Remember, a few years back, when every politician in town was going nuts over Mayor Anthony A. Williams‘ plan to build a city-financed ballpark? Williams figured out a way to whip the votes to get the stadium deal through: create a “Community Benefit Fund” that would collect certain ballpark-related revenues that would be dished out for various neighborhood needs. Of course, for councilmembers to be allocated a piece of that money meant they had to play ball (har har) with Tony.

Several councilmembers did. Kevin Chavous, then Ward 7 councilmember, got $5 million for projects in his ward. Sharon Ambrose, then Ward 6 councilmember, got the same amount for her bailiwick. Sandy Allen, then Ward 8 councilmember, was promised tens of millions for development projects in her ward. Vincent B. Orange Sr., then Ward 5 councilmember, got $12 million for pet projects of his own, including laptops for kids at McKinley Tech High School. Tens of millions more was set aside for city schools and libraries.

According to estimates published in press accounts at the time, the fund was estimated to eventually bring in as much as $450 million. This year is the first time that the District’s chief financial officer is certifying that there’s any money actually in the fund—but only about $2.23 million. And, under Mayor Adrian M. Fenty’s spending plan, not a dollar of that will go toward any of the projects Williams negotiated.

Instead, the money is being used for earmarks, including a half mil each for the Greater Washington Sports Alliance and the Lincoln Theater, plus $398,000 to “explore the feasibility of a D.C. Children’s Museum.” (The Williams allocations aren’t stripped out, but Fenty’s items are simply placed above them in the ballpark authorization law.) LL goes into much greater detail about the earmark game in his column to be published tomorrow.

Fenty’s budget czar, William Singer, says the move was a result of the low revenues seen coming into the fund, which come out of a tax-increment-financing district around the ballpark and other development-related sources. “We’re kind of recognizing that a modest amount of money is coming in,” Singer says. “Rather than wait 20 years to cross off one item…we’re saying, let’s just spend it on the community now.”

Also worthy of note: The community benefit money that wasn’t allocated through Williams’ horse-trading is supposed to be divvied according to a process that includes extended comment periods and “input from Advisory Neighborhood Commissions, community groups, the faith community, representatives of the labor community, representatives of the business community, and other community stakeholders.”

But under Fenty’s proposed budget, all those procedures are replaced with the following sentence: “The Mayor, through the annual budget process, may make a request for an appropriation for expenditures from the Community Benefit Fund.”

Fenty, of course, voted against the ballpark deal and owes no fealty to any of the four aforementioned ex-councilmembers. And the Williams horse-trading always had a hint of charade to it—meant, as it was, merely to provide short-term political cover for a deal unpopular in most parts of the city. Or, as Singer puts it, “Those were and always have been totally empty promises.”

Williams is traveling and was not available for comment. LL’s calls to Orange were returned by a spokesperson for his employer, Pepco, saying there would be no comment. Allen and Chavous did not immediately return calls for comment.

Singer says a time may come when the money might be used as Williams & Co. intended. “If a whole bunch of money started coming in to the fund, of course we’d come back to the list.”

This morning, the Washington Post has a nice little scoop on how after well over a decade living in town, former Mayor Anthony A. Williams has put money down on a sweet new 2,146-square-foot pad at Jim Abdo’s Landmark Lofts on H Street NE.

And Mayor Bowtie, now ensconced in a cushy corporate job, finally gave an explanation as to the delay in his homeownership:

Williams, 56, now chief executive of a real estate investment fund in Arlington, said he never bought property when he was running the city because of “the political and financial pressures. Politically, it was hard trying to pick an area.” Aides said the mayor realized that whatever neighborhood he chose would become fodder for public debate, to be chewed over and critiqued.

Oh, ferchrissakes. Like his decision not to own a home wasn’t endlessly chewed over and critiqued?

At one point, Williams was said to have been eyeing property in LeDroit Park. LL asks: Who possibly could have had a problem with LeDroit Park? It’s got history. It’s got majority-black demographics. It’s got a pedigree (former Mayor Walter Washington lived there). It’s got beautiful homes. I mean was Shepherd Park really gonna get pissed if you snubbed ’em?

Seriously, Tony, what’s real story?

“President Jarvis told me, ‘This is not a roast,’” said WRC-TV newsman Tom Sherwood, warming up as MC of this year’s Southeastern University Gala at the Washington Hilton.

