Results tagged “adrianfenty>”

Yesterday the Washington Post asked a number of local political watchers, myself included, if we thought Mayor Adrian Fenty would be re-elected in 2010. Some said yes, others said no. I stressed that without a credible challenger – and none has yet stepped forward – Fenty would cruise to a second term. Well, if that capable challenger ends up being D.C. Council Chair Vincent Gray, Fenty may have to start looking for a new job.

Even between the DPW fiasco, the WTOP/biking police escort kerfuffle, not being Superman, facing vital questions about crime, handling a significant legal tussle regarding policing strategies, dealing with his "all-purpose scandal-in-a-box" Sinclair Skinner, recognizing his struggles with the D.C. lottery contract, trying to rebuild OCTO after its bribery scandal, navigating the significant labor strife among teachers in our public schools, and drawing the general ire of the entire D.C. Council, it could always be worse for Adrian Fenty. After all, he could be Baltimore's Sheila Dixon, who finds herself balancing a busy Mayoral schedule with being a defendant on theft charges which could force her to leave the office. (Sorry, Baltimore, we're just looking for some perspective here.) Also on the bright side? Fenty's upcoming 39th birthday bash will feature a "a large cache of Wine, Beer & Soft Drinks." So he's got that going for him, which is nice.

D.C. Mayor Adrian Fenty appeared on WRC/NBC4 this morning to take questions from Barbara Harrison on the whole cycling team police escort/WTOP brouhaha. The mayor actually did a pretty good job explaining himself to Harrison, noting (correctly) that his security detail has been greatly reduced since he first took office, but at the same time appearing contrite and promising to do away with the motorcycle escort during his training exercises from now on.

Real estate mogul (and D.C. native) Don Peebles is thinking about giving Mayor Adrian Fenty a run for his money, according to a report this morning in the Washington Business Journal. Peebles told reporter Jonathan O'Connell that he will 'either run himself or support another candidate because of what he called "a continued pattern of a lack of oversight and accountabilty" under Fenty.' Harry Jaffe had previously reported the Peebles rumors in the Examiner, though the possibility that the businessman could run himself is a new development.

              

As promised, here are some images captured by DCist photographer Francis Chung during Thursday afternoon's Washington Teachers Union-organized protest outside the John A. Wilson Building.

Councilmember Tommy Wells (D-Ward 6) has sure had a busy start to his autumn. First, he came to the defense of disabled Segway riders who wanted to ride on the sidewalk. Then, he battled the oppressive governmental restrictions on raising chickens in your backyard. Now, all he has to do is work around the District's $20 million reduction in funding for homeless services in the budget for fiscal year 2010, a move that could be quite problematic for the District's network of homeless shelters and service providers.

Attention, Columbia Heights! The official word has just come down that D.C. Mayor Adrian Fenty will formally dedicate the new Columbia Heights Plaza and "Resonance" Fountain on Monday, Sept. 28 at 10:30 a.m. So let all the endless speculation cease. It does seem, however, that the plaza itself was pretty much mostly done and open last night.

A majority of D.C. voters disapprove of the job D.C. Mayor Adrian Fenty is doing, according to the results of a WJLA/SurveyUSA poll released this afternoon. Of 500 D.C. voters surveyed, 51 percent disapproved of his job performance, while 40 percent approved.

The final tally is in on this year's Summer Youth Employment Program, courtesy the Washington Post's Nikita Stewart. The program cost $41 million this year, which is "significantly less than last year, when the mayor promised a job to any youth who wanted one, but enough to eclipse similar programs in most big cities." This year's program was criticized less for payroll problems and more for employed kids either doing a crummy job or appearing to be doing not much at all. And of course, remember that the D.C. Council has limited the 2010 program to only $20 million, which would hardly cover the kind of all-inclusive program for which Mayor Fenty has always pushed. For his part, Fenty appears unconcerned: 'Fenty said he is determined to find a way around the council's caps on next year's program. "There's a long time between now and next summer," he said.'

Over the long weekend, DCist spotted the first yard sign we've seen so far for D.C. Mayor Adrian Fenty's re-election campaign. This sign, with its trademark Fenty green, was planted in front of a home in the Logan Circle neighborhood. We've also seen a few blue and white Clark Ray for D.C. Council At-large signs popping up outside businesses in the Dupont Circle neighborhood's 17th Street corridor.

