We’re headed into the final weekend. So who will have the biggest war chest to blow in the next five days?

According to reports filed earlier this week, Ward 2 incumbent Jack Evans has better than $184,000 in the bank; challenger Cary Silverman has but $3,440. Unopposed at-larger Kwame Brown has $144,000 in the bank. Republican at-large foes Carol Schwartz and Patrick Mara continue to duel; Mara’s spent more thus far, but Schwartz has more in the bank going forward.

But the fattest kitty belongs to Ward 4’s Muriel Bowser, who has been downright thrifty in her expenditures thus far. She has $224,000 banked.

WARD 2

Jack Evans
In: $20,596 ($605,324 total); Out: $48,672 ($420,718 total); Debts/Loans: $0; Cash on Hand: $184,606

The Skinny: Evans breaks the $600,000 mark on a ward council race. He did it with help from law firms Arnold & Porter and Arent Fox (and the latter’s client, D.C. United), developers Forest City Enterprises, and Shaw race-baiter Leroy Thorpe ($200), among many others. In most parts of the country, the state party apparatus raises money to give to its candidates, but not here: Evans gave a hefty $10,000 donation to the D.C. Democratic State Committee. Much of the rest went to canvassers, consultants, and newspaper ads. (That controversial Current spot apparently cost $1,827.)

Cary Silverman
In: $12,591 ($48,360 total); Out: $13,553 ($44,995 total); Debts/Loans: $10,000; Cash on Hand: $3,440

The Skinny: Silverman’s put together a nice little haul, garnering 83 mostly low-dollar-amount donors since Aug. 10. Silverman has also loaned $5,000 to pump up the campaign’s bottom line. Most of the cash has gone to printing and to direct-mail firm Paul & Partners of Dulles, Va.

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LL has been informed that the D.C. Chamber of Commerce has made their endorsements in several of the major D.C. Council primary races. In each of those, incumbents unsurprisingly pulled in the chamber’s nod:

• Ward 2 Democrat: Jack Evans
• Ward 4 Democrat: Muriel Bowser
• Ward 7 Democrat: Yvette M. Alexander
• At-Large Democrat: Kwame R. Brown

The endorsements, made by the chamber’s political action committee, do not include the at-large Republican primary. There, of course, the big question is whether four-term incumbent Carol Schwartz will get the chamber’s nod. Challenger Patrick Mara got the nod from the Greater Washington Board of Trade, a group with a broader scope but similar pro-business interests. Chamber types were not pleased, not pleased at all, with Schwartz’s advocacy on the behalf of mandatory sick leave.

A source says that the delay is due to the fact that neither Schwartz or Mara have been interviewed by the chamber yet; they’ll make their pitches next week. No word on whether a Ward 8 endorsement is forthcoming.

This morning, about 300 members of the area’s hotel employees union gathered in the halls of the John A. Wilson Building to lobby councilmembers on the long-percolating noise bill.

The bill, which aims to put a decibel ceiling on noncommercial speech, has caught labor ire due to concerns that it would curb union protests. (Not all unions are against the bill; local chapters of the Service Employees International Union support it.) It will be up for final vote on tomorrow’s council meeting agenda.

In the union’s sights were two councilmembers who supported a compromise measure that limited noncommercial speech to 80 decibels or 10 decibels above ambient levels: At-Large Councilmember Kwame R. Brown, who introducted the compromise, and Ward 7 Councilmember Yvette Alexander. The union’s preferred solution is through a set of amendments put forth last month by Ward 2 Councilmember Jack Evans that would, among other things, exempt areas containing hotels according to zoning definitions. Those amendments failed at the bill’s first reading last month, but are likely to be introduced again tomorrow.

Union reps took out ads on local radio stations and protested at at least one political event: Alexander’s State of Ward 7 Speech last week.

They’ve bagged at least one of their quarries: Brown, standing in the halls among the red-shirted union folks, told LL that he planned to vote for Evans’ pro-union amendments at tomorrow’s final vote. Alexander, according to top aide J.R. Meyers, “hasn’t made a decision as of yet.”

