John L. Hoban Read More “Exit Poll: Voters of Precinct 132, 3030 G Street SE” »

Not sure if this is old news but Congress Heights on the Rise just linked it. So we follow. The blog called The Barry Stops Here! appears to be–at this point–a warehouse of old Barry articles on his past drug abuse and a list of “Barryisms.” The blog also includes a “Why Now?” post:

“In the best of circumstances the mere mention of his name will illicit chuckles generally followed by a “that’s Marion Barry for you”. The only thing shocking about the life and times of Marion Barry is the life and times of Marion Barry. With every new scandal…every lack in ethical judgement he trumps the scandal before and tests the true faith of his few (but die hard) believers and attest to the ineffectiveness of his detractors.”

How about a blog devoted to the other councilmember across the river? She’s interesting and new. And there’s plenty of stuff worth documenting–the slow development around the Minnesota Avenue metro, the amazing empty space that will soon be filled up with new housing at the far end of East Cap, the persistence of the Shrimp Boat.

Early this morning, At-Large Councilmember Kwame Brown and the D.C. Sports and Entertainment Commission invited folks down to the baseball stadium for a little tour and press conference.

Part of the deal was to let media folk and politicos ooh and aah at the stadium construction, which is coming along nicely, project manager Matt Haas said—sod will be laid by the first week of November, and seats are being installed at the rate of about 2,000 per week. But the main point of holding the presser was to address the project’s compliance with promises made regarding D.C.-resident labor back when the stadium deal was crafted.

Last month, City Paper’s Joe Eaton broke the story that D.C. residents aren’t doing anywhere near the amount of work that the stadium’s labor agreement promised. Instead of the 50 percent of journeyman hours the agreement laid out, Joe reported D.C. residents had worked only 23 percent.

Brown & Co. today tried to put the best face on things: When it comes to other aspects of the labor agreement, things are going pretty well. The project’s meeting a 50 percent minimum for contracts awarded to local, small, or disadvantaged businesses; it just barely missed a goal of having 51 percent of all new hires be D.C. residents; and District residents have worked 78 percent of all apprentice hours. Also, honchos pointed out, 245 of 270 new hires were D.C. residents (never mind the agreement specified 100 percent).

But there was little mention of how the project was complying with the journeyman-hours requirement—that detail certainly didn’t make the PowerPoint presentation. (Journeymen are the most skilled, best paid workers on the job, and they represent the majority of the hours worked on the site; it takes as much as five years as an apprentice, depending on the trade, to reach journeyman status.) When asked, project bigwigs said the figure was up to 28 or 29 percent.

The essential problem is that there aren’t enough skilled D.C. resident workers available to fill the jobs. If a subcontractor doesn’t have a D.C. resident to do a job, it can contact the city’s Department of Employment Services. If DOES has no workers, then the subcontractor can hire whoever.

The good news: Due to all the apprentice hires, there should be more available journeymen down the line, but not for years.

So why set an unattainable goal? A DOES staffer present this morning said that her agency—tasked with keeping tabs on the District’s labor force—had been present throughout the labor agreement’s negotiation. Shouldn’t they have pointed out that 50 percent employment is a pipe dream, at least in some trades?

Courtland Cox of the Sports and Entertainment Commission had a suggestion why the D.C. Council would do that: “If you don’t set high goals, you don’t accomplish anything.”

Over the years, H.R. Crawford has developed some serious sales skills. That’s no secret considering he’s been rightly credited with turning shitty sections of southeast into gold mines.

But sometimes Crawford isn’t so good with the sales pitch. Like here.

And, well, in yesterday’s Washington Post. That paper took Sunday to go into feature mode on the rather tenuous ties between the right-now-freaking-out Officer James Haskel, Haskel’s precious minibike, and Haskel’s 14-year-old victim DeOnté Rawlings. So what’s Crawford’s connection? Haskel lived in the real-estate mogul and Barry superfriend’s gated community known as the Walter E. Washington Estates.