The yearly benefit for the private school in Southwest D.C., headed by former Ward 4 Councilmember Charlene Drew Jarvis, is well-known as a forum for elected officials, business bigwigs, media types, and other big shots to loosen up and show their sense of humor. Sometimes they get a little too loose: Last year, Sherwood got in a bit of trouble for referring to himself as “not as white as Jack Evans, [but] blacker than Harold Brazil.” The MC alluded to having to write an apology letter to Brazil for last year’s act.

Sherwood, in fact, did keep things less controversial this year, with a few jabs at the likes of developer Victor MacFarlane and Idaho Sen. Larry Craig. The killer material of the night fell to others. And it did turn into a roast of sorts, mainly of D.C.’s most roastable character, Marion S. Barry Jr.

The entertainment, billed as “As the District Turns: A Humorous Spin on the City We Love,” kicked off with a “Dreamgirls” act featuring the ladies of the D.C. Council. Ward 3’s Mary Cheh, Ward 4’s Muriel Bowser, and Ward 7’s Yvette Alexander all donned slinky black dresses (a sequined number for Bowser), feather boas, and long white gloves for their act. None of the three’s dance moves were ever quite in sync, but Alexander—definitely the Beyoncé of the group—clearly knew the words better than the other two. Not in attendance: At-Large Councilmember Carol Schwartz, who was represented late in the act by a proxy holding a campaign picket.

Next up was a skit lampooning the distribution of those coveted low-numbered license plates—Channel 9 anchor Derek McGinty played the low-tag czar, and among his supplicants was former Mayor Anthony A. Williams. (Williams, of course, was not included on Mayor Adrian M. Fenty’s low-tag list earlier this year.) Williams’ begging—”Remember me? Tony Williams? We’re talking…executive baldness”—didn’t get very far with McGinty.

His retort: “Only Marion Barry gets to be mayor-for-life and gets a low tag.”

After that was a Top 10 list of sorts—”If D.C. became a state”—given by a number of other D.C. councilmembers, plus Chief Financial Officer Natwar Gandhi. Gandhi had a lame joke about how the state bird would be a cockatoo because it’s “always talking but never really saying anything”—you know, like a chief financial officer! Ward 6’s Tommy Wells saved the groaner: “I thought the state bird would be the Anthony Williams, because of its propensity to fly.”

At-Large Councilmember David Catania also had a good one: “The state drug czar is….I’m not even touching that one.”

Then WRC-TV weathercasters Chuck Bell, Veronica Johnson, and Bob Ryan engaged in a painfully bad singing sketch, exacerbated by a malfunctioning microphone, that sent dozens to the ballroom doors.

Congressional Delegate Eleanor Holmes Norton took the podium to put a little bit of a federal perspective on things, lightly bashing Michigan Sen. Carl Levin and WTOP commentator Mark Plotkin. Her sharpest line, however, connected a neighboring state’s proposal to tax immigrants to the long-proposed D.C. commuter tax: “Interesting idea, Virginia: Tax people who cross your borders for good and services. Good thinking!”

New York Sen. Hillary Clinton recorded a video message for the occasion; it made fun of, among other things, her own controversial laugh, but there were a couple of local zingers. The best: “This is an exciting time for the District….There’s a bold new baseball stadium to delight 40,000 fans. And there’s parking for at least a thousand of them.”

The skits were over, but the Barry roasting continued. Council Chairman Vincent Gray took to the podium for a valedictory speech that was supposedly to be low on laughs, but the chairman read a selection of straight-from-the-dais quotations from his colleagues.

His closer: “Marion said, ‘Mr. Chairman, I want everyone to know that everyone should get a piece of the rock,’” Gray recounted. “True story!”

Is it just me, or does the world’s shortest man remind you of someone?

Don’t tear down MLK, the D.C. Historic Preservation Review Board said on Thursday.

The board granted historic-landmark status to the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Library, giving the deteriorating glass-and-steel building a legal protection against getting demolished.

Former Mayor Anthony A. Williams broached a plan last year to sell the building and build a new central library on the old Convention Center site. The board’s decision came a day after the Washington Examiner reported the Adrian Fenty administration’s decision to shelve Williams’ plans.

Now, thanks to the efforts of former D.C. Public Library trustee Alex Padro, the library has been protected as D.C.’s most notable example of modernist architecture; Ludwig Mies van der Rohe designed it in 1972. It is also the only downtown edifice that bears King’s name.

The city supported the historic-landmark application, something that Padro says could not have happened when Williams was mayor. “For years there was this battle raging between Williams and the library preservation and advocacy community,” Padro says. “Finally, [now] that we have a new administration, and Williams is out of the way…we get the board to approve it.”

