Since he moved last month to hold $27 million from the D.C. Public Schools budget over an enrollment dispute, Council Chairman Vincent C. Gray has been pleading for an answer to a simple question: Where are the schoolchildren that DCPS is projecting will enroll this fall---more than 3,000 more than if longstanding trends hold---going to come from?

Now Gray's crowing, because he says DCPS Chancellor Michelle A. Rhee has admitted he has a point in a letter sent to him yesterday.

In the letter, Rhee cites the work of independent researchers in coming up with the projections, but writes, "I understand your hesitance to accept the projected increase in enrollment....Based upon the assumptions we outlined...we believe we have sound evidence and data to suggest that DCPS's enrollment of October 2009 will increase slightly....However, as I shared with you Friday, I cannot guarantee that this will occur."

Gray sees vindication therein: "Basically, what I think it says is [that] I think we'll be proven right on the number," Gray said this morning at the council breakfast meeting. "It says in a lot of words that they don't know where 3,073 people are coming from."

As for a modus vivendi, a compromise has been fashioned: The council will vote today to restore DCPS funding on the October 2008 enrollment figure---meaning DCPS is free to spend about $24 million of the $27 million that council had threatened to place in escrow. The remaining $3 million will be set aside pending an audit of the fall enrollment.

For next year, however, Rhee and Gray have agreed to work together to "develop a uniform method by which enrollment projections will be completed by both DCPS and the charter schools." That would aim to end the inequity in the mechanics of charter funding versus DCPS funding: Charters have to refund money accepted due to overprojections, but DCPS doesn't.

Last week, on his way out of the door for a long weekend, LL threw up a post about how D.C. Public Schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee, faced with threats from the D.C. Council to cut $27 million from her fiscal 2010 budget over an enrollment dispute, had sent letters to her principals telling them that their budgets are set to be cut.

Therein, LL asked a couple of questions: Why cut teachers first? Aren't there central-office savings to be reaped?

This week, some answers came to those questions, from DCPS spokesperson Jennifer Calloway. "DCPS has cut the central office budget to the bare minimum," she writes in a statement, "reducing spending over the past 2 years while significantly increasing funding going directly to schools."

"Central office," by the way, is shorthand for all school-system functionaries who aren't directly serving students in schools---not just those who work at DCPS headquarters at 825 North Capitol Street. And if the central office has indeed been cut to the bone, Rhee will have accomplished quite something.

Read More "DCPS: Central Office Budget Cut ‘to the Bare Minimum’" »

The mayor and at least a half-dozen councilmembers in in Las Vegas today for the International Council of Shopping Centers' annual retail real estate convention. So where the party at?

In the Wynn Las Vegas' Alsace Room:

Law firm Arent Fox (new employer of Tony Williams, as it happens) is hosting the signature event for local politicos at this year's Vegas confab.

Question is, how many "other District of Columbia officials" will show at an event headlined by Adrian Fenty? With council resentment inflamed by tickets, travel, and what have you---and the chance for a repeat of last year's Vegas conflict, when Fenty's people scheduled meetings separate from councilmembers---things could get, um, interesting. LL had heard late last week that Yvette Alexander had been the only councilmember to RSVP. For LL's sake, he hopes everyone shows up: Nothing like clashing personalities, booze, and a small room far away from home to create LL-caliber drama.

He'll be taking party reports.

Mayor Adrian M. Fenty has finally handed over the Nationals tickets demanded by D.C. Council Chairman Vincent C. Gray and colleagues.

Gray informed fellow councilmembers in an e-mail late yesterday that the tickets had been delivered earlier that day by a Fenty staffer.

The handover comes one day after Neil O. Albert was named city administrator. A source says Albert moved to solve the ticket problem as one of his first official acts---perhaps as a gesture of goodwill, perhaps in recognition that mayoral requests for changes to budget legislation wouldn't have a chance otherwise.

More to come Monday.

