guys propose to set aside 20 percent of “small shop space” for local businesses and include a concert hall. “Maybe on some occasions Jay-Z would be performing there, or maybe on other occasions, it will be the Ballou High School marching band,” Gladney said. There was also talk of a “job incubator.” The big crowd pleaser, though, was the fact that Archstone included a soccer stadium in the plans. 2.4 million sq. ft. residential, 1.95 million office, 994,000 retail. Ooh-and-Ahh Grade: B+

Clark Realty Capital: These guys, part of the local Clark construction monolith, spent a little bit of time touting their local bona fides before moving on to what was undoubtedly the most ambitious proposal of the evening. The killer feature? The “Deck,” bitches, the “Deck”! That would be a three-block-wide lid over Interstate 295, which would do way more than any of the other proposals to connect Historic Anacostia to Poplar Point and the waterfront. Besides the Deck, there’s four other parts: The residential “Village at Poplar Point,” which would include a grocery store “along the lines of a Whole Foods or Harris Teeter”; the “Metro Soccer District,” which includes, yes, a soccer stadium; the “Preserve,” billed as “A Waterfront Version of New York’s Central Park”; and the “International Environment Center,” a business area billed as a “Silicon Valley for the Environmental Community.” That might include a “National Hall of the Environment,” a museum which would be on the tip of Poplar Point, facing the Capitol. Other things thrown in there: a 1,200-student K-12 KIPP charter school (which got the biggest cheer of the night from the crowd), a theater, and an open-air market. 3.8 million sq. ft. residential, 1.53 million office, 405,000 retail. Ooh-and-Ahh Grade: A

Forest City Washington: These guys blew it hard. FCW chief Deborah Ratner Salzburg got up at the beginning and explained they didn’t become aware of the no-notes, only-two-presenters rule until yesterday afternoon. Hence, Salzburg and a fellow presenter spent way too much time pumping up their own cred in the business community—spending, for instance, a good three minutes running down all the trusted inner-city types they’ve worked with: Al Sharpton, former Denver Mayor Wellington Webb, former Ohio Congressman Louis Stokes (who was in attendance). They only got to their actual plans with about three minutes left in the presentation. About all that the crowd could take away: The plan involves three “fingers” surrounded by parkland. A few pluses for Forest City, though: They had probably the best-looking PowerPoint show (too bad they had to flip through the actual site plans super-quick) and they seemed to be the only ones who made a point of saying their proposal actually reflected what was realistic (hence, no soccer stadium)—even though theirs proposed the largest square footage of development. 4.3 million sq. ft. residential, 1.26 million office, 415,600 retail. Ooh-and-Ahh Grade: C-

General Growth/Mid-City Urban: These folks proposed the smallest amount of square footage (about 3.5 million less than Forest City) but their big thing is education, promising the “largest learning sportsplex” in the D.C. area—bigger than the Prince George’s Sports and Learning Complex near FedExField and bigger than the South Germantown Recreational Park in Montgomery County. There’s also a UDC satellite campus on the premises. And these guys, too, were big on green. “Green technology,” to be specific: “We will bring the Googles. We will bring the Microsofts. We will bring the Sun Microsystems,” said a presenter. As far as cool shit, the big deal was the aerial tram crossing the river. (At one point the presenter mentioned a tram “all the way to Roosevelt Island,” but good luck getting that past the National Capital Planning Commission and the Commission of Fine Arts.) They did have—by a long shot—the most amateur-looking PowerPoint show. But when it comes to the logo wars, these guys were the undisputed champs. Here’s some of the logos that appeared on a single PowerPoint slide: AMC theaters, Best Buy, Bed Bath and Beyond, Dave & Buster’s, the Sharper Image, Chili’s, Cheesecake Factory, Costco, Starbucks, Victoria’s Secret, the Body Shop, Barnes & Noble, Macy’s, TGI Friday’s, Lowe’s, Olive Garden, and Discount Shoe Warehouse. Damn, don’t you feel like shoppin’ already? 2.65 million sq. ft. residential, 250,000 office, 467,000 retail. Ooh-and-Ahh Grade: B

Ward 8 has long been notorious for its lack of food options, whether it’s the paucity of sit-down restaurants or the skimpy produce aisles of its bodegas. Just as the ward is about to gain a Giant supermarket, the Capital Area Food Bank has decided to pull out of the farmer’s market business. In a few weeks, it will cease operating its stands at Peace Park, located at 14th Street between U and V Streets SE.

“The market has frankly never broken even,” explains Jody Tick, director of the bank’s Harvest for Health program. They’ve had to pay farmers to show up for its Wednesday-only market, she says. Tick adds that the market nets only about 120 customers per week and these customers spend on average $4 per transaction.

While the market will soon be gone, the food bank plans to ramp up its program to educate children on nutrition. Hence the prospect that Ward 8 youth will become experts on spinach and carrots yet have trouble finding them in their own neighborhood.

Yavocka D. Young, a Ward 8 activist, isn’t upset by the news, arguing that the market wasn’t ambitious enough. “We would like to see something more along the lines of Eastern Market,” she says. “It doesn’t have to be all food.”

Regardless of what improvements are made around it, a charred façade of three old storefronts at the corner of Martin Luther King, Jr. Blvd. and Good Hope Road in Southeast has refused to improve. It’s been vacant, overgrown with weeds, and even damaged by fire, and business advocates have championed its demolition for years. But since the structure is more than 100 years old, historic preservationists have stood in the way of that.

