In a little-noticed defeat for District home rule, Congress passed a bill on Monday rejecting the District’s attempts to assert more control over the D.C. Water and Sewer Authority. Both houses approved the measure by unanimous consent. The bill awaits President George W. Bush’s signature.

“I’ve been on the council 10 years, and I know of no other example that is more blatant of both houses of Congress dismissing the people of the District of Columbia,” said Ward 1 Councilmember Jim Graham, whose public works and environment committee has oversight of WASA.

LL has pretty much been the only reporter in town following this District-suburban squabble, which has roots going back years, to when then-Mayor Marion Barry raided the WASA budget when it was part of District government to make ends meet citywide. In the aftermath, WASA because a quasi-independent authority, governed by a board that includes members from suburban jurisdictions. (WASA provides water service to the District only, but it does treat sewage from the suburbs.) In recent months, attempts by Graham, with the support of Mayor Adrian M. Fenty, to bring the agency under closer District control have generated suburban ire and threats of congressional intervention. (For more background, check out LL’s column on the matter from earlier this year.)

The bill, sponsored by Maryland Rep. Chris Van Hollen and co-sponsored by Virginia Rep. Tom Davis, has two parts: One makes it perfectly clear that financial oversight of WASA lies with its interjurisdictional board, rather than with the District’s chief financial officer, as Graham and Fenty have asserted. The other part strips out a D.C.-resident hiring preference for the agency (which employs mostly Marylanders) set out in a bill pushed by At-Large Councilmember Carol Schwartz last fall.

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LL is not in the habit of reading the “Vows” section of the Sunday New York Times, so it is with some embarrassment that he only learned of this week’s edition yesterday.

Why is LL embarrassed? It might contain the juiciest piece of Wilson Building reporting in years: The featured groom, Jonathon Kass, is a staffer for Ward 1 Councilmember Jim Graham’s public works and environment committee.

The article describes Kass’ patient approach to romancing his eventual wife, Sarah Lucas—West Wing viewings turning into eight months of dates without as much as a smooch. Later came 17 months together in Africa. But no ring was immediately forthcoming.

As further proof of Kass’ deliberative ways, reporter Louise Rafkin offers this anecdote: “In the Washington group house where he and [a friend] lived in spring 2002, Mr. Kass slept in a sleeping bag for a month because he feared a rash purchase might preclude a full analysis of whether and for how long he would settle there.”

Anyway, happy ending: Lucas and Kass married on May 31 in California.

But the couple’s happiness has meant little to the hyper-empowered women over at Jezebel. On Monday, Kass (and the article generally, for its “what a catch!” theme) came in for a rather vicious line of commentary from blogger Moe Tkacik (”excruciating”) and the Jezebel commentariat. (Sample comment: “She’s beautiful - absolutely out of his league, AND he’s a turd! Poor girl.”)

LL feels he needs to stick up for the guy. 1. On the occasions LL has spoken to him, Kass has struck him as a sharp, knowledgeable guy. 2. Dunno where they get “out of his league”—he’s not a bad-looking dude, to LL’s straight-man eyes, anyway. 3. So what if the guy’s “[p]assionate about transportation policy”? Aren’t you ladies always prattling on about how much you love guys with passions? What’s so wrong with transportation policy, huh?

Also of note: Kass’ familiarity with long-term “excruciating” ordeals with uncertain prospects may have helped him in his professional career. Recently, he’s been an adviser to Graham on reopening Klingle Road.

On Saturday afternoon, LL was watching the weather report with bated breath, as a line of thunderstorms threatened to put the kibosh on this year’s Capital Pride Parade, the centerpiece of the yearly gay-community celebration and the first chance for the players in this year’s campaign season to truly come out. (Yes, pun intended.)

Luckily, the show went on. The big news of the parade were the mystery signs:

All along the parade route, posted on lampposts were signs reading “Ask Carol Schwartz why she OPPOSES marriage equality” in Schwartz’ trademark yellow-and-white. The signs carried absolutely no indication of where they might have come from. Shady!

