'Your papers, please' must never be heard in America
Independent voices from the TWT Communities

The defect in Huron Healthcare's bid to "turn around" a city-owned hospital shows that the steps that contracting officials took to rectify it and the response among competitors typified what is wrong with local small-business involvement in city contracts and the procurement process in general, according to elected officials and members of the business community.

A $12.7 million contract to overhaul the city's publicly owned hospital is poised to pass the D.C. Council on Tuesday, after a four-hour hearing last week during which several council members appeared to have made up their minds and others expressed uncertainty as to why the contract is necessary in the first place.

At least two D.C. Council members say they would not support efforts by the chairman of the Committee on Education to deliberately withhold funds from public charter schools in order to slow their growth amid rising demand.

It has been nearly a year since Marion Barry and fellow D.C. Council member David A. Catania got into a profanity-laced sparring match over the fiscal health of United Medical Center, and here we are, approaching another Valentine's Day and troubles have escalated.

Phil Mendelson is of a mind that his city's government is obligated to curb the school truancy problem.

Fifteen years after voters gave the green-light to a medical marijuana program in the nation’s capital, a pair of locations approved to grow or sell the drug have cleared regulatory hurdles and will set up shop a few months into the new year, according to city officials.

D.C. Mayor Vincent C. Gray said his city should "double down" on gun laws that are among the most stringent in the country, as leaders in the nation's capital and other cities view the sudden debate over guns as a pressing issue that afflicts youth both inside and outside of school walls.

The sudden resignation of former CIA Director Gen. David H. Petraeus over an extramarital affair turned heads for many reasons — not least of which was the way a few Gmail messages brought down a man who handled sensitive information for a living.

An uphill initiative to promote D.C. statehood in handpicked pockets of the country is in limbo as state lawmakers gear up for sessions in their respective capitals.

If you support health care reform, stay away from the D.C. model.

Former Baltimore Ravens offensive tackle Jonathan Ogden came under scrutiny last week from opponents of a Maryland gambling referendum after he appeared in a television ad supporting casino expansion.

The embattled managed-care company owned by the man at the center of a federal probe into D.C. Mayor Vincent C. Gray's 2010 campaign was carrying $3 million in unexplained revenue on its books and had transferred $1 million to an unknown recipient, city agency directors said Thursday.

Troubles mounted on disparate fronts for D.C. Chief Financial Officer Natwar M. Gandhi on Tuesday with fresh accusations of employee-driven fraud in his office's tax division and an "informal inquiry" from the Securities and Exchange Commission compounding the scrutiny the city's purse-minder has endured for weeks.

A city lawmaker and frequent critic of D.C. Chief Financial Officer Natwar M. Gandhi is calling for a closer look at how the District evaluates people who are hired to work at the Office of Tax and Revenue amid allegations an employee bilked the city for $300,000 in fraudulent tax returns.

The D.C. Council unanimously passed legislation Tuesday that requires the D.C. office of the chief financial officer to actively disclose its internal audits in the wake of scrutiny of the office's procedures and its ability to police itself.
"Inserting these disputes into the political process tells you everything you need to know about the [local small-business] community," said Council member David A. Catania, at-large independent and staunch advocate for the hospital in question.
"It's a culture that will use the politics to subvert the legitimate [contracting] process."