The Anacostia Economic Development Corporation has been trying to take over the aging structure for some time now, and now they have cause for hope. According to the Washington Business Journal, District officials have approved the demolition of the rear of the building. AEDC will be able to take over the building after that.

As executive director of Main Street Anacostia, Yavocka Young is painfully aware of how buildings like this one negate the corridor’s viability and add to the perception of blight in the neighborhood (“Strip Tease,” Nov. 16) She’s not sure exactly how long it will take to redevelop the site, or what businesses will be able to move in or when, but she’s hopeful it’s a step in the right direction.

“I think it’s good that development can move forward,” she says.

Strange, unconfirmed claim just made at today’s D.C. Council hearing about the Unifest disaster:

Advisory Neighborhood Commissioner Anthony Muhammad claimed to Councilmember Phil Mendelson & Co. that the incident—in which 30-year-old Tonya Bell drove into the crowds at the yearly Anacostia festival, injuring dozens—recently became deadly: Muhammad said that one of the victims lapsed into a coma and later died. He did not give a name of any victim, nor would he reveal his source of the information. The information seemed to be a surprise to the councilmembers, as well.

The list of Most Endangered Places in D.C. announced yesterday by the D.C. Preservation League includes some interesting choices. You’ve got your graffitied frescoes in the old Franklin School at 13th and K Streets NW (now a homeless shelter). You’ve got your Takoma Theater in Takoma Park, built in 1923, which should be preserved because, among other reasons, it’s been used “by independent filmmakers for film previews, including Chris Rock.” Its current owner has been trying to make the case to level it.

Those seem worthy enough. The one I don’t get is the 1900 block of Martin Luther King Avenue SE, buildings only a crackhead could love. The fight to save this major eyesore at the intersection of MLK and Good Hope Road has been going on since at least 1997. And guess what? Ten years later, they’re still vacant, taped-off, and burned out. A fire gutted the buildings more than two years ago, so tell me again why they’re so historically significant?

It seems they are, according to the preservation league, “contributing buildings owned and managed by the DC Housing and Community Development (DCHCD) agency are contributing structures in the Anacostia Historic District, listed in the DC Inventory of Historic Places and the National Register for Historic Places.”

Who gives a fuck? Tear them down and build something the residents of Anacostia actually need and can feel good about. There are fights worth having to preserve historic D.C. This isn’t one of them.

Thousands who rolled out of bed early Saturday for Hands On DC, the annual cleanup effort to spruce up D.C. schools, found more than enough to do. But my sense is the organizers were hoping to lure volunteers to return next year by keeping them out of the places that need the most work: boys’ bathrooms. I checked them out (when a girl’s got to go….) at both Jefferson Junior High in Southwest and Anacostia Senior High in Southeast. Talk about depressing. In Anacostia, all but one of the faucets weren’t working and two of the toilets were covered in duct-taped garbage bags. In both, janitors sloppily stored cleaning supplies in one of the stalls and those supplies didn’t do a whole lot to mitigate the smell.

But, hey, call me a hypocrite, but I’d rather paint over graffiti in a stairwell than deal with it. The truth is, the teams at Anacostia, which was built in 1935 and looks like it, did seem to make a small difference. They replaced ratty carpet in the library, weeded out an overgrown courtyard and planted professional-looking flower beds around the entrance. They slapped bright red paint on the front doors and an industrial beige (the can said “Swiss Chocolate,” but I have my doubts) in the stairwells. Unfortunately there wasn’t much they could do with the dark, dank basement cafeteria. Although I didn’t see this there, it did make me appreciate the small-town public school I went to, K-12 in one building, graduating class of 90 kids.

Any volunteers out there? Which school inside DCPS needs the most love? Tell us what you think.

Attention city bureaucrats: Anthony Muhammad, a member of the Anacostia advisory neighborhood commission, demands a little respect for his neighborhood. And if he doesn’t get it, your job fair could be in trouble.

The city’s Office of Unified Communications, which houses the citywide call center, 911, and 311 responders, sits on Martin Luther King Avenue SE, Ward 8’s main drag. On March 6, the agency planned to showcase employment opportunities at the facility.

Muhammad heard about the job fair only after another resident spotted the announcement on a Virginia Internet discussion group. It wasn’t on any of the groups serving east-of-the-river neighborhoods. “They sent it to Virginia, and they sent it to Ward 4,” he says.

So he contacted the agency’s director, and now the job fair has been postponed until March 17.

Debbie Knox, spokesperson for the Office of Unified Communications, says no slight was intended. “We didn’t exclude anyone in the advertising,” Knox says. “We’re basically trying to select the best person for the job.” The job fair, she points out, was advertised in several newspapers, and certain people “took it upon themselves” to distribute an announcement on their neighborhood Internet groups.

Knox says her agency was happy to honor Muhammad’s request for a delay. “It was a collaborative effort to ensure that we work together with the local ANC,” she says. Plus, she says, job fairs work better on Saturdays instead of in the middle of the week.

But Muhammad’s not buying it—he’s started advertising the upcoming job fair himself. “They said that they were going to do it,” he says. “But we believe them like we believed them the last time.”

What’s the District’s chief exec really up to today?

WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 14, 2007

Event: welcome remarks, celebration of the 189th birthday of Frederick Douglass and grand reopening of newly restored Douglass Home

Time: 10 a.m.

Location: Frederick Douglass National Historic Site, 1411 W St. SE

The Lowdown: If Fenty were in charge, no way that renovation would have taken three years.