This morning, Department of Public Works staffer Kevin Twine sent an email to several Northwest D.C. neighborhood listservs, informing residents of the ticketing snafu:

"To ease the parking burden created by the Nuclear Security Summit, the DC Department of Public Works issued a news release April 9, 2010 advising motorists that vehicles parked within the boundaries below, between April 12-14, would not be ticketed for residential street cleaning.  Some motorists did receive these tickets in error and the tickets will be voided automatically.

Streets within which street cleaning ticketing was suspended from April 12 to 14:

• Florida Avenue, NW (northern boundary).
• H Street, NW (southern boundary).
• 5^th Street, NW (eastern boundary).
• 15^th Street, NW (western boundary).

Please contact me directly if you have any problems.  I do apologize for any confusion or inconvenience this may have caused.

 Regards,

Kevin"

Ward 8 Councilmember Marion Barry's on-again, off-again boycott went off again yesterday afternoon, when the mayor-for-life called LL to take issue with his "silly" item on Barry's new wheels.

To recap: LL noted that Barry is now driving an aging Toyota Corolla; it bears tags registered to the BMW that Barry used to drive and which happen to have $465 of parking tickets associated with them.

"You don't have anything better to do except write about tags [with] all the great problems of this city?" he asked. "Why don't you find something else to do?...Small minds think small."

Barry has a point. LL, however, retorted with a version of one of Barry's own lines: Don't judge him on one teensy blog item, but by his larger body of work!

Barry assured LL that the Toyota's tags had been legitimately transferred from his BMW, now unrepairable with a busted engine block, to the temporary Toyota while his dealer locates a more suitable ride.

"I'm looking for a Jaguar, a Mercedes, or a BMW," says Barry, currently in hock to the federal and District government for back taxes.

As for the four tickets he owes, Barry says he found out about them last week and immediately challenged them. Three of them were too old to challenge, he says, but he's pressing on with the fourth.

"Write it straight now," he told LL.

Stop Ticketing Us: Some fed-up parents complain they’ve been ticketed for years; and although the school tried to distribute decals for parents to display on their windshields, the informal agreement did not dissuade parking enforcement administrators. Parent Andrea Brobgins, who has received two tickets, told City Desk: “They should at least have a safety zone. I’m so scared to get a ticket, I stay in my car. Luckily I have a high school student who can go get my kids, otherwise I don’t know what I’d do.”

It's Rush Hour: According to a D.C. Department of Transportation (DDOT) study on a nearby portion of L Street, “This section is experiencing congestion and numerous parking related problems…the major aggravator is illegal parking.” DDOT spokesman John Lisle says: "If we make an adjustment to the hours, there could be other impacts, like on rush hour traffic. It's something we'd have to look into."

Next Step: Pamela Johnson, another Thomson parent who has repeatedly contacted DDOT and the office of D.C. Council Chair Vincent Gray seeking relief, is on a crusade! Petition? Protest? Lisle says DDOT is looking into solutions such as extending the standing-only time until after 6. In the meantime, beware the meter maid.

Photo by Alicegop, Creative Commons Attribution License

Colbert King recently wrote a column on the racial paranoia bubbling up on Cleveland Park's listserv. He followed up our own blog post on the subject. Whether residents there are racist or not we can not say. Those stories only prove that people still live in Cleveland Park. There are always the holdouts.

Video and more, below the jump!

With all the bad news surrounding Cleveland Park, we were a bit scared to visit its Connecticut Ave. strip. Had it succumbed to a sort of lawlessness? Were people freaking out over their 'hood losing its Slurpee machine? Would there even be anyone around to talk to? Had its residents started migrating to the hipper Van Ness, a neighborhood that can actually support a Starbucks?

One thing we did prove: You can still get a parking ticket in Cleveland Park.

Much has been made of the District's plan to step up enforcement of parking restrictions all around town. The push will affect nightclubbers who try to press their luck in all of those spaces just shy of intersections, not to mention street-sweeping violators: The machines that roar down the alternating sides of certain D.C. streets will be equipped with cameras to nail all scofflaw automobiles in their way.

On Saturday, I observed the new municipal attitude in force. I spied a late-model Infiniti parked pretty unobtrusively on 15th Street NW, just shy of O Street. The car was squarely out of the residential parking perimeter but was well short of the intersection and posed a limited hazard—it was a car, and not an SUV, so there weren't any issues with blocked visibility. But there was the purple rectangle of dread on the windshield. It had been issued at 11:30 pm on Friday, evidence that the no-tolerance policies of a decade ago making a comeback.

OK, so what's news? Well, the WaPo ombo, Andy Alexander, declared himself in favor of the Post's having gone with a Web-only treatment for Paul Duggan's two-part narrative on the killing of 32-year-old Robert Wone, the most fascinating murder the city has perhaps ever seen. Alexander thought that the paper's editors made a good choice here, which puts him at odds with me!

Federer!

Those of us who've been following the news at least cursorily over the past year know that off all the U.S. automakers, Ford has been dealing with the downturn best. But that doesn't mean that if you're writing an article about the company's performance, you have to borrow from their own advertising copy. Here's Katherine Timpf of the Washington Times:

Amid bankruptcies and forecasts of Detroit doom, one of the Big Three is hanging tough. Ford tough.

The New York Times Magazine asks: Can Shakira make early childhood education the No. 1 priority in Latin America? And I state: I would have to be unemployed, stranded somewhere, with no cell phone, no Internet, no one to talk to, no billboards or nature to observe, to even consider reading such a story.

Oh, the drama! Read on to see whether the writer of the Post's story on regional cabin accommodations manages to strike up a fire on her very last match!