Chief Librarian Ginnie Cooper says there are no plans yet for any relocation of the library’s services. As for the building, the board will now have to approve any change to the first floor or the exterior. “We don’t know at this point that [MLK] will not always be the library,” Cooper says. “We also don’t know at this point that [it] will always be the library.”

Tired of the Fenty administration? Longing for a leader with a bit of hair and maybe a bowtie?

Then cruise over to the Department of Health’s Web site.

Who is that man up in the right-hand corner?

With the Opening Day for D.C. pools fast approaching, the big questions are starting to be raised for Mayor Adrian Fenty: The queries don’t have to do with whether residents will be charged admission to swim or if the Department of Parks and Recreation will have enough money for summer programs.

The pressing issue involves a cannonball. The cannonball dive, that is.

One of the biggest media days of the year for Fenty’s predecessor, Mayor Anthony A. Williams, was his annual cannonball dive (pictured) that marked the official opening of the city pool season. The former mayor violated one of the golden rules of politics every time he took the plunge: never take off your shirt with the cameras running. Williams didn’t shy away from displaying his physique. Over his eight years in office he took it off to reveal his various states of physical fitness each year.

Just before his last dive at the Turkey Run Recreation Center in 2006, Williams said he would like his successor to continue the tradition. And with a super-fit Fenty in the executive suite, supporters of the cannonball tradition figured they’d all get to see some kind of a Fenty beefcake routine.

But the mayor has yet to shy away from dumping tradition. New and different has been his catchphrase since the day he mounted a run for the city’s top office. The cannonball—that was a Williams’ thing—and he has no plan to repeat the former mayor’s stunt.

That doesn’t mean Fenty isn’t planning a pool party. The official opening is scheduled for June 25. And he isn’t ruling out a cannonball for the kick off—so long as the diver is a member of the media. “I was going to [dive],” Fenty told the radio audience of WAMU-FM’s The D.C. Politics Hour With Kojo and Jonetta on May 25. “but [WRC-TV reporter] Tom Sherwood actually says he’s going to do it.”

Not so fast, Sherwood shoots back. “I would do it, but someone would have to offer up some cash,” he says. “For $5,000, I’ll do it.”

Sherwood isn’t contemplating a lucrative new career in professional athletics. But he does want his dive to produce something more than a good laugh. “I will ask the person to donate the money to a charity of my choosing,” he says. “Everything has a price.”

That, anyhow, is the verdict of the ultimate arbiter on these matters—the Economy League of Greater Philadelphia and the Fels Institute of Government at the University of Pennsylvania. These entities have invited our former two-term mayor to appear at a May 21 event titled “Profiles in Leadership. America’s Great Mayors.” It’ll take place at the Loews Philadelphia Hotel on May 21, and admission is $15, a pittance for the honor of hearing such a great leader.

According to the announcement [PDF], the series of discussions has been timed to coincide with Philly’s ongoing mayoral race and calls upon “mayors who have demonstrated exceptional leadership on issues common to cities nationwide to discuss how they were able to lead to achieve results.”

Now we know for sure that Mayor Adrian Fenty’s administration is green. And we’re not talking about campaign colors or inexperience. Fenty is apparently going to great lengths to conserve paper.

A March 16 response to a March 13 letter from all councilmembers regarding global warming was on some letterhead that had been sitting around in the storage room for a while. At the top of the one-page missive signed by Fenty, just below the city seal, it carried this familiar moniker:

Asked whether the vintage stationery was indeed further evidence of her boss’ green credentials, Fenty spokesperson Carrie Brooks replied in an e-mail, “That’s exactly right. We are continuing efforts to be an environmentally friendly administration.”

It didn’t take long for former Mayor Anthony A. Williams to get a big check after leaving the public sector.

But the $4,000 payment he recently received wasn’t a signing bonus from his new employer. The check came from an outfit he’d rather forget—the 2002 Committee to Reelect Tony Williams.

The former mayor was apparently too busy with golf lessons at the FBR Open in Scottsdale, Ariz., to return calls from LL about the money. The disbursement is reported as a loan repayment in the committee’s Jan. 31 filing. In another section of the report, the nature of the debt is listed as “legal fees.”

