An influx of $77 million into the District’s coffers will not be enough to fund even two of the nine spending priorities the D.C. Council settled on for any additional money the city collects, according to revenue projections released Wednesday, Tom Howell Jr. reports in The Washington Times. “That means priorities further down the list, such as hiring additional Metropolitan Police Department officers, will not be funded unless revised revenue estimates in September paint a rosier picture.”
The 2010 killing of 16-year-old Brishell Jones and two other youths in the so-called “South Capitol Street Massacre” were the result of “gross negligence, racial discrimination and indifference” by D.C. government officials and agencies, according to a lawsuit filed recently in D.C. Superior Court. Jeffrey Anderson at The Washington Times reports that Nardyne Jefferies filed the lawsuit on behalf of her daughter, Brishell, who was fatally shot in the March 30, 2010, tragedy. We’re a little surprised the lawsuit was not disclosed when Ms. Jeffries and council member David A. Catania appeared earlier this month to announce legislation she offered input on to reform the system.
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D.C. Chief Financial Officer Natwar M. Gandhi has determined his office did not misinterpret a tax law after two lawyers claimed Gandhi’s office left more than $100 million on the table by doing so, the Washington Examiner reports. In a letter to council member Jack Evans, Gandhi wrote he believes “the law governing taxation of these transactions has been correctly implemented.”
Organizers of a petition to repeal Maryland’s Dream Act collected more than 47,000 valid voter signatures through the end of May, according to numbers released Wednesday by the state elections board. The Baltimore Sun reports that the “first batch of signatures included 17,092 gathered through a website set up by the petition organizers, according to Donna Duncan, an elections board official. The Maryland chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union and immigrant advocacy group Casa de Maryland have said they plan to sue over those submissions, alleging the website — mdpetitions.com — is susceptible to fraud.” The remaining Another 30,196 signatures were gathered the old-fashioned way.
An attorney for an Ehrlich campaign operative indicted last week in connection with election-night robo-calls accused Maryland Attorney General Douglas F. Gansler of trying to score political points on the issue, The Washington Post reports. The arguments between Gansler and Julius Henson come in the form of filings in a civil suit Gansler is pressing against Henson, even as a criminal case proceeds against him. Prosecutors say he orchestrated 112,000 robo-calls that told voters they could “relax” because Gov. Martin O’Malley had already won last year’s election. Henson’s lawyers say Gansler’s action “smacks of hypocrisy and gamesmanship.”
Some Frederick County parents are upset over a third-grade textbook that they say promotes such ideas as government-sponsored child care and universal health care, David Hill reports in The Washington Times. The book states that those countries’ “communities pay the rest of the bill,” and asks the reader whether he or she believes health care should be a public service. At a school board hearing Wednesday, members chose not to eliminate the book from the county curriculum, instead allowing it to come up for review next school year as part of a mandatory eight-year review cycle for all books.
