With $40 million being cut from the D.C. Public Schools budget, Mayor Adrian Fenty and DCPS Chancellor Michelle Rhee announced on Wednesday that they would be laying off some teachers. However, Rhee hired over 900 new teachers over the summer, and many D.C. Councilmembers are saying the budget cuts are not extensive enough to prompt firings. D.C. Council Chairman Vincent Gray accused Fenty of “scapegoating” the council and using the cuts as an excuse to fire older, unionized teachers.
After a 15-year-old boy was killed after jumping on the tracks at the Columbia Heights Metro Station on Thursday, WMATA is starting up a suicide prevention program. There have been nine suicide attempts on Metro this year, with seven of them resulting in deaths.
The rainy labor day weekend may have been a bummer for your barbecue, but it was a godsend for local news. You see, Fox 5 weatherman Tony Perkins was so sure we were going to have good weather over the weekend that he promised to eat a sock if it rained. And so, here’s what happened when he got back to work this Tuesday:
For the past few years, the Metropolitan Police Department has been insisting on occasional “All Hands on Deck” weekends, periods during which all officers are required to work eight-hour patrol shifts. The Fraternal Order of Police challenged the practice, saying it violated contracts. This week, an arbitrator sided with the officers, ruling that AHOD must end and officers must be paid overtime for the previous AHOD weekends.
Editor’s Note: Now that we’re done with Prefrosh Preview, we’re bringing back District Digest, a weekly roundup of D.C. news and politics.
If you’re a mass transit organization, what do you think best way to endear you to the public would be? If your answer was “close the Metro stop that serves the local airport during a major holiday,” you’re on the same wavelength as the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority!
WMATA decided that Labor Day weekend would be the perfect time to do maintenance at the Reagan National Airport Station. To further endear themselves to Washingtonians, Metro also decided to give the public last-minute notification about the closure. Local politicians are not too pleased.
Mayor Adrian Fenty had promised to send his twin sons to D.C. Public Schools this year, but instead of enrolling them in their neighborhood school, Fenty sent them to Lafayette Elementary School, one of the top-performing public schools in the city. Because getting into out-of-boundary high-performing schools is extremely difficult in DCPS, the move has raised questions about whether the Fenty family received special treatment. Fenty refused to answer questions about the matter, but DCPS Chancellor Michelle Rhee insisted that “no rules were broken.”
Washington City Paper continued their phenomenal coverage of former D.C. Mayor and current Councilmember Marion Barry’s current saga with a great expose of his sketchy dealings with and control of nonprofits he funneled $450,00 of D.C. funds to. The also had more details about the also sketchy contract Barry offered to the woman he was arrested on charges of stalking, former paramour Donna Watts-Brightbaupt.
The D.C. Council has launched an independent investigation of Watts-Brighthapt’s contract. The conflict took on some ugly homophobic undertones when Barry accused openly gay Councilmember David Catania (I—At Large), who has been publicly critical of Barry, of having it out for him because he voted against the recognition of same-sex marriages.
The trial of Banita Jacks, the D.C. woman who lived in a house with the decomposing bodies of her four daughters for seven months, started the week. Her testimony has been extremely disturbing, detailing how she believed her daughters were possessed by demons how she thought they would come back to life when the demons died.
No matter how poorly your 4th of July went, it’s safe to say it was probably better than former “Mayor for Life” and current D.C. Councilmember Marion Barry’s (D—Ward 8). Saturday evening Barry was arrested by the Park Police and charged with stalking his ex-girlfriend, Donna Watts-Brighthaupt.
The stalking charges were dropped on Wednesday, but not before it was revealed that Watts-Brighthaupt received $20,000 in city contracts after her relationship with Barry began. City Paper’s Loose Lips columnist (and former Voice EIC!) Mike Debonis got the scoop of the week when he obtained recordings of some of Barry and Watts-Brighthaupt’s phone conversations, leading to the greatest City Paper cover line of our time: “You put me out in Denver ’cause I wouldn’t suck your dick!”
Meanwhile, the fallout from the Red Line crash continues. A couple more lawsuits have been filed against WMATA and commuters are getting cranky about the delays and crowding caused by the ongoing investigation. Metro also announced that it is planning a $177 million overhaul of the line to begin in 2010.
After months of fights about whether or not the recognition of same-sex marriages could be put up to a referendum vote and concerns about congressional interference, D.C. officially started to recognize same-sex marriages performed in other states at 12:01 a.m. this Tuesday. D.C. Councilmember David Catania (I—At Large) is expected to introduce legislation that will allow same-sex marriages to be performed in the District soon.
After the jump: Metro’s new “one strike” texting policy, the Onion takes on the Nat’s kiss-cam, the summer youth jobs program is going broke, and more!
