Late Friday, Attorney General Peter Nickles released an opinion stating that the D.C. Housing Authority is required to vet its contracts worth $1 million per year or more through the D.C. Council.

That was a nice, if unexpected twist to the disclosure that his boss, Mayor Adrian M. Fenty, had sent $82M in parks construction contracts to DCHA in such a way as to elude council oversight. For once, it seemed, Nickles had put the kibosh on a pet Fenty project.

Today, in a one-page memo [PDF], Nickles says that's actually not true.

Read More "Nickles: Parks Contracts Are OK After All" »

You have questions about the $82 million dollars in parks-and-rec spending that Mayor Adrian M. Fenty is sending to the D.C. Housing Authority? LL has (some) answers!

What are these projects?

According to data furnished by the D.C. Council, they are 12 projects to renovate 12 parks or recreation facilities. One, to build a $1.3 million ballpark at Emery Rec Center, was awarded in January. The rest---concerning 7th and N park ($800,000), Bald Eagle Rec Center ($5.3M), Barry Farm Rec Center ($15M), Chevy Chase Playground ($1.3M), Fort Stanton Rec Center ($12M), Guy Mason Rec Center ($3M), Justice Park ($12M), Kenilworth Rec Center ($12M), Park View ballfield ($1.2M), Rosedale Rec Center ($16M), and a new park in LeDroit Park ($1.7M)---were awarded last month.

Read More "Fenty’s DCHA Contracts: Some Questions" »

Attorney General Peter Nickles has determined that the D.C. Housing Authority must send its million-dollar-plus contracts to the D.C. Council for approval.

Such a determination comes less than 24 hours after news broke that the Mayor Adrian M. Fenty has sent a dozen parks-and-rec construction projects worth $81.6 million to DCHA in a manner that eluded council oversight. The contracts subsequently awarded by DCHA have gone to firms with close ties to Fenty---raising a whole lot of question about the process.

The opinion released this evening came in response to a question posed today by DCHA. In it, Nickles relies on a 1996 corporation counsel opinion that addressed an almost identical question.

So what does this mean?

Read More "Nickles: DCHA Contracts Must Go to D.C. Council" »

Mayor Adrian M. Fenty and his human services director need to get on the same page.

For the last month or so, the Fenty administration has been getting hammered on surprise cuts to homeless services. Dozens of providers cried foul after they were notified by the Community Partnership for the Prevention of Homelessness that, due to trying economic times, their budgets stood to be cut by 15 percent or more.

A week ago, Fenty made with some answers. In his weekly wee-hours appearance with WRC-TV's Barbara Harrison, he called the perception that homeless funding was being cut "either a miscommunication or a distortment of the facts" (forward to 3:30).

Read More "Fenty’s Explanation of Homeless Cuts Doesn’t Hold Water" »

Mayor Adrian M. Fenty has again raided the private sector for an agency head: Bryan D. Sivak, 34, is his new chief technology officer.

Sivak replaces interim CTO Chris Willey, who in turn replaced Vivek Kundra, who exited the Fenty administration for a top federal job in the Office of Management and Budget.

Like transportation director Gabe Klein, Sivak is coming from well outside the governmental sphere. He is a founder of software firm InQuira---an Silicon Valley outfit that has done projects for the like of Nokia, T-Mobile, and the British Ministry of Defense. This will be Sivak's first stint living in the District.

"I'm more of an innovator than anything else," he said at a One Judiciary Square press conference this morning.

Well, we've got about 11 months before the all-important 2010 District of Columbia primaries. Just enough time, in other words, for candidates to gather some early information on how they stand with the city's electorate.

Which means polls!

Two of which City Desk has gotten some details on over the past couple of days. Details below.

Read More "It’s Polling Season in D.C. Politics" »

Apparently the dispute between Mayor Adrian M. Fenty and Cora Masters Barry's Recreation Wish List Committee over the operations of the Southeast and Tennis Learning Center has been settled.

The Fenty camp just put out this statement: "All parties involved are satisfied with today's settlement agreement, and look forward to working together to ensure that District residents and children receive high quality public recreation services."

Now the Fenty release includes no details on what exactly that agreement is, thank you very much.

Barry, from her office today, also declined to discuss details of the settlement, but that it allows RWLC to continue its work at the center. ""I'm just glad it's behind us so that we can keep on doing what we do with these kids," she says.

UPDATE, 3:45 P.M.: Here's the addendum to the agreement signed by both RWLC and the city:

Read More "Southeast Tennis and Learning Center Dispute Is Settled" »

Fifty-one percent of District residents polled in recent days disapprove of Mayor Adrian M. Fenty's job performance, according to WJLA-TV, and get this---"even more believe he cares more about advancing his career than about the city's needs."

The poll, echoing another poll done earlier this summer, shows an emerging racial split on Hizzoner. Where 23 percent of blacks approved of Fenty, 66 percent of whites approved.

And members of his own party like him less than others: "Among Democrats, Fenty had a 54-percent disapproval rating. Throughout the survey, Democrats judged Fenty more harshly than Republicans or independents, who make up a very small percentage of District voters."