Gay activist Peter Rosenstein told LL he had seen folks on stepladders posting the signs earlier in the afternoon, but neither he nor anyone else LL consulted had any idea who they were. The challengers who marched in the parade—Adam Clampitt, Dee Hunter, and Patrick Mara—all denied having anything to do with the signs. (A Clampitt aide, in fact, phoned in a preemptive denial, before LL even showed up for the parade.)

Schwartz called it “the work of a cowardly liar” and furthermore implored LL not to “rain on my parade” (har har) by giving the cowards any ink—sorry, Carol! (For more on the does-Carol-support-gay-marriage theme, read Washington Blade articles by Rosenstein and by Schwartz.)

LL thought he might have solved the mystery when, right on the middle of the 17th Street NW commercial strip, a spectator holding one of the signs in one hand and a drink in the other marched right out to confront Schwartz, who was walking behind her yellow Pontiac Firebird. From a distance, LL seemed to see Schwartz saying to the interloper, “I do! I do!” in response to the sign’s query.

After Schwartz passed, LL asked the man, Andrew Campbell of Dupont Circle, whether he’d been involved in the signmaking. Nope, he said—”I pulled it off the lamppost.”

LL quizzed him further on the reasoning behind his anti-Schwartz stance. “I dunno,” he said. “Look at what the sign says!”

The crowd rest of the crowd seemed not to care much. Take this spectator reaction to the confrontation: “Tell him to fuck off, Carol!”

Many more pix after the jump! Read the rest of this entry »

ABC Board-Packing Raises Eyebrows: So a round of Alcoholic Beverage Control Board nominations are up for first reading today. In March, LL wrote about how the ward makeup of the nominees (three of seven members are from Ward 1) seemed fishy, considering the board is overseen by Ward 1 Councilmember Jim Graham, who has long taken a special interest in the board’s operations. The noms are all going to pass safely, but Ward 8’s Marion Barry, Ward 2’s Jack Evans, Ward 7’s Yvette Alexander, and Ward 5’s Harry Thomas Jr. are all taking issue with the lopsided geographic balance on the board. —Mike DeBonis

Ward 1 Councilmember Jim Graham started out sounding like the accomplished, mature legislator he sometimes can be: “I suspected the D.C. Council has discussed Klingle Road at sufficient length,” he began. “There are even points where I give up….The handwriting is on the wall.”

Phew, thanks Jim, on behalf of the beleaguered political class of the city, we appreciate you sparing us the 2,345th hour of debate about….

“HOWEVER,” he continued, “saying in fact that Klingle will not be a road is a different decision than what this pathway ought to be.”

So another amendment! This one, introduced with the support of colleagues Carol Schwartz and Muriel Bowser, would remove funding to convert Klingle Road to a hike/bike trail, while leaving the decision to close the road intact.

Graham, in his remarks, said he wanted to avoid rehashing all the old arguments but cited a conversation he’d had with transportation director Emeka Moneme last night where Moneme informed him that the official estimate for a hike/bike path is $9.6 million, far outstripping the $2 million so far budgeted. OK, interesting.

Then, in a funny but rhetorically empty exercise, Schwartz quoted the words of main anti-road foe Mary Cheh about how the road was prone to flooding and is located in a gorge: “I like bicyclists! I like pedestrians! I want them to be safe!”

Oh, and then, and then! Bowser, despite Graham’s promise not to rehash the same 17 years of debate, takes the mike and starts rehashing the same goddamn unpersuasive arguments about traffic! Sheezus, Muriel!

The amendment has just failed, 3-10. God help us all.

Pissed About Klingle Road Vote? Following through on his comments earlier today, Ward 1 Councilmember Jim Graham will hold a public roundtable on the matter on Thursday, May 8, at 6:30 p.m. at the John A. Wilson Building. Room TBD. —Mike DeBonis

This afternoon, the D.C. Council’s public works and environment committee voted to strip $2 million meant to reconstruct Klingle Road NW from Mayor Adrian M. Fenty’s budget proposal. Furthermore, the committee voted to add language to budget legislation requiring the road to remain closed, effectively overturning a 2003 council vote to reopen the road.

For LL’s take on the whole sordid story and how it got to this point, read this.

