WTOP: DC Council members call for probe after health dept. didn’t report COVID data
"In a letter signed by Nadeau, Trayon White, Mary Cheh, Robert White, Lewis George and Charles Allen, they said they are concerned that once-available coronavirus data wasn’t transmitted to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention."
DCist: Developer Seeks Exemption To Heritage Tree Protections, Citing D.C.’s Housing Crunch
"City Interests hired a lobbyist to plead its case before the D.C. Council, spending $9,000 since the beginning of the year. The lobbyist emailed and met with with staff from the office of Councilmember Mary Cheh (D-Ward 3), who chairs the transportation and environment committee and who originally introduced the heritage tree legislation, and with staff from Councilmember Vincent Gray’s office (D-Ward 7), who represents the area where the development is located.
Cheh was not interested.
“I was not inclined to consider an exemption,” Cheh tells DCist/WAMU. “I know the exemption business: Once you have one, then you have two.”
Councilmember Gray, on the other hand, lent a sympathetic ear, and introduced a bill to exempt Parkside from the heritage tree law. Gray was not available for an interview with DCist/WAMU and did not provide comment on the bill, despite multiple requests.
Cheh says she supports the development, but does not want to start a precedent of allowing exemptions for particular properties, which she says would undermine the law. And, she says, since the bill is in her committee, it won’t be going anywhere.
“I have no intention of moving this bill,” Cheh says. “I think it’s bad business, and I’m sorry that after they got the reception that they got from my office, that they figured they would shop it around to somebody else, because I’m still not interested.”
Rather than paying a lobbyist to try to get a loophole written in to the law, Cheh says City Interests should instead pay to have the trees relocated, as some other developers have done, in order to comply with the heritage tree law.
“They would be the beneficiaries of these magnificent trees, their magnificent canopies, and they should just pencil it in as part of the cost of their development,” Cheh says...
D.C. lawmakers, led by Cheh, recently have been working to tighten protections for heritage trees, after several cases where developers illegally cut down trees while city officials looked on, powerless to stop them. Under emergency legislation, the city can now issue stop work orders to prevent illegal tree removal, rather than just retroactively issue a fine."
Bloomberg: A City Fights Back Against Heavyweight Cars
“You can’t ban sales of these things,” says Mary Cheh, a D.C. councilmember who developed the new fee structure, “but you can make them pay their own way.”...
But Councilmember Cheh believes that that carmakers’ addiction to adding weight and height demands a regulatory rethink. “The size and weight of these vehicles has become ginormous,” she said. “When cars and pedestrians or cyclists come into contact, we know that the heavier the car, the worse the accident will be.”
During this year’s budget process, Cheh proposed overhauling the city’s vehicle regulation framework. Annual fees for machines under 3,500 pounds would remain at $72/year, while those from 3,500 to 5,000 pounds would now cost $175. The fee for registering a car between 5,000 and 6,000 pounds would rise to $250. The biggest hit is aimed at a new category created for SUVs and trucks weighing over 6,000 pounds: Their owners would now have to shell out $500 per year.
In other words, a D.C. resident registering a heavy-duty pickup or SUV who would have paid $775 over five years in the old fee structure will now have to fork over $2,500. Notably, no exception is available for residents claiming that they need a heavy-duty truck or SUV for their work. (Cheh says the issue hasn’t come up.)
Cheh sees the hiked fees as “a kind of proportionality” for the damage caused by the heaviest vehicles, but she doesn’t expect them to be the decisive factor for all car buyers. “The bigger thing is going to be the cost of gas,” she said.
Unless, of course, the car buyer opts for an electric vehicle that needs no gas at all. Numerous EVs, including the 9,000-pound GMC Hummer EV, already crack the three-ton mark. Cheh has proposed that electric vehicles, whose batteries often add weight compared to an equivalent gas-powered model, be subject to the same sliding scale of registration fees — but with a 1,000-pound credit intended avoid standing in the way of electrification.
D.C.’s budget analysts have projected that the new fee structure would contribute around $40 million to the city’s general fund over the next five years. Cheh calls that estimated revenue an “added benefit,” and she hopes to see the money allocated toward enhanced street safety efforts."
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