UPDATE, 1:50 P.M.: Gray tells LL he did indeed speak to Albert yesterday afternoon, and that Albert explained to him that he wanted to make settling the ticket feud his first official act as city administrator. The tickets were delivered within hours. Gray, speaking en route to catching a flight to Las Vegas for the yearly shopping centers convention, says there was no deal discussed, nothing mentioned by Albert that the mayor would be expecting in return. Not that Gray would be willing to entertain such a deal with regard to the tickets: "They're our property," he says.

Sussing out the backstory here is a tough. Why would Albert be the peacemaker here? Looks to LL like Fenty's using the fortuitous timing of Dan Tangherlini's exit to put an end to a conflict Hizzoner clearly didn't think would persist as long as it has. By having Albert serve as the peacemaker here, it gives Fenty a somewhat face-saving exit (somewhat!) by giving his old CA a bit of a kick as he goes out the door---making it seem as though he were the source of the pettiness all along. Could that be? Well, Tangherlini's played hardball with the council before, particularly on the issue of withholding executive witnesses from council hearings, but the ticket tussle has smelled like a Fenty production from the beginning.

Baseball tickets: Remember them?

That insubstantial issue indicative of much larger problems reappeared today when Council Chairman Vincent C. Gray wrote Mayor Adrian M. Fenty a terse letter this afternoon asking, in effect, what's up with this?

"We are at a loss to understand why you and the Nationals have allowed this absurdity to happen again," Gray writes, referring to last year's similar conflict. "We look forward to you putting an end to this unnecessary distraction by immediately providing my office with the remainder of this season's tickets that belong to the Council for our constituents."

Gray closes, "You have never communicated with us to explain why you chose to take the tickets and then to keep them. We await your immediate response so this situation, once and for all, can be resolved."

LL asked both Fenty and Attorney General Peter Nickles about the letter this afternoon. Nickles simply ignored LL; Fenty tried a classic move: "We're still working on the budget!" he said.

LL asked if that meant things stood exactly the same place as they did the last time anyone asked; Fenty said, "Yes."

Full letter after jump.

Read More "Gray to Fenty: Gimme Tickets; Fenty to World: Eat It" »

Yesterday, after the D.C. Council voted to hold back on some $27 million in D.C. Public Schools funding, Chancellor Michelle A. Rhee wasted no time writing a nastygram [PDF] to Vincent C. Gray and his colleagues.

The letter laid out all the money that would have to be pulled from schools---itemized and broken down by ward. (Smart move: Hey, Harry Thomas, want to explain to your constituents why you voted to cut $3.9 million from Ward 5 schools?)

This wasn't the first letter Rhee had sent Gray and the council.

Last week, she had sent another missive [PDF], asking the council to reconsider its moves to cut the budget of the Deputy Mayor of Education's office and to remove the State Board of Education from the Office of the State Superintendent of Education. Rhee says the council moves, which were ratified yesterday, "begin to erode the structure established by and the progress which has ensued under" school reform legislation passed in 2007.

Much of the letter concerns the decision to take the Interagency Collaboration and Service Integration Commission (aka ICSIC---"ick-sick") out of DME Victor Reinoso's shop and put it in the DCPS Office of Youth Engagement. That office, Rhee writes, "is building twilight programs, student attendance and truancy initiatives, and the Youth Engagement Academy," and as such "cannot take on the additional responsibilities of ICSIC without diverting its focus from these other important initiatives." Better, she says, to leave it with Reinoso, where it "has the force of the Mayor's office to coordinate across agencies and the dedicated focus and resources which would otherwise be lost in the day-to-day functions of another agency."

Rhee also takes issue with the council's move to pump up the SBOE's independence, saying it is "likely to lessen the policy focus of the Board and create the temptation to micromanage" and claiming that moving the school ombudsman's office under their aegis "is likely to politicize" that operation.

In closing, she writes, "we need to continue our progress within the structure and the time line promulgated by the Act. It is too early to turn back."

Full letter after the jump.

