Photo by Fade…Good morning, Washington. With all the hubbub surrounding the gay marriage vote, it might have been easy to forget that the D.C. Council had other business on Tuesday as well. But as Nikita Stewart reports in the Washington Post, the Council also voted unanimously yesterday to remove Banneker Ventures from the city’s controversial contracting process. Banneker, as you’ll recall, is run by Fenty pal Omar Karim, and is at the center of the ongoing Council vs. Mayor fight over just who is the decider on major Department of Parks and Recreation construction projects. The move to ice Karim is hardly a surprise, but the council’s solution to working around him might give you a laugh: they’re going to send all those contracts to Allen Lew in the Office of Public Education Facilities Modernization, which, as Mike DeBonis lucidly explains, is in fact exactly what Fenty originally asked for a year ago. At that time the council, and especially parks committee chairman Harry Thomas, Jr., refused to go along with Fenty’s plan, which is pretty much the main reason why the mayor came up with his D.C. Housing Authority workaround scheme in the first place.
Lanier Reacts to Cop Arrested for Murder: We linked to it at the end of the day yesterday, but it’s worth repeating that the Examiner still has the top local story of the morning. Bill Myers had the scoop (and some follow-up today) on the arrest of D.C. Police Officer Reggie Jones, 40, who has been charged with felony murder. Police don’t think Jones pulled the trigger in the Dec. 1 shooting death of Arvell Alston. Rather, Jones is alleged to have participated in a scheme to help one crew of drug dealers set the stage to be able to rob a rival crew, and the theory is that the series of events that Jones helped set off eventually led to Alston’s death. Here’s the quote from the Lanier presser last night: ‘”The worst that a police officer can do is betray the public’s trust, and this officer went well beyond that,” Lanier said. “This officer desecrated the very office he was sworn to uphold.”‘
Gay Marriage Will Be Good for the Local Economy: Now that the D.C. Council has passed its same-sex marriage bill, Mayor Adrian Fenty just needs to sign it before we send it to Congress for review (we now hear the mayor will likely sign it on Friday). But beyond all the usual follow-up stories about the various potential paths that opponents to the measure might take, what else will legalizing gay marriage mean for D.C.? Big bags of money for everyone! Yep, WAMU runs with a story about how two different studies, one from CFO Nat Gandhi’s office and another from the Williams Institute at UCLA’s Law School, say that the expected influx of same-sex wedding ceremonies inside the city could mean anywhere from $33 to $52 million in additional revenue for the District. So if you’re thinking about a career change and looking for a growth industry, give a good hard at look to anything wedding related.
Briefly Noted: D.C. zoning panel approves Ft. Totten development … DNA testing clears ex-District man after 28 years … Man captured after assaulting Montgomery County police officers … 38 arrested in N.Va. drug ring that dealt mainly to youths.
This Day in DCist: In 2008, we learned that then-President-Elect Barack Obama planned to arrive in D.C. via Amtrak, so we offered him some tips.