Committee chair and Ward 1 councilmember Jim Graham supported spending the money, as did Ward 4’s Muriel Bowser. Ward 3’s Mary Cheh, Ward 7’s Yvette Alexander, and at-large member Kwame R. Brown opposed doing so. Ward 8’s Marion Barry, though not a committee member, also showed up to speak in support of keeping the road closed.

The full council is free to revisit the decision when the budget legislation moves forward next month.

Updates to come.

UPDATE, 3:50 P.M.: A subsequent amendment by Cheh moves the $2 million in local money to alley repairs and earmarks another $2 million out of the District’s federal funds for environmental remediation of Klingle Valley and construction of a recreation trail.

UPDATE, 4:17 P.M.: After the markup ended, Graham vowed to take the matter to the full council at the May 13 budget session. He also said he intends to hold a public “roundtable” on the Klingle issue in the two weeks interim. “I think there’s going to be a lot of discussion,” he says. During the hearing, Graham had proposed delaying any vote until such a roundtable could be held. Cheh & Co. voted it down; “The public had had ample time….I don’t know anything that’s been debated more than Klingle Road,” she said.

UPDATE, 7:30 P.M.: The Fenty response, from spokesperson Carrie Brooks: “The Mayor will defer to the judgment of the members of the Committee on Public Works and the Environment on this issue. Having served as a councilmember for six years, he certainly appreciates the legislature’s role in shaping the District’s budget.”

Right when you thought the Lincoln Theatre was all cashed out, Mayor Adrian M. Fenty announced earlier today that the District plans to develop two city-owned properties behind the theater and use a portion of the funds generated by the properties to support the theater’s future operations.

Fenty says its his hope that the two properties on the 90,000-square-foot parking lot will bring in enough revenue to help keep the cash-strapped 88-year-old theater afloat.

Early last year, Lincoln officials threatened to shut down the once-popular theater due to lack of finances until the D.C. gov put up a $200,000 grant to keep the doors open. The District also spent another $1.5 million last year for capital improvements that are nearly complete.

Ward 1 Councilmember Jim Graham and At-Large Councilmember Kwame R. Brown also attended the announcement today outside the theaterss U Street entrance.

“We want to bring the Lincoln Theatre where it should be,” said Graham, who has been on the theater’s board for 10 years.

It was a shame the announcement did not take place in the back parking lot so everyone could see where all the action was taking place. The District is requiring that any development will provide ongoing financial support for the theater and include at least 7,500 square feet of flexible event space. Bids for the site are due by July 18 and construction is scheduled to begin by October of this year.

Opened in 1922, the Lincoln Theatre is known for hosting big-name performers, including Billie Holiday and Ella Fitzgerald. Early next month, Maya Angelou is scheduled to celebrate her 80th birthday there. Maybe she can give over her birthday cash to help out?

—Whitney Boyd

The Examiner’s Yeas and Nays has the scoop: Ted Loza, longtime chief of staff to Ward 1 Councilmember Jim Graham, gets pounded by bouncer at Marvin. In a police report, Loza threatens Marvin with “possibly bring[ing] up whether Marvin’s liquor license should be suspended” (the Examiner’s words). —Mike DeBonis

Call him the Franklin Delano Roosevelt of liquor regulation!

Last year, Ward 1 Councilmember Jim Graham held up a pair of nominations to the Alcoholic Beverage Control Board submitted by Mayor Adrian M. Fenty. In February, Graham explained his power move by playing up his plan to reduce the board’s size from seven to five members.

This week, Fenty sent down some new ABC board nominations. Two of the names—Ward 8 engineer Herman O. Jones and Ward 6 statistician and civic leader Nicholas Alberti—are somewhat familiar: They were the two that Graham had obstructed. Two new names show up, however: Charles L. Brodsky and Donald C. Brooks.

And here’s another place they show up: Graham’s donor rolls. Brodsky, an Adams Morgan businessman, gave $100 to him in 2002; Brooks, a longtime city health administrator and also an Adams Morgan resident, gave the same amount, along with his wife, Christine Brooks.

Currently, only four board seats are filled, and two are set to be vacated come June. The board’s current chair, Peter Feather, is a Ward 1 resident (and also a Graham donor), which means that assuming all four of the new nominees are approved, three of six board seats will be occupied by Graham constituents/donors.