Read More "Michelle Rhee Annoyed By Council’s School Governance Moves" »

This morning, D.C. Council Chairman Vincent C. Gray convened a press conference with 11 of his colleagues to go over their proposed markup changes to the FY2010 District budget. It was a standing-room-only affair, at least in the beginning, but as councilmember after councilmember rose to detail his or her recommendations, it got real tedious real fast. Be glad LL was there so you didn't have to be. Herewith, the highlights:

---Marion Barry showed up by 9:45 a.m.---by far the earliest LL has ever seen him in the John A. Wilson Building. He explained he had come straight from the airport, after flying in from Oakland, Calif., where he was attending a conference of the National Association of Black Public Administrators. Harry Thomas Jr., the only councilmember not to attend the briefing, remained there. In a strong voice, Barry explained how he "almost jumped out of...my chair" when he saw what the Fenty budget proposal did to charter facilities funding. "I called the chairman, said, 'Good afternoon; you got your $10 [million]."

---Streetlight Maintenance Fee looks to be gone. Jim Graham, Jack Evans, and Gray all committed to finding the $12 million to make the proposed electric-bill add-on go away.

---As previously mentioned, Emancipation Day will remain a public holiday.

---No Class 3 property-tax relief---for now. The controversial hike on vacant-property tax rates was widely expected to be expunged though the budget process, but Evans says the council will take up the matter after the budget process. Same goes for reform measures at the Board of Real Property Assessment Appeals---everyone agrees it's necessary, but not necessary to deal with in the budget.

Read More "Streetlight Fee No More, and Other Budget Potpourri" »

Looks like Vince-'n'-Victor show has turned into a bit more than a show. More than that, it looks like the baseball ticket feud between the council and Mayor Adrian M. Fenty has given way to conflict much more substantive.

According to a budget report released tonight, Council Chairman Vincent C. Gray is proposing to cut the office of Deputy Mayor for Education Victor Reinoso by some 80 percent. Where the mayor had proposed a $4.04 million budget for the office, Gray is proposing outlaying only $778,000 for the office. He proposes taking the office from 21 employees down to seven.

In other big news, all the lobbying by charter schools and their advocates has paid off: Gray's looking to restore $16.7 million to the charter facilities budget (though not the full $24 million). Where did the council find much of the money to do so? From Fenty's beloved summer jobs program.

The proposed reduction in the deputy mayor's budget corresponds to a movement of various functions out of Reinoso's shop and into others. Some agency oversight functions are being transferred to the State Superintendent of Education; the Interagency Collaboration and Service Integration Commission and its $2.3 million budget is being sent to the DCPS Office of Youth Engagement; and the schools ombudsman will fall under the State Board of Education's purview.

As for charter facilities funding, under the committee plan, the method of funding will remain the same for another year, delaying the mayoral effort to move to a "cost-based" system. However, the formula will decrease from $3,100 per student to $2,800 per student.

If you think mayor-council relations were bad before, consider this a declaration of all-out war. Gray is taking direct aim at what Fenty considers the cornerstone of his mayoral legacy: public education reform. Reinoso was tasked with being Fenty's big-picture, behind-the-scenes guy responsible for steering the whole educational ship in the District, from early education to charter schools to facilities management to DCPS to UDC. But Gray never saw much strategic direction out of Reinoso's office, and it didn't help that Reinoso repeatedly clashed with Gray when he testified before him---if he testified at all.

That's borne out by the report, which reads, "[S]ince the creation of the Office of the Deputy Mayor for Education, no statewide education strategy has been created or established, even though approximately $2 billion is invested annually in public education in the District of Columbia, not including the District’s educational facilities capital program....The Committee is concerned that there is a continuing environment of uncoordinated efforts, initiatives, and budgets between early childhood education, the traditional public schools and charter schools, and the University of the District of Columbia, as well as the strategic planning of educational facilities for all public education sectors."

The slap being delivered by raiding the Summer Youth Employment Program for $10 million is even more vicious for who is delivering it: Marion Barry, the father of the summer jobs program and current chair of the committee on housing and workforce development. It's rare for a committee chair to willingly give up a huge chunk of the budget under his oversight, but make no mistake that Barry considers it worth it to send a message to Fenty.

The plan is still subject to a vote by the full council---this is the committee of the whole, after all---but expect Vince to have the votes on this one.

