Photo by Danielle Scruggs

While fêting the opening of The Hamilton, a hulking restaurant and music venue at 14th and F streets NW, Mayor Vince Gray, D.C. Council Chairman Kwame Brown and Councilmember Vincent Orange (D-At Large) answered—briefly, at least—questions about another item on the District’s menu.

Specifically, the political situation in Ward 5 after Harry Thomas Jr. resigned the ward’s Council seat with his guilty plea on charges that he stole more than $350,000 from District coffers.

Brown said phone calls and emails to Thomas’ old office are now being routed to his constituent services staffers.

“We’re going to do everything we can to make sure Ward 5 residents are served,” he said. The chairman added that he wanted to keep his focus on constituent needs rather than political questions.

Orange, though, does have an eye on the special election coming up for the seat he held before Thomas. Orange is hosting a meeting tonight at 7 p.m. at the Israel Baptist Church at 1251 Saratoga Avenue NE to discuss the search to replace Thomas. Among those slated to appear at Orange’s meeting are John L. Ray, an at-large councilmember from 1979 to 1997, and William Spaulding, who held the Ward 5 seat from the Council’s creation in 1975 until he was defeated in 1986 by Harry Thomas Sr.

Also appearing at the meeting will be officials from the D.C. Board of Elections and Ethics, members of the ward’s advisory neighborhood commissions, and most likely some of the potential candidates for the vacant seat.

“I’m going to be in a facilitator’s role,” Orange told DCist while surveying The Hamilton’s breakfast spread.

The special election will likely be held mid-May, even though many officials, including Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton, have said they’d prefer to see a Ward 5 vote alongside the primary ballot on April 3.

Count Gray among those who’d rather hold the vote sooner. The mayor cited a bill Norton moved through the House of Representatives in 2010 that would allow the District to contract the window between Council vacancies and replacement votes from 114 days to 70, though the measure has been subject to an anonymous hold since it arrived in the Senate.

As he so often is when it comes to Congressional meddling in District affairs, Gray was irked, suggesting what the reaction would be if Congress told Maryland or Virginia when they could hold elections.

“Why should they be involved in this?” he said.