Brown said that his original amendment, was meant to address nighttime street noise in the Penn Quarter area and that he didn’t realize at the time that this bill would not help solve those problems. “You gotta understand,” he says, “this was during the budget.”

Brown says he’s “disappointed” with the unions when it comes to their media campaign, which invoked Martin Luther King Jr. in an attempt to sway minds against his and Alexander’s original positions. His change of heart on noise, he says, was due to new facts he’s learned since the initial vote. “It really helped me understand why we have two readings,” he said.

When running for political office, incumbency certainly has its benefits. You get your name in the paper all the time. You can send out newsletters on the public dime. You inevitably make deep-pocketed friends who donate to your campaign fund.

And, in Ward 7, you get to hold a “State of the Ward” speech.

Last night, that ward’s councilmember, Yvette Alexander, did just that in the vast expanses of the Kelly Miller Middle School auditorium, and damn if she didn’t do a good job of filling it up, attracting close to 300. (The turnout for her speech far outstripped the turnout for Mayor Adrian M. Fenty’s state-of-the-District speech earlier this year, which was a low-key affair held in the cozy confines of a Ward 7 senior center.)

But here’s LL’s question: Was this simply an opportunity to inform her constituency, or, with the primary just over three months away, a campaign event in disguise?

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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.”

By now, you may have heard of the legal troubles of one James L. Walls Jr., the mayor of District Heights, Md., who was arrested for soliciting a male undercover cop for prostitution early Thursday morning.

Fun fact: Mere hours before Walls was arrested near Verizon Center, he had been hanging out with Ward 7 Councilmember Yvette Alexander at a community meeting in the Prince George’s County burg of Fairmount Heights, where Walls serves as town administrator.

What was Alexander doing across the District line? She had planned to attended a community meeting in her ward, but a scheduling snafu meant that didn’t happen. So she decided to check out the Fairmount Heights meeting and work on those interjurisdictional relations a bit. There, she met Walls.

LL learned of this when he ran into Alexander at the Wilson Building yesterday—before the Walls scandal broke. At that time, Alexander referred to Walls as “an amazing individual.”

When Alexander learned of Walls’ arrest later in the day, she called LL. “I can’t believe this!” she exclaimed between guffaws. “We were just talking about the prostitution on Eastern Avenue.”

LL inquired whether there were any outward signs that Walls might have been on the prowl. Says Alexander, “He had some fancy brown-and-white shoes on.”

Typically, the only time LL’s Thursday-afternoon strolls through the John A. Wilson Building even get a whiff of celebrity are the occasional Dan Tangherlini sighting in the mayoral bullpen. (Governance rock star, that guy!) But not this week.

Yesterday afternoon, distinguished Spanish tenor and Washington National Opera general director Plácido Domingo spent more than an hour roaming the building with a pair of WNO bigwigs in tow, as well as an official photographer. (Yes, LL had his picture taken with the maestro.) His rounds took him to the offices of most councilmembers.

A couple of members asked for a command performance from the tenor, including Ward 7 Councilmember Yvette Alexander and Ward 4 Councilmember Muriel Bowser, who rated his pipes as “excellent.”

Domingo treated Bowser and staff to a bit of Gounod’s “Ave Maria.” “We got a good taste, I think,” she said. Her chief of staff, Joy Holland, chimed in: “The first 10 bars, which is a good taste.”

So why exactly was Domingo roaming the Wilson Building halls? To ask for money, duh.

Later today, a panel of WNO bigwigs (not including Domingo) will appear before the council to make their case for a city subsidy. The mayor’s proposed list of budget earmarks leaves the opera out in the cold, even though such cultural organizations as the Washington Ballet ($1 million), Ford’s Theatre ($10 million), and the Ward 7 Arts Collaborative ($100,000) are currently in the money.

Domingo’s appeal played up the need for greater resources for arts-education programs. He then had to be rushed out to rehearse for his upcoming role in Handel’s Tamerlano.

Washington Post this morning reports that the Fenty administration has been a bit selective in dishing out coveted tickets to the Washington Nationals. Some D.C. councilmembers get ‘em, but Fenty leaves others off the list.

