Tomorrow’s the monthly D.C. Council legislative meeting. This morning, Council Chairman Vincent C. Gray held his usual preview press conference. Here’s the rundown:

• Vince Gray Punctuality Watch: The presser kicked off at 9:42 a.m.—12 minutes late. Getting better, Mr. Chairman!
• Things kicked off with a presentation from At-Large Councilmember David A. Catania on his “Healthy DC” universal-health-care plan. The meat of the policy proposal is to provide an affordable health insurance option for a relatively small part of the city populace: the approximately 25,000 uninsured folks who make too much to be eligible for Medicaid or the D.C. Healthcare Alliance program. Will spare the details, but the costs are intended to be no more than 3 percent of annual income for participants, with a District subsidy covering the rest.

  Along with the bridge insurance program comes a requirement that all District residents over 18 years of age be continuously insured. Anyone filing a D.C. tax return will be required to check a box attesting they’re insured. Enforcement is still vague; Catania said liars could be prosecuted for tax fraud—another option, he says, would be to cross-reference all emergency-room visitors with their tax returns.

  How is it being paid for? Under Catania’s proposal, the individuals are expected to bear a little more than half of the cost through monthly premiums. As for the remainder, a new 2 percent premium tax on HMOs raises a chunk, and taxes paid by CareFirst, the local Blue Cross licensee, takes care of most of the rest. Also kicking in, but not directly: A doubling of the District’s excise tax on cigarettes, from $1 to $2.

  The plan is scheduled to kick in on July 1, 2009; Gray said he hopes to hold a hearing on the plan before the end of the budget season.

• Looks like Ward 8 Councilmember Marion Barry’s plan to rename the Southeast-Southwest Freeway and part of Maine Avenue SW after Martin Luther King isn’t going anywhere fast. Said Gray: “I have a number of concerns about that…as well as a number of my colleagues….I think this is one of those where I think I will have a hearing.”

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Back in December, Ward 8 Councilmember Marion Barry introduced a bill to extend Martin Luther King Jr. Avenue SE across the Anacostia River into Wards 2 and 6. Since then, the measure’s gone nowhere fast, but Barry’s looking to speed up the timetable a bit.

This week, Barry circulated a memo informing his colleagues that he would move his bill as emergency legislation at next Tuesday’s legislative meeting. The memo said the emergency action, which requires no public hearing, was necessary in order to honor the good Dr. King in time for the 40th anniversary of his April 4, 1968, assassination.

The bill would extend the traditional MLK Avenue, renamed from Nichols Avenue SE in 1971, from its current northern terminus at Good Hope Road SE across the 11th Street Bridge, along the Southwest/Southeast Freeway and along Maine Avenue SW to its new terminus at Raoul Wallenberg Place SW (itself a renamed portion of 15th Street SW). The new portion would be called Martin Luther King Jr. Drive.

An inspection of the route revels very few, if any, addresses will be affected, but it’s problematic to say the least that folks won’t get a chance to express an opinion one way or another about the change before action is taken.

Nine councilmembers co-sponsored the original bill, indicating a reasonably good chance of legislative success. Noticeably absent from the co-sponsor list: Ward 6 Councilmember Tommy Wells, through whose ward most of the affected thoroughfares run. Wells is out of town and unavailable for comment, but his chief of staff, Charles Allen, says that Wells declined to cosponsor because “he wasn’t approached or consulted about the possible renaming of streets in Ward 6.”

Let the amendments begin! The Sick and Safe Leave bill is up on the council dais; sponsor Carol Schwartz has introduced a substitute that keeps things largely intact and doesn’t address the main issues the business community have. Never fear—Ward 2 Councilmember Jack Evans is on the scene. He’s got seven amendments, drafted with the assistance of Council chair Vincent C. Gray, at-large member David A. Catania, and, undoubtedly, the D.C. Chamber of Commerce. This could take a while. —Mike DeBonis

Tomorrow’s the monthly D.C. Council legislative meeting. This morning, Council Chairman Vincent C. Gray held his usual preview press conference. Here’s what’s on tap:

• The biggest deal tomorrow is going to be what happens with the final reading on the Accrued Sick and Safe Leave Act, which has attracted the intense scrutiny of the business community. After LL queried Gray on possible amendments, At-Large Councilmember and bill sponsor Carol Schwartz stepped to the mike to announce that she would be submitting a substitute bill, which she had drafted with her staff over the weekend. (LL’s voice mail vouches for that: He arrived this morning to find a message from Schwartz left on Sunday returning a Friday call. “Hope you’re having a good weekend,” she said. “Better than mine!”) Schwartz declined to make the new text available this morning, but she did allude at the press conference that it was intended to allay the concerns of the business community. LL is presently trying to get his hands on a copy of the bill to see if Barbara Lang’s “Big Five” made it in.