UPDATE, 12:30 A.M.: After having a closer look at the COW report, LL realizes he may have buried the lede. Gray is proposing to essentially triple the proposed budget of the State Board of Education and to make it "a separate entity within the District of Columbia Government, with sufficient resources and staff to fulfill its important mission." That responds to concerns that, under the Office of the State Superintendent of Education, the board did not have sufficient institutional distance from executive functions of government. But before you start thinking this is the second coming of Peggy Cooper Cafritz, read this: "No additional roles, responsibilities or authority over educational decisionmaking will be assumed by the Board as a result of this transition."

Another item of note: Gray has found $5.4 million in his proposal to fully fund the "Pre-K for All" legislation passed by the council last year. The report had strong words for the gap in the mayor's budget plan: "Disappointed is a mild description of the Council’s response to the failure of OSSE and this Administration to honor its commitment to the expansion and enhancement of pre-kindergarten (pre-k) services to District residents."

As their baseball-suite squabble with Mayor Adrian M. Fenty has festered over the past two weeks, members of the D.C. Council have had a ready reply to any accusations of cravenness in their ticket-grubbing: We don't use them ourselves! We give them away to constituents!

LL is glad to see that those magnanimous impulses haven't seen stymied by the fact that the council still has not been given any tickets by Hizzoner.

To wit, the auction fundraiser for Murch Elementary School, held Saturday at the Washington Hebrew Congregation---check out Lot 923: "Nationals Tickets in the City Council Skybox."

"Enjoy the Nationals from the best view in the house," the auction booklet reads. "Watch the game from the City Council's Sky box. The package includes a catered spread of tempting food and beverages (beer, wine, soda). Four tickets to a 2009 home game of your choice." The donation comes courtesy of Council Chairman Vincent C. Gray and the D.C. Council.

The estimated value of the lot: "Priceless."

Read More "Council Auctions Off Baseball Tickets It Doesn’t Have" »

Note to potential D.C. Council witnesses: Best not to diss councilmembers ahead of your testimony. Especially in writing.

Just ask Robert Cane.

Yesterday, the executive director of Friends of Choice in Public Education was among dozens of charter school advocates who showed up at a council budget hearing to plead for a restoration of facilities funding for charters cut in the mayor's proposal.

After Cane completed his testimony, Council Chairman Vincent C. Gray had a couple of questions. He produced an e-mail Cane had sent out to several charter groups ahead of the hearing before Gray, long a critic of certain charter-school practices.

The e-mail, which contained instructions for hearing witnesses, contained this line: "You may be asked policy questions after your testimony. Please understand that these questions are a trap for the unwary, especially if directed at you by [Tommy] Wells, Gray, or [David] Catania. Please do not answer unless you are confident that you have absorbed the talking points we've previously distributed to you."

That led to this exchange (watch it, forward to 2:32:50):

Read More "Watch Council Witness Eat Crow" »

A new season, a new round of squabbling.

LL has been informed that Washington Nationals tickets are again a point of contention between the city's executive and legislative branches.

According to Dawn Slonneger, top aide to Council Chairman Vincent C. Gray, the council has yet to receive their allotment of tickets for Monday's home opener. The Nats have told her that all of the tickets are in the possession of Mayor Adrian M. Fenty's office.

Last year, a similar dispute arose over the sharing of tickets; the Nats handed them over to the mayor's office, which in turn distributed them only to certain members, leading to charges of favoritism. Gray had his colleagues keep sending the tickets back until they were distributed equitably. The conflict was only resolved when Fenty consigliere Peter Nickles intervened, and the council was given exclusive use of one of two skyboxes provided by the Nats.

Now Fenty, Slonneger says, has the tickets for the original suite, the council suite, and a "smattering" of seats behind first base. The council, however, does have plenty of parking passes---those were delivered last week by Deputy Mayor Neil Albert.

Slonneger says she brought the matter to the attention of her mayoral counterpart, Carrie Kohns, yesterday; as of 11 a.m. today, no arrangement had been worked out. Mayoral spokesperson Mafara Hobson says she had no idea about the ticket situation.