Those left on deck include At-Largers Phil Mendelson ,Carol Schwartz, and Kwame Brown. Not hard to figure out why those people would get stiffed, considering that they have shown little hesitancy to put a little water in the tank of the Fenty machine.

Another shunned councilmember: Ward 7 rep Yvette Alexander. What’s the deal here? Alexander hasn’t done much antagonizing of any sort since replacing Vincent Gray, who jumped from the Ward 7 seat to the council chairmanship in 2006.

So the verdict is this: Ticketgate is part petty pique and part disarray/incompetence. Right in line with a grand District tradition, in other words.

In a town where Barack Obama got better than 75 percent of the vote, this wasn’t supposed to happen. But it did anyway: Hillary Clinton picked up an extra District delegate to the Democratic National Convention last night. For that, Obama supporters have only their own to blame.

The D.C. Democratic State Committee met in the John A. Wilson Building for almost three hours to select a pair of unpledged add-on “superdelegates.” More than 20 signed up to run for the two slots, voted on by the 80-odd members of the committee. “Unpledged” in this case is a bit misleading; most delegate candidates’ presidential preferences were already widely known to voters.

The days and weeks before the vote saw furious lobbying of the 80-some committee members—especially on the Obama side—to sway votes to their presidential candidate. Obama organizers hoped to prevent a split vote by steering support to two delegate candidates: Ward 7 Councilmember Yvette Alexander, a longtime state committee member and favorite of the old guard, and lawyer Miriam Sapiro, a relative unknown favored by the grassroots types.

Though a number of the 25 candidates on the ballot withdrew before the vote, seven Obama supporters ended up running, while only two Clinton supporters only three Clinton supporters only two Clinton supporters stood: Ward 5 Councilmember Harry Thomas Jr., Ward 3 resident Mary Ann Miller, and lawyer and ex-council staffer Aimee Occhetti.

Clinton’s name never came up in Thomas’ brief remarks before the vote; he instead chose to talk up his own qualifications and big-picture issues. “The issue is what are we going to do when we get to Denver that best represents the District of Columbia,” he said. (Rumors had swirled that Thomas planned to switch to Obama, but Thomas knocked those down after the vote: “I haven’t changed,” he says. “I’m consistent.”)

The actual candidates’ names rarely came up, in fact. The division within the Obama camp was briefly aired when candidate Linda Nguyen rose to say, “I only have 2 minutes to convince you to vote for me…not someone you promised the mayor you’d vote for.” That earned her hearty boos from the crowd. (Line of the night, though, came from Occhetti: “If you call me at 3 a.m., I will definitely try to answer the phone.”)

In the end, Alexander cruised to victory, but Sapiro came up two votes short; she got 22 to Thomas’ 24. Check after the jump for a full tally of the results (i.e., which Obama folks didn’t get with the program).

Delegate Potpourri

• Unsurprisingly, Council Chairman Vincent C. Gray and At-Large Councilmember Kwame R. Brown took the two spots reserved for PLEOs—party leaders and elected officials. Shadow Rep. Mike Panetta appeared on the original ballot but withdrew before the vote. In remarks after the vote, Gray said, “My life’s aspiration has been to be a PLEO. I’ve finally arrived!” Panetta says he plans to run for an alternate pledged at-large spot set to be selected on May 3. Barring that, committee chair Anita Bonds announced to the crowd that Panetta would be serving as the delegation’s Official Blogger in Denver. Says Panetta: “One way or another, I’ll be there.”
• Ward 2 Councilmember Jack Evans showed early in the meeting to greet the crowd but quickly left. Since the decision came down that both PLEOs were to be Obama-pledged, Evans did not appear on the ballot. Gray announced after voting that Evans would be running at the May 3 meeting for a pledged at-large slot for Clinton; Gray lobbied the crowd on Evans’ behalf.

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At-Large Councilmember Kwame R. Brown’s gotten a fair amount of attention for his campaign conveyance, a huge blue conversion van plastered with Kwame Brown-in-’08 decals.

Sorry, Kwame, you no longer are king of campaign transpo. Ward 7 Councilmember Yvette Alexander has you beat.

This monster was parked outside the Washington Senior Wellness Center this afternoon in advance of the mayor’s State of the District speech.