But Ward 1 has a lot of liquor licenses, right? Not that many: Only 16 percent of the city’s almost 1,500 active on- and off-premises liquor licenses are located in Ward 1. (If any ward were entitled to multiple members, it’s Ward 2, with 609.)

Back in February, Graham told LL that he and Fenty had worked out a deal, though he didn’t disclose the details at the time. Graham has not responded to a call for comment, but from these developments, the dimensions of the deal look something like this: Graham stopped pressing his bill to shrink the booze board; Fenty reciprocated by nominating two Ward 1′ers.

More to come.

Photo by Darrow Montgomery

Today, news came that the Central Union Mission shelter would not be moving from 14th Street NW to Georgia Avenue NW. The shelter will be relocating to a site close to Union Station. So that makes two enormous homeless shelters within blocks of each other.

Ward One Councilmember Jim Graham participated in the news conference and posted a message on his website crowing over the news. He rejoiced:

“Good news!!! Central Union Mission is not moving to Georgia Avenue in Ward One. It is moving downtown.”

It was all around bad form.

Dcist does an excellent job noting Graham’s apparent happiness. It does an even better job mapping Graham’s contradictions: this is the same guy that pushed to dump a bunch of displaced strip clubs to Ward 5. This DCist post is a must read!

With the Mount Pleasant apartment fire and back history of thousands of code violations, a string of Post stories on crummy landlords, and the announcement today by Peter Nickles heralding a new “sweeping” offensive against slumlords, I have to wonder: Where’s Councilmember Jim Graham?

If you go to the Post’s “Forced Out Map,” so many–if not the majority–of controversial properties are in Graham’s ward. The news of these properties isn’t a surprise. Each of these properties has a history. Graham is great at throwing heat during a council hearing. And he’s wonderful at showing umbrage in front of a reporter. I have no doubt that he’s prevented a number of tenants from eviction. And maybe he’s even helped clean up a building or two. I can’t help but feel Graham could have done much, much more.

I can’t help but wonder where Graham was on these issues years ago. And if he was on these issues, why didn’t he do more to protect tenants? He certainly wasn’t living in these apartments ala Cory Booker.

After the Mount Pleasant fire, Graham was quoted in the Post saying: “This is the classic example of eviction by neglect.” The newspaper of record goes on to describe the councilmember as having “worked on various issues with tenants for years.”

So I’m sure Graham was well aware of the 7,000 code violations from that building. So couldn’t this powerful and savvy councilmember have done more?

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.

On the morning of Jan. 17, teachers and staff at Garnet-Patterson Middle School in Shaw thought their school remained safe from the dreaded D.C. public schools closure list. Hours later, their outlook changed.

Around 3 p.m., Ward 1 Councilmember Jim Graham placed a call to Garnet’s principal, Veda Usilton, letting her now that the plan to close Shaw Junior High School and ship its students and a gifted program over to Garnet could be in jeopardy. Schools Chancellor Michele Rhee, he said, was considering a swap: Shut down Garnet, keep Shaw open.

With a few hours to go before Rhee’s 23 simultaneous school-closure hearings—the public’s last chance to testify on the proposal—Graham wanted Garnet to stand up and show some muscle.

“I had advised her that I believed it was important that some support be established in the record,” he says.

That night, after Ward 2 Councilmember Jack Evans and a variety of other community figures testified on behalf of Shaw, a group of Garnet supporters spoke about how they were blindsided by their school’s potential closure.

“The good people of Shaw have had upwards of three months to gather support from the community. We had three hours. Here at Garnet-Patterson, we need the same time to gather our community members,” said one Garnet teacher.

Toward the end of the meeting, Rhee showed up and confirmed she was considering moving Garnet to the closure list. If the switch were to take place, she added, the Garnet community would get an opportunity for its own hearing.

OK, so that news broke roughly three years ago, followed by a breathy announcement in the Post about the grocery chain’s planned store at 17th and Kalorama, expected to open in fall 2006.

But, this just in, couresy of Jim Graham: The Teet’s actually thinking about hiring people in 2008. There’s a job fair and everything, Jan. 9, at the Columbia Heights Community Center. Can in-store sushi bars and wine shops be so very far away?