National Transportation Safety Board investigators are getting closer to pinpointing the cause of last week’s Metro crash. They discovered that WMATA had replaced a crucial component of the signaling component, the “Wee-Z bond” which maintains a safe distance between trains, and it malfunctioned. There have already been a couplelawsuits filed against Metro, including one by Johnnie Cochran’s law firm. WMATA General Manager John Catoe announced that the system will keep operating in manual mode until outside experts have a chance to examine the signaling system, which could as long as a year.
In some rare “good on you, WMATA” news, the embattled transit agency just re-launched its NextBus service this Wednesday. NextBus allows you to see when the next bus will be arriving for any route and can be used from the internet or a cell phone. The service was launched as a pilot program about two years ago for 32 routes, but it was only 80 percent accurate. The improved version covers all 335 bus routes.
Harriette Walters, the D.C. Office of Tax and Revenue employee who masterminded the largest embezzlement in city’s history, was sentenced to 17 and half years in prison. It was revealed in 2007 that over the course of two decades Walters’ had defrauded the D.C. government to the tune of $48.1 million through issuing tax refunds to fake businesses.
Speaking of OTR, this year they mistakenly sent tax refunds to people who actually owe the District taxes. One resident who got the unmerited refund was D.C. Councilmember David Catania’s (I—At Large) parter, Brian.
After the jump: the Washington Post wipes out, medicinal marijuana makes progress, legal fireworks fun and more.
On Monday at about 5 p.m. two Red Line trains crashed into each other near the Fort Totten station, resulting in the deadliest crash in Metro’s 33 year history. Nine people died, including Jeanice McMillan, the operator of one of the trains, Ana Fernandez, a mother of six, and Retired Major General David Wherely, Jr. who led the D.C. National Guard and his wife Ann. Although investigations are ongoing, it’s looking like the accident was probably caused by a malfunction of the computerized control system.
D.C.’s Chief Financial Officer Natwar Gandhi announced that his office is projecting a $340 million budget shortfall over the next two years due to the recession. In light of the dire news, Mayor Adrian Fenty (D) discretely ordered 40 government agencies—including the police department—to cut more than $35 million from their budgets. It probably doesn’t help that the city can’t find thousands of dollars it collected in fines from misdemeanor cases..
On Thursday, June 18th, a gunman opened fire outside the Columbia Heights Metro station, shooting and injuring two. This week it was revealed that the gunman was actually working as an intern for a D.C. Councilmember, Jim Graham (D—Ward 1). Graham himself took the young man, Devyn Black, to the police station to turn himself in.
After the jump: taxi fare increases, how Twitter can help you get fired from your D.C. government job and more! Read the rest of this entry »
The D.C. Board of Elections ruled that the newly passed law recognizing same-sex marriages performed in other states is not subject to a referendum vote. The board ruled that if a referendum were allowed on the issue, they would be “authorizing discrimination.” Gay marriage opponents who had been fighting for the referendum immediately filed a lawsuit with the D.C. Superior Court. They’ve also asked the judge to “stop the clock” to prevent the new law from coming into effect on July 6.
The D.C. Council debated two competing anti-crime bills. The more hard-line bill, backed by Mayor Adrian Fenty (D) and Georgetown’s Councilmember Jack Evans (D—Ward 2) included a “civil gangs injunction” that raised civil rights and racial profiling concerns. The other bill, backed by Councilmember Phil Mendelson (D—At Large) was pretty similar but more ACLU-friendly and ultimately won out.
The hearing for Holocaust Memorial Museum shooter James von Brunn was delayed due to his medical condition (he was shot in the face during his attack). It was also revealed that in addition to being a white supremacist, von Brunn was also into child pornography. The D.C. Council also passed a resolution urging prosecutors to charge von Brunn with violating the city’s hate crime statue in addition to his federal charges.
After the jump: Michelle Rhee reaches the terrible twos, D.C. Voting Rights foe gets a nice helping of karma, and more!
In the interest of keeping you informed about the fine city we live in, Vox is starting a new feature, the District Digest, which will be a quick-and-easy guide to the most interesting and important D.C. stories of the week.
The big, sad, awful story of the week was the shooting at the Holocaust Memorial Museum on Wednesday. James von Brunn, an 88-year-old white supremacist, opened rifle fire at the museum, killing security guard Stephen Johns.
Plans for the District to get a voting representative in the House were derailed on Tuesday when Delegate Eleanor Holmes Norton announced that she had decided to kill the D.C. House Voting Rights Actdue to the Ensign Amendment, a provision tacked on to the bill that would have all but eliminated the District’s gun control laws.
Vox Populi is the staff blog of the Georgetown Voice, a weekly newsmagazine at Georgetown University. Opinions expressed in posts are those of their author alone unless otherwise stated.
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