What the Yvettemobile lacks in sign dimensions is more than made up for by the sheer mass of its conveyance. Alexander’s campaign manager, Darryl Rose, says the pickup—made by semi-tractor manufacturer International—is all his. “It won’t be showing up on any campaign finance reports,” he says. The Alexander sign is magnetic and can easily attached and removed for campaign functions.

Rose showed off the remote-start function, and then LL climbed up—way up—into the cockpit to sample the truck’s leather seating and premium audio system (sample CD: Bobby Brown’s The Definitive Collection).

LL did not peek under the hood, but Rose vouches for the horsepower. “It’s got a tractor-trailer motor,” he says. “A big ole motor.”

“We’re just using it to help re-elect” Alexander, Rose says. “It gets a lot of attention.”

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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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.

This week, Loose Lips ran his Secret Santa column, resurrecting a tradition in which LL gives back to all those who have given him so much. Problem is, LL had to skip of lot of deserving folks in the Wilson Building and elsewhere, which has made for several unhappy politicos. All this week, LL’s been going around, saying he’d make a “supplemental appropriation.”

That’s a job I’m pawning off on you, readers. Here’s a selection of folks LL didn’t have room in his stocking to bestow with gifts, but are probably deserving all the same. Let ‘em have it in the comments:

• Ward 1 Councilmember Jim Graham
• Ward 2 Councilmember Jack Evans
• Ward 3 Councilmember Mary Cheh
• Ward 4 Councilmember Muriel Bowser
• Ward 6 Councilmember Tommy Wells
• Ward 7 Councilmember Yvette Alexander
• At-Large Councilmember Kwame Brown
• At-Large Councilmember Carol Schwartz
• Deputy Mayor for Planning and Economic Development Neil Albert
• Fire Chief Dennis Rubin
• Fenty Communications Director Carrie Brooks
• Soon-to-be-former Attorney General Linda Singer
• Legendary tax thief Harriette Walters
• And anyone else is fair game, too…

Last night, the D.C. Democratic State Committee held its holiday party and presidential straw poll at the 18th Amendment bar on Capitol Hill.

The big winner: New York Sen. Hillary Clinton, who won a narrow victory—55 votes to 49—over Illinois Sen. Barack Obama. John Edwards, Sens. Joe Biden and Christopher Dodd, and Bill Richardson captured another 18 votes between them.

The other big winner: The District Dems themselves, who seem to have righted the ship after nearly depleting their bank account earlier this year (Loose Lips, “Democrats’ Checkbook Dwindles,” 4/27). According to committee chair Anita Bonds, the committee has money in the bank (she declines to say how much, citing still-pending bills), thanks largely to the group’s Kennedys-King dinner last month—the first such dinner in three years. “We’re in much better financial shape, and we’re grateful for that,” she says.

Event organizer Phil Pannell says the party helped line the coffers, raising about $2,000 in $10-a-head door fees. It’s almost enough to comfort Pannell, an Obama supporter: “To be honest about it, I was really surprised he lost,” Pannell says. He says 34 ballots that went unreturned might have made a difference. “Maybe people just got caught up in the party,” he says.

If so, he’s got no one to blame but himself. The night’s entertainment was karaoke, and the room didn’t show much interest in taking the mike before Pannell kicked things off with a snappy “Mack the Knife.”

From there, it was showtime for the east-of-the-river council delegation, past and present: Former Ward 8 Councilmember Sandy Allen did Etta James‘ “At Last,” and Ward 7’s Yvette Alexander indulged in a solid rendition of Bobby Caldwell’s 1978 classic “What You Won’t Do for Love.” After LL left, Alexander reports, she switched to more contemporary repertoire and gave an encore rendition of Jill Scott’s “My Love.”

But Ward 8 Councilmember Marion Barry stole the show with a ferocious take on T-Bone Walker’s classic “Call It Stormy Monday.” Barry later sang back up for a rendition of the Temptations’ “My Girl.”

His performance may have been enough to capture some hearts and minds: There was one write-in vote—for Barry.

NB: LL has a dark, fuzzy photo of Barry at the mike, but he’s having trouble getting it off his phone.