The Post writes of Crawford’s tribute to D.C.’s first mayor under home rule: “Encouraging people to unite as one community, ignoring an economic divide, was what H.R. Crawford, a former D.C. Council member, had in mind when he developed the gated community.”

Crawford told the Post: “The whole point was to bring stability to the neighborhood by attracting police officers and schoolteachers.”

All of what Crawford says may be true. But c’mon, he built a gated community that has zero connection to the surrounding neighborhoods, the same neighborhoods where Rawlings lived. So what if schoolteachers and cops break bread and watch American Idol in Crawford’s compound. They lived inside a fortress.

If Crawford wanted to be a uniter, he wouldn’t have put up the gates.

The Washington Post does a follow-up story on the cop shooting that resulted in the death of a 14-year-old boy. As everyone knows by now, the circumstances of the shooting are sketchy. The Post lays it out in its first graph:

“The D.C. police officer who fatally shot a 14-year-old boy in Southeast Washington on Monday night was off duty, out of uniform and acting on his own to find a minibike that he believed was stolen from his home, authorities said yesterday.”

There are many questions that just sort of jump out you: why did the cop, and another off-duty cop–along for the ride–not report the stolen minibike? Why did they go out on their own without notifying authorities, without radioing the police district at least to let other cops in the area know they were cruising around?

If the cop, as the police are saying, engaged the kid in a running gun battle, why did his fellow off-duty cop not fire his weapon? And why after this so-called running gun battle, did the cop then end up back behind his own car calling for back up? What was the other cop doing? In this scenario, the cop would have had to shoot the boy then run back to his car, get behind his car and then call for backup on his cellphone. Why didn’t the other cop call for backup immediately has his friend was giving chase?

More important, why didn’t the cops immediately call for backup the minute the boy allegedly started shooting?

And perhaps just as sketchy is the fact that the police refuse to release the cop’s name. According to the Post, police spokesperson Traci Hughes said: “Considering the heated reaction of the community, we don’t want to put an officer in danger.”

This answer just doesn’t fly. The officers in question weren’t acting as cops that night. We should know their names and know their backgrounds. How many years did they have on the force? Where did they work?

Have they been involved in other shootings or been accused of excessive force in the past?

All the police are saying is that the officer is a member of the helicopter unit.

District residents have a right to know a lot more. Why? Because surely one day these same cops will end up back on the force, patrolling neighborhoods.

If everyone drives to a sold-out game at the new Nationals stadium, the result will be a mess.

That was the unstated message of the Aug. 2 “open house” held to brief D.C. residents on the Traffic Operations and Parking Plan (TOPP) for the stadium, which is scheduled to open for the 2008 baseball season. Representatives of Metro, D.C.’s transportation department, and consulting firm Grove/Slade Associates were on hand to explain the various TOPP maps and graphs. But none of them could say what will happen if most Nats fans drive, or if they ignore the complicated game-days scheme for traffic flow, street closings, color-coded parking sectors, and on-street parking restrictions.

Anyone who perused the maps, or walked the nearby streets, would have noticed that the site of the under-construction stadium is less accessible than RFK, the team’s current home. It’s served by one Metro line rather than two and can be reached by fewer major thoroughfares and bus routes.

At least there are some ideas about remedying the latter problem. The stadium’s opening might spur extensions of the N22 Union Station-Navy Yard shuttle (whose conversion to Circulator service is being considered) and the 7th Street Circulator line. Also possible, in theory, is a game-only express Circulator directly from Union Station to the stadium.

The N22 expansion makes sense, even if its roundabout route to the stadium, via 8th Street SE, might discourage baseball fans from riding. But the express line is dependent on the reopening of 1st Street SE alongside the Library of Congress’ Madison Building, which has been fortified since 9/11. That’s not gonna happen. And the extension of the 7th Street Circulator, which would also offer an indirect approach to Natsland, seems primarily designed to coerce a few more people onto a route that currently attracts almost no passengers. (At the TOPP event, even a Metro representative allowed that ridership on the 7th Street Circ is “light.”)