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LL spoke to D.C. Chamber of Commerce President and CEO Barbara Lang this afternoon and asked her about her organization’s proposed amendments to the pending sick-leave bill in front of the D.C. Council this week.

Of the 14 proposed amendments, Lang deems five to be “must-haves.”

Those are:

• Defining “employee” in the same terms as the city’s Family and Medical Leave Act
• An economic hardship exemption, like one in the smoking-ban bill
• An exemption for businesses with 10 employees or less
• Requirement for a yearly economic impact study
• No waivers for the act allowed in collective bargaining agreements—i.e., unions shouldn’t be allowed to bargain away paid sick days for wage increases, etc.

As for the Maryland-and-Virginia first clause, Lang says that’s a matter of keeping the District competitive with its neighbors. “There are 700,00 jobs in the District of Columbia every day; 450,000 are filled by residents of Maryland and Virginia. [The bill] asks dc business to pay for Maryland and Virginia residents when Maryland and Virginia are not doing that [for D.C. residents].”

Lang says she hasn’t discussed the amendments with the bill’s sponsor, At-Large Councilmember Carol Schwartz but has been focusing her energy on members she feels might actually be swayed. Lang reports she doesn’t yet have commitments from members to introduce all 14 amendments at Tuesday’s meeting.

Assuming the measure passes, amended heavily or not, Mayor Adrian M. Fenty would still have to sign it in to law, and Lang says Hizzoner’s still opposed to it. Is a veto a possibility? Says mayoral spokesperson Carrie Brooks: “I don’t think that determination has been made yet.”

On Tuesday, the D.C. Council will take its second and final vote on the Accrued Sick and Safe Leave Act, a piece of legislation that would greatly expand mandatory sick leave for all employees in the District. The legislation passed 11-2 on first reading on Feb. 5, but it stands to be heavily amended next week.

The D.C. Chamber of Commerce will be leading the charge. Chamber President Barbara B. Lang sent a letter Wednesday to Council Chairman Vincent C. Gray and colleagues that said her organization was “very concerned about the unforeseen and unintended consequences of this bill as well as its potentially devastating impact on small businesses.” To that end, Lang attached 14 proposed amendments to the bill.

To give you an idea of their thrust, here’s a summary of the first one: “Amendment #1 makes the District’s implementation of the bill contingent on the enactment of comparable legislation in both Maryland and Virginia.” You read that right: D.C. can go ahead and pass this, but it won’t actually be enforced until Annapolis and Richmond get behind it, too. There’s nothing the District loves more than waiting on those guys to ratify our own public policy.

Other amendments:

• Mandatory yearly economic impact studies on the bill’s effects
• A two-year sunset provision
• Exemption for businesses with fewer than 10 employees
• “Economic hardship” exemption
• Exemption for waitstaff who work for minimum wage plus tips

Also wanting changes is the metro Consortium of Universities, who sent a letter yesterday proposing several amendments—including one that would exempt graduate students (undergrads are already exempt).

The bill’s sponsor, At-Large Councilmember Carol Schwartz, will have her hands full come Tuesday. No word yet on which members will be carrying the C of C’s water as far as introducing any amendments, but Schwartz, who’s done a fine job of getting this thing this far, will have some interesting calculations to make.

Don’t take the 11-2 first reading vote as proof of strong Council backing—the bill was very nearly tabled before the up-or-down vote. Yesterday, LL spied groups of sick-leave advocates making their way around the Wilson Building. Unfortunately for them, they don’t give thousands and thousands to local political campaigns—local businesses do. Expect that to factor somewhat into Schwartz’s thinking, what with a re-election campaign coming up.

C of C letter after the jump.

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Now’s your chance: Tune in to Channel 13 and play along.

P.S. Not included on that chart is one of the chancellor’s more annoying habits: Starting every response to a question with “So…” She already did that. On the very first question.

Joe Fengler is pissed. The member of Advisory Neighborhood Commission 6A, which serves Stanton Park, Lincoln Park, H Street NE, and other “East Hill” neighborhoods, is a strong proponent of the enhanced noise regulations that failed to proceed at a Tuesday D.C. Council meeting.