Last month, LL covered the sizable personality conflict between D.C. Council Chairman Vincent C. Gray and Deputy Mayor for Education Victor Reinoso.

The conflict remains.

On Tuesday, Reinoso showed up before Gray for his office's budget hearing. Among the topics discussed was the charter school facility allotment, which is, rather controversially, being cut by $24 million. Gray and Reinoso discussed the topic for more than 15 minutes, and Gray seemed satisified enough with the answers that he invited Reinoso to attend the hearing on the charter schools budget two days later.

Reinoso, though, had a hard time committing to that date. He kept telling Gray that he'd confirm the next day; Gray didn't understand why he couldn't just give a yes-or-no answer. "Is that a decision you can make independently?" he asked Reinoso, who sheepishly replied that it was. [Watch the hearing, WMV format, forward to 3:07:50]

Fast forward to yesterday's hearing, where, surprise, Reinoso doesn't show.

Read More "The Vince ‘n’ Victor Show Continues" »

A little more than a week ago, news broke that at least three percent of District residents have AIDS or HIV. This provoked Shannon L. Hader, director of the city's HIV/AIDS Administration to now-famously compare D.C. to West Africa. When pressed by Loose Lips at a press conference, Hader stated that our rates of infection were twice as high as New York City and five times that of Detroit.

As LL pointed out, the bigwigs at the press conference---Mayor Adrian Fenty, Councilmember David Catania, et al.---defensively argued that the part of the reason for the high infection rates is that the city is just testing more people. Case in point: testing is now routine at the D.C. Jail.

But this epidemic is not a new epidemic. In fact, it's been called an epidemic too many times to count. Perhaps the reason this story didn't provoke serious outrage and more press conferences and men in white coats discussing infection trend patterns is that this is an old story.

"This is the number one [public health] priority of this government," Fenty told the Washington Post. That quote was from an April 5, 2007, story headlined: "Fenty Renews Fight Against HIV-AIDS; Mayor Promises Strong Effort, Plans To Pick New Agency Chief." In the story's first graph, the mayor "pledged" to "put an end to this crisis."

Read More "Remember the Mustard-Yellow Condoms? A Look at the District’s Tortured Response to the AIDS Crisis" »

With the D.C. House Voting Rights Act set to hit the Senate floor early next week, and with House consideration likely not far behind, things are looking up enough that LL can ask the question: What happens after the bill becomes law?

Well, Eleanor Holmes Norton isn't magically transformed from delegate into full-fledged congresswoman.

Read More "D.C. House Voting Rights Act: What Happens If It Passes?" »

Did Vincent Gray break his campaign promise to keep D.C. Council meetings open?

Yesterday morning, WTOP reporter Mark Segraves went to a meeting of councilmembers in the John A. Wilson Building. Segraves entered the meeting room and sat down, but before the meeting got underway, Council Chairman Gray called Segraves into his office to tell him he wasn't welcome.

Segraves says the ejection marks a breakdown in transparency for the city's legislature. He, along with the Post's Colby King and others, successfully lobbied Gray's predecessor, Linda Cropp, to open up the council "breakfast meetings" traditionally held immediately before monthly legislative meetings. Those gatherings were used in Cropp's time to hash out contentious issues ahead of time in order to maintain comity during the public meeting; Cropp relented in April 2006 and opened the meetings. Gray had made a campaign promise to continue the open-door policy for breakfast meetings.

Now, the Tuesday meeting wasn't a "breakfast meeting," exactly. Rather, it's known as an administrative meeting, where discussions are supposedly limited to matters of council operation. Segraves says he decided to attend Tuesday's gathering after noting at the Jan. 6 breakfast meeting that Gray deferred several matters to the administrative meeting, such as the council's inaugural plans.

Segraves says Gray told him he could not attend the meeting because personnel matters are discussed therein; Gray spokesperson Doxie McCoy tells LL that administrative meetings aren't open as policy, and they never have been.

Read More "Gray Kicks Segraves Out of Council Meeting" »