Possible supplemental transit strategies include a bicycle “valet” to encourage gamegoers to cycle to the stadium and a water taxi to the area. The latter seems a long shot, however, even if four companies have reportedly expressed interest in a 18-month pilot program. After all, a water taxi could only ferry people from other sites that have mediocre transit access and limited parking, like Georgetown and Old Town Alexandria.

The principal revelation of the TOPP event had nothing to do with transportation, however. The open house was held on the unoccupied top floor of 20 M Street SE, which turned out to be a new office building developed by the Lerner family, who also own the Nats. The 10-story building was appointed with baseball-related art, an outdoor video screen that showed stylized images of the game, and an electronic signboard that welcomed attendees in the name of the Lerners. Inside, each person who entered the session was offered a soft-sided mini-cooler branded with the Nats’ logo.

From the 10th floor, there was an unencumbered vista of the stadium but also a view of the new official plan for Washington: Block after block of bland office cubes, with no public structures, few shops or restaurants, and little public space. And those blocks that haven’t been ceded to private developers will be the province of the security-crazed feds. So enjoy that soft-sided mini-cooler, Mr. and Ms. D.C. It’s all you’re getting.

Last year, Metro proposed radical surgery on D.C.’s longest, most-used bus route, the 30 line, which runs from the Montgomery County line in Northwest to the Prince George’s County border in Southeast. The procedure the agency recommended was one of its current favorites: cutting the route in half. The buses now designated 30, 32, 34, 35, or 36 would terminate at 10th and Pennsylvania NW, and riders who wanted to go further in either direction would have been forced to transfer to a renumbered service covering the other half of the journey.

Metro recently performed a similar bisection on the 90 line, which travels from various points in Southeast to Adams Morgan and McLean Gardens. But after a June 27 ridership survey, bus planners backed away from the proposal to sunder the 30, which is 15 miles long and carries almost 20,000 riders every weekday. “Reaction to that plan was negative,” James Hamre, Metro’s planning manager for bus and corridor projects, told a group of about 30 bus users who attended a “listening session” Tuesday night at St. Columba’s Episcopal Church in Tenleytown.

Divided into four subgroups, the participants were asked to discuss problems with the notoriously unreliable 30s, and suggest fixes. When the conversations were summarized for the entire assembly, it turned out that at least some of the riders had a familiar idea: cutting the line in half.

Read More “A Split Decision on Metro’s 30 Line” »

Late on Saturday night, I searched YouTube for clips of Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood. This famous PBS series molded me as much as television could. With no sarcasm and no hidden meanings, it tried to explain life: How trumpets are made, or how it feels to be angry, or what it means to have a friend. As I watched again, I wondered how Fred Rogers found such candor. He spoke to all five-year-olds as Rilke spoke to all 20-year-olds. He needed no punch line. The world was serious. One’s feelings were serious, even if one was very small.

I thought over these things while I sipped wine in the empty house. The dark summer air was quiet, and I felt like part of it: I was an agent of this peace, one neighbor on a block where everyone knew each other, where there were barbeques and talks over the fence, where someone would come over if something was wrong.

Then the kids started shooting.

The first shot rang right in front of the house. The next five came from the neighbors on the next block. Having hit the floor, I reached for a phone and called the cops. “Several callers have already alerted us,” the dispatcher said. “We’re sending the next available unit.” No, they weren’t. No sirens reached G Street till about 20 minutes later, when I was in bed, wondering if Mister Rogers was wrong. Maybe we shouldn’t make friends. Maybe we shouldn’t talk about our feelings. Maybe we shouldn’t play the piano when we get mad.

Maybe we should buy a nine and cap the next mofo who gets in our way.