The other outstanding red ink in the Williams political treasury is $5,950 owed to the law firm of Greenstein, Delorme & Luchs. Vincent Mark Policy of the firm defended Williams after political consultant Tom Lindenfeld sued the sitting mayor, alleging Williams stiffed him for services. The law firm also helped Williams out during the now-famous petition-signature scandal. Widespread forgeries and fraud in the signature collection process cost Williams a place on the 2002 democratic primary ballot. He won in a write-in campaign.

During one of these legal scuffles, Williams apparently found it necessary to personally cough up $4,000—presumably to pay Policy. In November 2003, good-government gadfly Dorothy Brizill filed a complaint with the Board of Elections and Ethics, claiming Policy’s decision to provide Williams with legal help on a pro bono basic violated city law. (Policy was also working as a lobbyist at the time.)

But who ponied up for Tony’s check? Two local unions—the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers and the Washington Building & Construction Trade Council—kicked in $2,000 each this summer as Williams was becoming an afterthought to D.C. voters. Neither union could explain to LL how they became aware of the pressing need for funds at the committee.

Williams didn’t have to go far to get the check. His wife, Diane Simmons Williams, is treasurer of the committee, which might explain why when the union money came in, the law firm ended up second in line for the cash.

Posted by James Jones
Mayor Anthony A. Williams’ last scheduled press conference revealed something D.C. residents already suspected: His fondest political memory came before a stadium mostly filled with residents of Maryland and Virginia.

When asked to reveal his best times as mayor, Williams turned to baseball. He recalled the feeling after he was introduced to the crowd at the 2005 home opener at RFK stadium. “When 30,000 people give you a standing ovation, now that’s a good moment.”

As for the low point, Williams highlighted the 2002 petition-signature scandal that led to him being kept off the Democratic primary ballot, despite having a $2.5 million campaign war chest and no serious opposition. He offered this 20/20 hindsight on that famous debacle: “I should have just got a lawn chair and sat out on Connecticut Avenue [to collect signatures]. We could have given all the money to charity.”

The mayor also offered a few unsolicited personal comments on the Wilson Building press corps. He noted that WTOP radio commentator Mark Plotkin “is kind of, well, kind of sweaty.” The mayor did offer some admiration for a Plotkin’s fashion bravery in light of the sweltering D.C. summers and Plotkin’s perspiration tendencies. “I have to give you credit for coming out here with a pink shirt.”

And he had a few queries for the people who usually go after him every week. Williams noted WRC-TV reporter Tom Sherwood’s frequent absences from the press briefings and asked him to reveal how much vacation he takes. He posed an uncomfortable question for WUSA-TV reporter and weekend anchor Bruce Johnson: “Does anyone actually watch local news on the weekend?”

For his nemisis Dorothy Brizill—who has used the press briefings over the years as a personal prosecutory platform from which to launch attacks on his administration—Williams had only one final line to offer: “Dorothy, I love you. I have nothing more to say.”

“What’s the urgency?” asked Councilmember Marion S. Barry Jr. That was one of the many unanswered questions the evening of Tuesday, Dec. 5, when Barry’s lame-duck colleague Kathy Patterson tried yet again—and failed yet again—to win D.C. Council approval for a plan to build a new central library on the old Convention Center site.

Over the last year, the library scheme has been peddled vigorously by outgoing Mayor Tony Williams and the Board of Library Trustees and the Federal City Council, both of which are headed by John W. Hill. But the need for a new library is questionable, the financing plan shaky, the proposed location controversial, and many of the proponents’ arguments so dubious that they’ve gradually evaporated over the course of the debate.

Legislation to abandon the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Library at 901 G St. NW and authorize a new library seemed to have died on Tuesday, Nov. 21, when the D.C. Council’s Education, Libraries, and Recreation Committee voted to table it. Yet Patterson and her allies decided to keep pushing, even though they clearly didn’t have the nine votes necessary to pass the authorization as an emergency bill. Instead, they tried a rarely-used gambit: a full-council vote to discharge the bill from committee. That required a simple majority of the 12 members present, but even that wasn’t doable: Only six voted for it.

In addition to Patterson, the aye votes were Linda Cropp, Vincent Orange, Adrian Fenty, Jack Evans, and Phil Mendelson. (The first three of those will leave public office with the next term.) Aside from Barry, voting no were Kwame Brown, David Catania, Jim Graham, Vincent Gray, and Carol Schwartz.

The supporters of a new library mostly reiterated arguments made by Williams and Hill, and generally seemed unfamiliar with the issue. A distracted Fenty commended the mayor’s “blue ribbon task force” on the library, which recently published a report that’s an embarrassing goulash of cliché, boilerplate, and irrelevancy. Orange floated by on a cloud, comparing MLK unfavorably to Paris’ Bibliotheque Nationale—which is, of course, the French equivalent of the Library of Congress, not a city library.

