Results tagged “council”

If there's one thing that American politics has hammered into my brain, it's that the people hate tax increases. So when the Post hit the streets to talk to Washingtonians about the tax hikes proposed by the Council last week, there was probably mass carnage, eh? Suffice it to say that reporter Martin Ricard could have left the body armor at the office -- the only thing that would have overcome him was the massive indifference. In Ricard's sample: smokers, who will just buy cigarettes in Virginia; some guy who drives for a living, and will only be able to make five side trips a year instead of seven due to the gas tax increase; and transient interns, who can hardly be bothered about the District's fragile financial state. There are people out there who are deeply concerned about the measures the Council have taken to fix the large budget gap -- but if we take this report as at all indicative of public opinion (admittedly, somewhat of a stretch), it's quite possible that most people out there just don't care that much.

"For anyone who wants to vote, I want it to be a smooth, efficient operation."

So what exactly caused all those phantom votes in last September's D.C. primaries? Well, thanks to Sequoia Voting Systems, city officials will soon be able to fully investigate that very question. The Post reports this morning that the manufacturer of the District's voting machines -- which, for some reason, created thousands of of extra write-in votes out of thin air last fall in City Council and Shadow Senator races -- has agreed to give the Council sensitive information about how the machines tabulate votes including source code, in order to avoid a lawsuit. It's a relatively big concession for the manufacturer and potentially sets a precedent for similar voting mishaps around the country; in addition to the District, seventeen states also use Sequoia machines. The Council says that its findings will be made public, even though Sequoia has had a long history of fighting such inquiries into its "trade secrets" -- here's hoping.

Whew, we can all breathe a little easier now. After what seemed like weeks of incessantly meaningless bickering, D.C. Wire reports that the Mayor's office handed over 19 Nationals seats to the City Council today, in what I'm sure new City Administrator Neil O. Albert is going to remember fondly as his first official duty in said capacity. Vincent Gray & Co. will be able to use the seats in Suite 61 at Nationals Park starting on Wednesday against Pittsburgh. (Hey, just in time to watch the Nationals and Pirates battle for the title of most incompetent National League franchise!) Post scribe Nikita Stewart, who broke the story, wonders about the timing of the exchange: "[t]he tickets could be a peace offering as Fenty tries to convince the council to restore some of his original budget proposal before a final vote on the budget support act." Uh, sure, tickets are nice and all, but if the Mayor thinks that giving the Council Nats tickets which they already believed were theirs is really going to grease the wheels, he probably has not seen a lot of Nationals games this season. (Springsteen tickets probably would have been a better choice.) But hey, that's beside the point here -- at least now we won't have to hear about this nonsense again until there's something interesting happening at the Verizon Center.

Testimony from bar and club owners and workers has convinced Ward 1 Councilmember Jim Graham to see the error of his ways and loosen penalties for bars found serving to minors. Marc Fisher writes that the D.C. Council took up his proposal at the December 16 meeting after tentatively approving the measure in November.

For those of you who grew so weary of Michael A. Brown's incessant robocalling and significant paper trail, well, you can't say that the D.C. GOP isn't on your side -- even if its motives are slightly different.

The tension between Schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee and the D.C. City Council may be a given by now, but the outright hostile language can still be a bit surprising. Last night Rhee testified for three hours with regard to the $100 million budget reshuffling that we wrote about on Tuesday. According to the Post, she was met by Council members' harsh statements and outright threats, "This is a joke," and "You keep disagreeing with [Marion Barry's (D-Ward 8) claim Rhee gives more info to the media than to the council] and you won't be around here too long."

Maybe you've got a 20-year old bottle of Burgundy chilling in your wine cellar that you want to drink for a special dinner out. Or, you just want to order something nice off the wine list. Up until now, D.C. ABC regulations dictated that you can't carry any remainder out of the restaurant. So of course, most folks would either try to finish the whole thing, leave it behind, or stealthily hand it off to some other lucky diner. This leaves you with the options of dangerous, wasteful, or illegal.