D.C. Mayor Vincent C. Gray will send a package of campaign finance reforms to the D.C. Council by mid-July that answers mounting calls to eliminate pay-to-play politics without resorting to sweeping bans that the nation's highest court has deemed unconstitutional, the city's top legal officer said Monday.
Mayor Vincent C. Gray and D.C. officials are girding for a legal battle over a highly touted law that ensures city residents are hired to work on projects that receive public assistance from the District.
A federal judge this week tossed a defamation lawsuit by reformed gangster Cornell Jones, whom the D.C. attorney general has accused of misappropriating more than $300,000 from the city's HIV/AIDS program for renovations on a proposed job-training center that instead was used to open a strip club.
The District's top attorney on Wednesday asked members of Congress to let the D.C. government rely on its own version of a federal law that polices public employees' participation in partisan politics, arguing the city is plagued by confusing applications of law.
A D.C. man who was organizing a recall of D.C. Mayor Vincent C. Gray and council Chairman Kwame R. Brown because of ethics scandals that hit shortly after their election in 2010 has abandoned his effort.
Former D.C. Council member Harry Thomas Jr. came up with $20,000 this week to chip away at the $300,000 sum he agreed to pay back to the District for stealing public funds from 2007 to 2009, the D.C. Office of the Attorney General said Thursday.
D.C. Mayor Vincent C. Gray announced Thursday the "historic" settlement of 37-year-old litigation brought by mental health patients who decried the District's lack of non-institutional treatment settings.
Within weeks of an inspector general's report that criticized a bid by the D.C. Lottery to launch a first-in-the-nation online gambling program, the deal was dead.