Read More "Majority of Voters Polled Disapprove of Fenty" »

Why is Leo Alexander running for mayor?

LL stopped by his kickoff event at the Channel Inn on Monday evening to ask the 45-year-old Brightwood resident and newcomer to electoral politics the first question any decent reporter is obligated to ask a candidate---especially one convinced (deluded?) that he can knock off well-financed incumbent Adrian M. Fenty.

His response: "I'm running because of the suffering that's going on in our community," the former TV reporter and government spokesperson says. "No one has a plan to attack generational poverty in our community."

Read More "Leo Alexander Explains His D.C. Mayor Run" »

Another candidate is announcing a challenge to Mayor Adrian M. Fenty and his $2.5 million war chest: Leo Alexander, a former WRC-TV newscaster, is announcing a mayoral run tonight.

Alexander will join Sulaimon Brown, a former Fenty 2006 volunteer, as Fenty's only declared competition for the 2010 race.

Alexander was a Channel 4 reporter in the mid-1990s before moving on to communications jobs for the D.C. General Hospital and the D.C. Housing Authority. A Brightwood resident since 1999, Alexander now works in insurance sales and has been active in the Brightwood Civic Association and the D.C. Federation of Civic Associations.

Read More "Leo Alexander Joins 2010 Mayoral Fray" »

The Metropolitan Police Department's "All Hands on Deck" initiative violates the terms of officers' labor contract and must be ended, an arbitrator has ruled.

"AHODs," three-day periods during which all sworn police officers are required to work eight-hour patrol shifts, have been a favorite tool of Mayor Adrian M. Fenty and Chief Cathy L. Lanier since 2007. They've credited the initiative with being at least partly responsible for record low levels of violent crime. But police union officials have long decried the AHODs as essentially a publicity stunt that generate goodwill for politicians at the expense of rank-and-file officers. The Fraternal Order of Police filed a grievance challenging the practice earlier this year.

In an opinion released today [PDF], arbitrator John C. Truesdale largely agreed with the union's arguments, ruling that the AHODs violated several terms of the police contract. He declined to take into account the policing value of the AHODs, calling them "apparently well received in the District of Columbia." But due to the contract violations, he ordered the department to rescind the 2009 AHOD order and pay time-and-a-half overtime to officers who participated in the six AHODs that have taken place this year.

Read More "No More ‘All Hands on Deck’ for D.C. Cops, Ruling Says" »

Some folks might be satisfied with the "innocent explanation" presented in this morning's Washington Post editorial on the enrollment of Mayor Adrian Fenty's twin sons at Lafayette Elementary:

Mr. Fenty's neighborhood school, West Elementary, has only one fourth-grade class. Most studies show that twins, particularly if they are of the same gender, should be in separate classes for both learning and social development. That's apparently why Ms. Rhee -- using a process employed for other families in similar circumstances -- assigned the boys to Lafayette, where the existence of four fourth-grade classes made it easy to accommodate them. The school is also in Ward 4, where the Fentys live.

Some folks, on the other hand, might not be satisfied.

Read More "Why the WaPo’s Fenty Schooling ‘Explanation’ Is Not Convincing" »

There's been much hand-wringing of late over @MayorFenty, assumed to be Hizzoner's official Twitter feed.

But something wasn't quite right about it. The first tweet, on July 27, informed the world that this was a summer-jobs project. There's the poor design and copyediting, not up to the EOM's usual standards. Then there was the repeated admonitions to "stay in school!" And today comes a strangely relevant tweet.

Yesterday, LL was intrigued as to why Hizzoner's profile contained the line, "For more information about this profile contact McKennaLong & Aldridge c/o Jessica Abrahams,or Badele McQueen Esqs."

McQueen, reached yesterday at the law firm, had no idea what was up with that.

So LL asked mayoral communications director Mafara Hobson, who says her office has nothing to do with the @MayorFenty Twitter page. Someone's freelancing! "It's not ours," she e-mails. "Can you get the word out?"

A Twitter feed might be helpful for that!

Mayor Adrian M. Fenty - or, rather, his Twitter stand-in, if anyone wants to own up to serving in that role - asked in a tweet early this morning: "Do DC residents want District government officials twitter use to be for entertainment, news or answering questions from voters?"

One word, @MayorFenty: entertainment!

This morning, Chancellor Michelle A. Rhee went on WTOP radio and said more than Mayor Adrian M. Fenty has about the process by which Hizzoner's twin sons ended up enrolled at out-of-boundary Lafayette Elementary.

"I can assure you that no rules were broken," Rhee said. "We have a number of provisions that allow kids to go to out-of-boundary schools and all of those things were followed."

It's not a complete explanation by any means, but it's something. Rhee seems to grasp in some way what Fenty has not: That questions about his kids' schooling concerns the integrity of a process relied upon by many parents in this town, and that they are questions that have implications for his grand project of school reform.

Since Fenty has made it quite clear that he will answer no questions about this issue, LL will not be asking him any further questions about the matter for the time being, barring further developments and the results of several records requests. But here's a rhetorical question for Hizzoner: Why do this?

Read More "The Last Word on Lafayette Elementary. For Now." »