                     

D.C. Mayor Adrian Fenty presided over the opening of a fabulously-appointed new dog park at 17th and S Streets NW yesterday (along with a refurbished park for all living things at 17th and T, but the focus was clearly on the pooches' new playground). As theses photographs illustrate, the park features a hill-shaped, artificial grass surface and a water fountain designed specifically for dogs.

We've been giving the largely lame-o @MayorFenty Twitter feed a hard time for a couple of days now. This is after word of the presumed official mayoral feed first came out earlier in August. But now, weeks later, the Mayor's Office is saying that the @MayorFenty feed isn't actually theirs, City Desk reports.

The ongoing saga of the abrupt eviction of the Recreation Wish List Committee, run by Cora Masters Barry, from the Southeast Tennis and Learning Center keeps attracting more and more big guns. D.C. Wire updates today that none other than Maya Angelou and Dorothy Height were trying to get a meeting with D.C. Mayor Adrian Fenty this past week to discuss the matter. And to make matters worse, sources are telling the Post that Fenty canceled not one, but two meetings with the women. And just when you thought Fenty's office couldn't appear to be any more callous on this issue. But wait! What's that you say, @MayorFenty?

Missed meeting with Dr. Maya Angelou & Dorothy Height was due to scheduling conflicts and not disrespect :-)

Perhaps you've been enjoying the often entertaining fake Adrian Fenty Twitter feed, @fentydc, for some time now. We know we have. A recent example why: "Reporters, go ahead and rail about my unexplained travel, compulsive workout schedule and Axe body spray-but lay off my kids. Seriously." That's funny stuff.

It still amazes me just how little D.C. Mayor Adrian Fenty seems to understand about talking to reporters. The more he categorically refuses to answer a single question about the process that took place to enroll his two sons in the high-performing Lafayette Elementary School, even though their neighborhood school is West Elementary, the more journalists are going to keep after this story. If you've ever wondered what it's like to talk to Fenty in the middle of a press scrum, just check out the video below, courtesy NBC4's Tom Sherwood. Mike DeBonis has a write-up with full audio of yesterday's heated exchange over at City Desk as well.

D.C. Mayor Adrian Fenty is running for re-election, and so far no viable candidate has formally declared an intent to run against the incumbent (though there are plenty of rumors about At-large D.C. Council member Michael A. Brown). A story from the Examiner today may help persuade someone to step to the plate sooner rather than later, however. A recent poll conducted by D.C.-based Successful Capital Strategies shows that six in ten District Democrats would be "open" to voting for someone other than Fenty in the next election.

D.C. Mayor Adrian Fenty likes to keep active. The man gets up almost every day and runs, bikes or otherwise exercises for a solid hour (if not more), and he likes to be seen always zipping across town to take care of his mayoral business, whether in his little Smart Car or his big Lincoln Navigator. But ever since Fenty got in a fender-bender about a week ago, the Washington Post has had a hard-on about whether or not the mayor did anything wrong to cause the accident, and today Nikita Stewart goes ahead and asks the question: Should the mayor be driving himself around the city at all?

Maybe it's just August doldrums, but I'm having a hard time getting too worked up about today's revelation that Mayor Fenty's weekend fender-bender may not have happened exactly the way his spokesperson first said. From the Post:

Spokeswoman Mafara Hobson wrote in an e-mail Sunday that "a vehicle ran a stop sign and pulled out in front of the Mayor's vehicle, causing a collision."

Continue reading "Fender-bendergate?"

We've mentioned it before, but Mayor Adrian Fenty has long promised to enroll his twin sons, Matthew and Andrew, 8, in DCPS starting this fall. But where will they enroll? West Elementary is technically the neighborhood school for the boys, who live in Crestwood, but Harry Jaffe argues that the campus is "in turmoil," and reports this morning that Michelle Fenty has toured five other NW elementary schools: Janney, Murch, Key, Eaton and Lafayette. We agree with Jaffe that it's high time Fenty followed the example of his DCPS chancellor, Michelle Rhee, and sent his children to the public schools under his watch, but we question ruling out West. Turmoil or not, surely the presence of the Mayor's sons would draw some much-needed attention to improving the school, and by enrolling his sons elsewhere, Fenty is sending a sign, intentional or not, that what's good enough for some D.C. kids - his neighbors, in fact - won't cut it for his own.

