The New York Times called it a “new phenomenon.” Greater Greater Washington trumpeted that it “will change everything.” Mayor Fenty talked about his big head. All part of the hype surrounding today’s grand opening of Capital Bikeshare, which replaces SmartBikeDC and promises more than 100 bike sharing stations in the District and Arlington featuring over 1,100 sharable bikes for area cyclists.
D.C.’s much-maligned Summer Youth Employment Program kicked off yesterday, and of course, there were issues. The Post reported on a group of youths who reported for work at the Benning Park Recreation Center as assigned, and then were told they weren’t needed; after showing up at Sherwood Recreation Center in Northeast, the group was told again they weren’t needed before being shuttled off and told to call the program’s office to get another assignment….
Photo by say71 The Washington Examiner reports that three thieves snuck into Mayor Adrian Fenty’s Crestwood garage and nabbed two of hizzoner’s mountain bikes, right under the noses of the Mayor’s security detail. The thieves left their own crappy bicycles and took off with the Mayor’s more pimp rides back on June 3. The bikes were each about a year old and worth $300 apiece, according to the report. Could the thefts be a charged…
Photo by DG-rad.Obviously, we’re fond of recently-passed indie icon Alex Chilton around these parts. Fitting then, that one of Chilton’s most well-known stanzas — “hangin’ out / down the street / the same old thing / we did last week” — so accurately describes some of the delays in H Street NE’s evolution into the city’s next corridor du jour. On Friday, Voice of the Hill reviewed the holdup on development at the planned H…
A D.C. Council committee voted unanimously on Tuesday to approve Millicent Williams, Mayor Adrian Fenty’s nominee to replace Darrell Darnell at the head of the city’s Homeland Security and Emergency Management Agency, Nikita Stewart reports in the Washington Post. Williams, who still needs to be approved by the entire council, had been thought to be underqualified for the job, but council members were apparently “swayed by Williams’s enthusiasm and the overwhelming support she drew at…
Photo by Tracy Clayton The Examiner’s Michael Neibauer picks up on just the latest power struggle between the executive and legislative branches of the D.C. government: Mayor Adrian Fenty has decided he doesn’t have to follow the D.C. Council’s budget directive to put an end to the existing $19 maximum fare on all taxicab rides originating and ending inside the District. Once again, the move comes down to a legal opinion justifying the mayor’s…
Last night, D.C. Council Chair Vincent Gray’s office sent out a terse press release admonishing Mayor Adrian Fenty for not making his agency directors available for this morning’s budget hearing. Only City Administrator Neil Albert would be there, he had been told, meaning more than a dozen agency directors were being held back by the executive. This was classic Fenty — just straight out refusing to play ball with the council whenever it tries…
View more news videos at: http://www.nbcwashington.com/video. As we mentioned briefly in the roundup, Adrian “Mr. Personality” Fenty resurfaced on WRC/NBC4 early this morning, during the mayor’s regularly scheduled Thursday appearance on the local news channel. Anchor Eun Yang got the ball rolling with a pretty standard question. Maybe she could have been more nuanced in how she phrased it, but this is the early morning TV news — you’re looking to bottom line it. So…
On top of having to oversee a massive snow removal operation, D.C. Mayor Adrian Fenty now also to worry about his political standing in the midst of the region’s largest winter storm in decades. Yesterday on Hardball, MSNBC’s Chris Matthews took Fenty to task for the city’s response to the storm, going so far as to hope out loud that the mayor will be replaced in the coming Democratic primary. “We’ve got a very…
Mayor Adrian Fenty’s cleared street in Crestwood It’s an awkward truism of urban politics that a snowstorm can be the undoing of an elected official. Take too long to get the snowed cleared off the roads — like Marion Barry in 1987 when the city struggled for a week after a snowstorm, which he missed because he was in California at the Super Bowl — and you’re an out-of-touch executive leading an inefficient government….