Perhaps the biggest reasons he’s pissed: Ward 7 Councilmember Yvette Alexander and At-Large Councilmember Kwame Brown, both of whom had supported the noise bill in the past (Brown was a co-sponsor), voted to table the bill on Tuesday.

Incensed at the flip-flop, Fengler wrote in an e-mail to his ANC colleagues and councilmembers that he’s “personally prepared to debate the merits of this bill with Alexander and Brown in a public forum over the next three weeks.”

Oh snap! Full e-mail after the jump.

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Anyone doubting the strength of organized labor in this town, think again: A bill that would allow the District to enforce limits on daytime noise was tabled without debate this morning at a meeting of the D.C. Council’s committee of the whole, thanks in no small part to union protesters.

The Noise Control Protection Amendment Act, sponsored by Ward 3 Councilmember Mary Cheh and Ward 6 Councilmember Tommy Wells, was prompted, among other things, by the amplified demonstrations of the Black Hebrew Israelites on or near H Street NE. Under the bill, noise greater than 70 decibels, or 10 decibels above ambient noise levels, would be subject to sanction.

Cheh introduced the bill, citing the need for some checks on daytime noise that’s currently unregulated “no matter how long, no matter how unrelenting, no matter how amplified.” She mentioned that she had met with members of the labor community, who were concerned that the bill might interfere in union protests, but noted that the bill had gained the support of the Service Employees International Union. Cheh, a constitutional law professor at George Washington University, also said she “completely confident in the ultimate constitutionality” of the bill.

Immediately afterward, Ward 2 Councilmember Jack Evans moved to table it, a manuever that under council rules requires no debate. The motion passed 7-5, with Evans, Jim Graham (Ward 1), Muriel Bowser (Ward 4), Yvette Alexander (Ward 7), Kwame Brown (At-Large), Phil Mendelson (At-Large), and Chair Vincent C. Gray in favor; Cheh, Wells, Marion Barry (Ward 8), David A. Catania (At-Large), and Carol Schwartz (At-Large) opposed the tabling. Ward 5 Councilmember Harry Thomas Jr. was absent.

What gives, you may ask? Our man on the scene, Arthur Delaney, reports that more than 100 members of the Metropolitan Washington Council AFL-CIO and its affiliated organizations showed up for the council meeting wearing red T-shirts. After the vote the group set off around the Wilson Building thanking members and their staffers for putting the kibosh on the bill.

LL wasn’t the only tall, handsome, impeccably dressed gentleman roaming the Wilson Building halls this afternoon.

D.C. United owner and real-estate mogul Victor MacFarlane was making the rounds of D.C. Council offices late today, trying to gauge and drum up support for public funding for a Ward 8 soccer stadium.

LL caught up with MacFarlane on his way out of the building about 20 minutes ago and asked him what his message was to councilmembers today. MacFarlane declined to talk specifics, but spoke in broad terms: “I think we’re focusing on the main principles….We’re going to provide substantial equity that doesn’t require any new taxes.”

Yesterday, a Washington Post article revealed that Mayor Adrian M. Fenty was in talks with MacFarlane about public funding for a stadium at Poplar Point.

MacFarlane has lobbied for a soccer stadium on Poplar Point since the days of Mayor Anthony A. Williams, but the talks came as a surprise, because MacFarlane’s company had declined to submit a bid to serve as master developer of the Poplar Point project after Fenty decided to open the land to other developers.

MacFarlane did say that he’s “very satisfied” with the announcement yesterday of Clark Realty as the master developer and that he and Clark had already begun talks about the stadium.

Asked if he was confident of council approval for any public-private partnership on the stadium, MacFarlane said: “I’m hopeful.”

With so many millions of dollars walking out the door in Jimmy Choos, etc., courtesy of the tax scandal, you’d figure D.C. Gov would be totally into recovering millions of other dollars it’s rightfully owed by the Corrections Corporation of America (CCA).

You’d figure that. But you’d be wrong. In a classic case of buck-passing between the Office of Property Management (OPM) and the Department of Corrections (DOC), the utility bill for steam used to heat the Correctional Treatment Facility—located right next to the D.C. Jail and privately operated by the Nashville-based CCA—has gone unpaid for years. What’s owed is up for negotiation. Last March, former OPM director Lars Etzkorn (who has since lost his job over that unfortunate police department relocation fiasco) testified before the Council that OPM was “collecting monies owed.” To wit: “For example, last month OPM presented to the Department of Corrections the analysis for it to recover $5.7 million from the Corrections Corporation of America…”

OPM didn’t take over collecting the money, mind you, it presented an analysis of how to collect the money. And this was after At-Large Councilmember Phil Mendelson figured out in the 2006 budget process that DOC was actually being billed for the steam rather than being paid for it. A year after OPM was informed of that, a year after Etzkorn’s testimony throwing around “$5.7 million,” none of the money has been collected. And $5.7 million could be way underselling it.

