Photo by spiggycat

Good morning, Washington, and a happy Friday to you. Before you start focusing on the weekend, we’d like you to take a moment and think long and hard about how you’re responsible for one of today’s most troubling headlines: at least 13 area post offices are slated to close (plus over 600 nationwide) under a cost cutting plan under consideration by the USPS. And yeah, we’re pointing the finger at you, dear reader, and at ourselves and pretty much everyone else. None of us sends enough mail anymore, it turns out, so the post office is going bye-bye. I don’t know about you, but about the only thing I send through the physical mail anymore are Netflix DVDs, so I’m clearly part of the problem. The Government Accountability Office recently added the Postal Service to its list of high-risk government agencies, and there had even been talk recently about getting rid of mail delivery on Saturdays. It seems pretty unlikely that America is suddenly going to suffer from snail mail nostalgia and start writing letters and mailing all their bills again (unless of course the computers rise up with the rest of the machines against us), so maybe it’s really just high time that the Post Office trimmed down?

Council May Actually Lower Vacant Property Tax: The D.C. Council are gathering as we speak for their final legislative session before the break, during which they’ll vote on how they’d like to close the massive, looming budget gap facing the city. But here’s a real headscratcher: Michael Neibauer in the Examiner reports that there’s one tax they are actually considering lowering: the tax rate on vacant property, which looks like it will come down from 10 percent to 5 percent. Enough Council members apparently believe that the tax is so high that it actually prevents some owners from fixing up their vacants. Still, it’s a pretty strange move considering they’re also talking about slashing the budget for cops and teachers.

New Mental Health Hospital is Too Small: Neibauer hits it out of the park with two great stories this morning. The lede says it all: “The District’s new $157 million, 293-bed psychiatric hospital on the campus of St. Elizabeths will be too small to house its anticipated number of patients when the long-awaited facility opens in 2010, city officials said this week.” Another classic moment in local governance.

Briefly Noted: Two-alarm blaze, this time at 329 Rhode Island Ave NE … Metrobus driver charged with driving bus without valid license … New witness in the Chandra Levy case … EHN working to save city’s needle exchange program.

This Day in DCist: In 2008, the mayor of Berwyn Heights, Md. had his home raided and his two dogs killed by a SWAT team who incorrectly believed he was a drug dealer, and in 2007, WMATA was sorry that we found out that they kill birds all the time.