In an apparent effort to compete with the District's growing number of thematic charter schools, this morning DCPS announced the reorganization of 13 campuses into "theme-based catalyst schools," meaning that they will have an overall curricular emphasis in one of three areas: STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math), Arts Integration, or World Cultures. At a morning press conference, Mayor Adrian Fenty described the purpose of the project as "to provide compelling options for students and families at their neighborhood schools, so that in every Ward quality and choice becomes a reality."

The unemployment news just doesn't seem to be getting better inside the District of Columbia. Monthly Department of Employment Services numbers are out once again today, and they report that the June unemployment rate was 10.9 percent, up 0.2 percent from the previous month. The District's unemployment numbers have been climbing since December, holding slightly steadier at just below 10 percent for several months before finally surpassing the figure in May. The news comes on the same day that Mayor Fenty has proposed eliminating 250 more city government jobs as part of his latest budget proposal, in addition to the roughly 1,600 he's already cut. DOES says there were 35,900 unemployed District residents in June.

Do you have enough reusable bags? Mayor Adrian Fenty signed into law today the bill that will establish a 5 cent fee charged to consumers for every disposable plastic or paper bag they take from a retailer. The mayor's action means the 5 cent fee will go into effect in January (unless of course Congress intervenes, but we kinda doubt that'll happen on this one). Four out of every five cents charged will then go into the newly established Anacostia River Cleanup and Protection Fund (with the remaining cent for the retailer, for their trouble).

Via the DCist tipline, we learn that D.C. Mayor Adrian Fenty may actually face some "super" serious competition in his upcoming reelection campaign. A web site promoting Peter Parker, aka Spider-Man, for mayor of D.C. has popped up, along with the requisite Facebook page and Twitter feed.

Saturday was National HIV Testing Day, and as part of the national effort to get out the message to take an HIV test regularly, D.C. Mayor Adrian Fenty taped this PSA with HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius.

"Over the past six months we have filtered out those businesses that want to be good neighbors and those that did not wish to operate legitimate businesses," Fenty said today.

This morning Mayor Adrian Fenty named Valerie Santos as his new Deputy Mayor for Planning and Economic Development. Santos replaces former DMPED Neil Albert, who was recently promoted to City Administrator after Dan Tangherlini exited for the Obama administration. Previously, Santos had served as chief operating officer under Albert. Some of the major development projects long in financing limbo that will now be under Santos's guidance: the Southwest Waterfront redevelopment, Poplar Point, the CityCenterDC project at the Old Convention Center site, the O Street Market in Shaw, the Minnesota-Benning Metrorail Station site and the Washington Convention Center Hotel project, which, as was just reported in the Washington Business Journal, has still been unable to secure private sector financing and will now attempt to beg for as much as $750 million worth of public money.

When we reported last week that Council member Michael Brown (I-At Large) might be pondering a 2010 run against Mayor Adrian Fenty, we got just a little excited for the storyline possibilities. After all, both men are bald lawyers from Ward 4 with twin sons. But today City Desk's Mike DeBonis is telling us something that could only make the coming mayoral showdown that much more exciting -- Council member Kwame Brown (D-At Large) might run. According to DeBonis, Brown's father sent out an email over the weekend looking to get people to "draft" the younger Brown for a run at Fenty's seat. Of course, Brown was coy about the whole thing, though he didn't definitively rule out a 2010 campaign for the city's highest elected position. Should he run? Duh. More than one Brown in the race would be fantastic. Especially if the two Browns had run on a "Brown-squared" platform in the 2008 council election, which they did. Throw in Shadow Senator Michael Brown and you've got the makings of total electoral chaos! Fenty v. Brown v. Brown v. Brown? Yes, please.

CORRECTION: The announcement this morning was to enact regulations targeting auto repair and tow lot operators - not used car sales. Which makes my comparison below more or less moot, since Barry is focusing on the used car sales lots. Mea culpa.

Even though the talk of someone taking on Mayor Adrian Fenty in the 2010 mayoral contest has been mostly idle chatter to date, a familiar face might be ready to take him on.

Just like the public swimming pools open over Memorial Day, there's usually an unofficial kick-off to the summer crime season in the District. It's never on the same day and it's usually not just one event, but rather a series of incidents that invariably provoke a response from the police and politicians. This year, it looks like it's come a little earlier than usual, and the city is already grappling with ways to respond.