To be fair to the CCA, the folks in Nashville didn’t know how much steam they were using in D.C. until OPM installed a meter last March; a bill didn’t even go out until a few months later, in June. According to the bill, the meter shows that in six months—from June to December of 2007—the Correctional Treatment Facility used more than $450,000 in steam. When you do the math, and take into account that the CCA, according to its lease, has been responsible for paying utilities on the facility since 1997…. well that’s somewhere around $10 million to $11 million in danger of—poof!—evaporating.

The DOC, by nature of its relationship with the the jail, the next-door Correctional Treatment Facility, and the CCA, has been the agency ostensibly in charge of the lease with the CCA. But—and you’ll have to try and follow this alphabet soup—the DOC thinks it’s the OPM’s job to get the CCA on board. Beverly Young, spokesperson for DOC, e-mailed that succinct response to me this week: “The Department of Corrections is not responsible for the collections. The matter is ultimately an issue between OPM and CCA.”

Mendelson agrees. The DOC, he says, never should have been in charge of the lease in the first place. “The only agency that should administer a lease is OPM,” he says, and further: “They (OPM) screwed around last year with invoicing and not getting payment….They’re very slow to act and wer’e talking about millions of public dollars.”

At a hearing last Friday, OPM’s interim director Robin-Eve Jasper (after being jousted by Vincent Gray) faced Mendelson on this front:

Mendo: “We should get answers without having to think of every angle to ask the question. So I get the bills, but it turns out we’re not getting the pyament…”

Jasper: “I’m going to have to get back to you. We are billing currently, but the first bill didn’t go out that long ago…and I don’t believe it was as high as $11 million….I will get back to you with a detailed response.”

Mendo: “What I was last told at our last hearing on this was that the Office of Property Management was talking to the Department of Corrections. I’m not sure why that makes sense. Why doesn’t the OPM talk to CCA or to the CFO’s office?”

Jasper: “I can’t answer that question…I can’t answer why we were in discussion with the DOC rather than sending out a demand note and just proceeding on that basis.”

Mendo: “When you get back to me, can you also go into what was going on prior to June 2007?”

Jasper: “Yes, I believe we’re trying to establish a baseline of a full year at this point and…establish prior payments.”

Mendo: “I’ve yet to receive any evidence that anyone has talked to CCA, so this would all be a surprise to them when we send them a bill. That would kind of help, I think, to talk to them.”

Hey, it’s a start.

OPM’s spokesman, Bill Rice, did not return three phone calls. Stay tuned!

Loose Lips queries D.C. Councilmembers about The Real Super Tuesday, the Potomac Primary on Feb. 12.

Every month (sometimes more often) the D.C. Council meets on a Tuesday for its legislative meeting, where the full body sits in the chamber all day and actually passes bills and things like that. There’s usually some fairly interesting stuff, but there’s usually even more not-so-interesting stuff. Of late, Chairman Vincent C. Gray’s started doing a press conference the day before to get reporters acquainted with the concil’s business. LL goes to these things so you don’t have to, and he will now be rounding them up in convenient bullet form:

