Municipal budget negotiations are notoriously stodgy affairs, so we can appreciate that there’s at least one member of the Council who is at least able to lend some levity to the proceedings. Cue Mary Cheh!
Cheh, who has a history with this kind of thing, released a memo last night on the eve of the Council’s first crack at the 2012 budget suggesting several new initiatives — including a Cheh-esque tax on processed food (revenue from which would be used to replace “unhealthy high-sugar foods with broccoli in all vending machines in the District”), spending five million dollars to construct an ampitheatre on the Klingle Trail and another $50,000 which will be “used to write, cast, and produce a play entitled Sulaimon Brown’s Service: The Musical“, using $580 million to move the Blue Plains Wastewater Treatment Plant upwind from the U.S. Capitol in a “continuing effort to engage Congressional attention to the District’s lack of voting rights,” and seizing Georgetown, American and the University of the District of Columbia and turning the land into a subway station, the nation’s largest dog park and a strip mall.
There’s also a “fully loaded” joke, natch.