The opponents’ remarks were more pungent. Barry termed the claim that a new D.C. library would become a tourist attraction “idiocy”; Brown said the arguments for a new library are “foolishness”; and Schwartz called expectations of major federal funding “just craziness.” It was Barry who nailed the weakness of the case for a new library. It was apparent, he said, that advocates of the scheme just decided they wanted the library “and then went back to try to justify it.” A 6–6 vote says they didn’t.

On Tuesday, Nov. 21, the D.C. Council’s Education, Library and Recreation Committee voted to table legislation authorizing the construction of a new central library. Prominent supporters of the new-library proposal were clearly shocked by the 3-2 vote but were quick to suggest that the bill still might move forward, perhaps as emergency legislation.

A week later, on Nov. 28, the committee eliminated that possibility by a 4-1 margin. The second vote guarantees that the library proposal is comatose until after Mayor Tony Williams, the most powerful elected official to advocate the scheme, leaves office at the beginning of 2007.

At issue was a proposal to build a new central library, at an estimated cost of $275 million, on the old Convention Center site, which is due for major mixed-use redevelopment. Under the plan, the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Library at 9th and G Streets NW would be leased to an as-yet-undisclosed entity. Opponents of the scheme argued that MLK is a significant building that should be preserved for its original use and that it could be renovated for far less than the cost of a new structure.

After they voted to stop the legislation, Councilmembers Marion Barry, Carol Schwartz, and Vincent Gray were left with a procedural anomaly. The committee report, produced by the staff of Committee Chairperson Kathy Patterson, strongly endorses the legislation that failed to pass. The 113-page study raises nine questions and answers them all in favor of the plan for a new library put forth by the Board of Library Trustees and the Federal City Council, both of which are headed by John W. Hill. (The report was written by Patterson staffer Jason Juffras, who is a friend of Hill’s.)

The committee’s solution was to reclassify the document as a “special” report rather than a committee one. Since it was not adopted as a committee report, it cannot be the basis for legislative action. Even that was not enough for Schwartz, who voted against accepting the report at all.

The library scheme will no doubt be back on the council’s agenda next year, but on Tuesday both Gray (who in the next term will be council chairman) and Schwartz expressed doubts about the expense. Schwartz noted that Montgomery County’s brand-new central library cost less than one-tenth the estimated price of the proposed D.C. facility.

Suzanne Peck, the city’s chief technology officer, has become a darling of the nation’s technomedia. Public CIO magazine, Federal Computer Week, and Government Technology are among the pubs that have rightly hailed her success in turning a municipal technological backwater into a model for other cities. Washington Examiner columnist Jonetta Rose Barras, however, took a pass on boarding this particular bandwagon, calling Peck a “serial District law violator” and a “serial law violator” in two recent columns. The pull-no-punches columnist also advocated Peck’s sacking as part of the mayoral changeover.

Vince Morris, a spokesperson for the Williams administration, rang up the Examiner to express his concern. “To call someone who’s worked in government and turned the city’s Web site into one of the best in the nation…a lawbreaker is pretty serious and completely unfair,” says Morris.

The Examiner responded with a “Clarification” stating, “In neither column was there any support for this phrase and it should have been removed from the column.” Barras offered her “support” materials in an e-mail to Morris that cited findings by city investigators who’d examined various practices of Peck’s office. “More has to be done to hold bureaucrats and people of Ms. Peck’s position accountable,” wrote Barras, a longtime Washington City Paper contributor. She would not comment for this story.

Peck & Co., meanwhile, are satisfied with the Examiner’s mea culpa. “It meets our needs to have false statements corrected,” says Christina Fleps, Peck’s general counsel.

Mayor Anthony A. Williams is suddenly tossing out positive critiques of the yet-to-be-hatched Adrian Fenty administration.

At his weekly press conference, a reporter began a question about schools by mentioning Fenty’s trips to visit with officials in New York City, Chicago, and San Francisco.

“Good start,” Williams quipped. “Got to start traveling early.” After the laughter from the press corps and the dwindling gaggle of Williams’ hangers-on died down, the mayor added: “You know he’s not even in the general election and he’s already across the country.”

The mayor then volunteered that Fenty had indeed managed to make his way up to the sixth floor of the John A. Wilson Building to solicit Williams’ views on mayoral takeovers of public-school systems.