• The tally this morning: Four reporters (myself, the Examiner’s Michael Neibauer and Jonetta Rose Barras, and the Post’s Nikita Stewart), eight of 13 councilmembers (Gray, Ward 1’s Jim Graham, Ward 3’s Mary Cheh, Ward 6’s Tommy Wells, Ward 7’s Yvette Alexander, and At-Large members David A. Catania, Carol Schwartz, and Phil Mendelson), and approximately three dozen staffers and randoms. In other words, about a 10-to-1 nonpress-to-press ratio.
• Gray announced that he’s hired a new communications director to replace Denise Reed, a longtime Wilson Building fixture who left Gray’s office in December for a job with the Court Services and Offender Supervision Agency. Her replacement is familiar face: Doxie McCoy, who’s served as the press aide to congressional Delegate Eleanor Holmes Norton since October 2001. She starts next week.
• Graham announced emergency legislation to force the mayor to issue rules implementing mandatory inclusionary zoning. (Here’s the whole complicated background on “IZ”—long story short, the rulemaking’s been delayed to give the development community a chance to weigh in.) Graham had introduced a nonemergency bill last month that would have given the mayor 30 days after enactment to issue the regs. This bill gives him until April 1.
• While we’re talking emergency legislation, there’s 10 emergency bills on the agenda coming out of the mayor’s office, all of which are contract approvals (the Council has to approve any contract greater than $1 million). Barras questioned Gray on why this stuff’s being done by emergency legislation. Blame, naturally, went to the mayor’s office and a blown contracting and procurement system. Good question, Jonetta!
• Mendelson announced a pair of bills coming out of his committee. One will require the sale of “fire-safe” cigarettes in the District by July 1. (Fire-safe cigs use a different type of paper that cause them to extinguish themselves if not actively puffed.) The other is the Motor Vehicle Theft Prevention Act of 2007, which creates a fund dedicated to fighting, yes, auto theft, funded mainly by a $5 hike in the yearly car registration fee. The money’s overseen by a mayoral-appointed board and can be spent on more cops, bait cars, public-awareness campaigns, and things like that.
• Schwartz got up to talk about her “Paid Sick and Safe Days Act of 2007,” which is now the “Accrued Sick and Safe Days Act of 2007.” The new name reflects the fact that the bill stands to be heavily amended, mostly to make it more palatable to folks who do the hiring. “We have really worked hard to win a buy-in from the business community,” Schwartz said. Despite the changes, the votes haven’t been counted yet (members of the Service Employees union rallied at the Wilson Building this afternoon, citing “wavering as Tuesday’s vote nears” in a press release) and there’s rumors of mayoral veto being bandied about.
• Gray gave some early, rough numbers on the budget surplus from FY07: Total surplus is about $248 million. About $50 million of that has been earmarked for spending, and another approximately $100 million was allocated in a December supplemental appropriations bill. Of the remainder, Gray indicated he’d hoped to put that money away for a rainy day, and given the economic outlook right now, looks like things could get rainy indeed. Revenue projections won’t be in from the CFO’s office for another few weeks—but LL did get this fun tidbit from Gray: “Dr. [Natwar M.] Gandhi has informed us it will not be like we’ve seen in the recent past.”
• The Fenty steamroll on school closings is all but complete. Last month, Ward 8 Councilmember Marion Barry and Ward 5’s Harry Thomas Jr. introduced their “School Closing Fairness and Accountability Emergency Act of 2008,” which would have given the Council a chance to vote on the proposed school shutterings. On Friday, both Barry and Thomas stood behind Fenty as he announced the final closings list (as Marc Fisher pointed out in his column over the weekend). And today, Gray quiety announced that Barry and Thomas had withdrawn their bill.

In late April, the D.C. Democratic State Committee realized it had a little problem. Its own rules allowed presidential candidates to pay $2,500 to get on the Feb. 12 primary ballot. That’s easy enough.

D.C. law, however, had a different requirement: Candidates needed to gather signatures, a messy task requiring all manner of political organizing. The committee quickly made calls to several councilmembers, says delegate selection Chair Donald Dinan. Lo and behold, eight months later, the trouble disappeared.

On Dec. 11, the D.C. Council passed legislation decreeing that candidates may follow the rules outlined by their own party, meaning they didn’t have to get the signatures after all, as long as they paid up. The Republicans, on the other hand, had no clue that a fix was in the works and didn’t learn of the new policy until Dec. 10.

“If there had been a council that represented both Republicans and Democrats, the council wouldn’t have bailed out the Democrats and just [chosen] to ignore all the laws,” says Republican National Committeeman Tony Parker.

For months, Republican volunteers and staffers have staked out grocery stores and banged on doors in the hope of collecting the roughly 300 signatures—1 percent of registered D.C. Republicans—required by the old District statute. But given proper notice, they probably wouldn’t have abandoned their grassroots approach, say both Parker and D.C. Republican Committee Executive Director Paul Craney. They just want the Dems to play by the rules:

“There’s one party in this town that decided to change the rules last-minute because they couldn’t do [the signature-gathering],” says Craney. “It’s the equivalent of driving a car without a license and saying, ‘Oh, but I’m going to get one soon.’”

The D.C. Council earlier this afternoon approved the legislation reclassifying most DCPS central office employees as “at will,” meaning schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee can start firing them soon.

Voting against: Marion Barry, Phil Mendelson, Harry Thomas Jr.