Morning Roundup: Hear Ye Hear Ye Edition

Posted by Tom in DC Life on 10 20th, 2009 | no responses

Photo by M.V. Jantzen Good morning, Washington. If you haven’t been following the Washington Post’s investigative series into the squandering of millions of dollars worth of HIV/AIDS funding inside the District, take some time to do so today. The stories forced Mayor Adrian Fenty and Attorney General Peter Nickles to call a press conference on Monday and announce an investigation into whether nonprofit groups have misspent AIDS funding inside the city with the country’s worst infection rate. The FBI also launched its own investigation of D.C. AIDS funding in 2006, and the case is still active, according to the Post. Will the Gay Marriage Hearing Be Another Marathon?: The D.C. Council is set to hear testimony on Oct. 26 on the upcoming same sex marriage legislation, and the Examiner reports that nearly 100 people are already signed up to speak . Could this hearing possibly rival the 18-hour DCPS hearing that started Friday morning and ended at 4 a.m. on Saturday? Probably not: gay marriage is nowhere near as controversial topic among the Council as education reform is. Clark Ray Battling Strange Lawsuit: The Washington Times reports on a rather bizarre lawsuit filed against current D.C. Council candidate and former director of the Department of Parks and Recreation, Clark Ray. Two days after Ray announced he would be running for the Council, the father of an inmate at the old Oak Hill Youth Center filed suit against Ray for allegedly soliciting sex from the juvenile after

he was invited to spend Christmas of 2007 with Ray and his partner at their home (the couple had apparently intended to treat a troubled youth to a special holiday as a sort of charitable/Big Brother gesture). There’s just a ton about this story that demands skepticism: the timing of the lawsuit, the records and reputation of both the boy’s father and his lawyer, and most of all, that the complainant has refused to answer questions when police inquired about the case. But DYRS too has “refused to verify basic information about the evening in question and about the agency’s procedures for checking youths out of detention,” which seems unnecessary. Whether procedures were followed when Ray took this juvenile into his custody for one night ought to be a pretty straightforward question to answer. Briefly Noted: Double shooting in Southeast leaves one dead, one critically injured … Two people hospitalized due to carbon monoxide leak in Columbia Heights home … Arlington family of 16 displaced by early morning fire … Developers battle White Flint plan to require purchase of farmers’ rights … D.C. man who shot armored truck says he was on PCP at the time. This Day in DCist: In 2008, we tried to get to the bottom of a loud noise coming from the HUD building, and in 2006, we couldn’t find many Nationals fans to speak of .