The rest of the ghost bike story

Dave Stroup of why.i.hate.dc has tracked down the gory details of the ghost bike removal.

In a nutshell, the request originated with Ed Grandis, who runs a Dupont Circle based group called DC MAP with significant overlap with Historic Dupont Circle Main Streets. The next week, the Mayor’s Ward 2 specialist Andrew Huff asked DPW to cut the bike down within 24 hours, calling it a “mayoral request.” DDOT’s Jim Sebastian tried to give WABA a chance to remove the bike, getting Huff to agree to wait until Monday; however, DPW didn’t get Huff’s note in time and cut it anyway.

Following the outcry, Mayoral, DPW, and DDOT officials debated what to do. Some of the Mayor’s people were willing to set up a permanent memorial, but DPW opposed the idea, as did other mayoral staff, and they collectively decided to refuse to give a better answer to inquiries.

From our previous discussions on this topic, I know commenters’ opinions are divided on a permanent memorial, and I’m not sure if I’d endorse it either. The bigger question, as Stroup notes, is why a request from one local organization turned into an urgent priority on the part of the Mayor. Had the Mayor’s office simply contacted Sebastian without such a short deadline, he would have talked to WABA, they would probably have taken the bike down, and that would have been it.

Stroup had to pay $65 in copying fees to get all of this. This is a good example of why it’s important for bloggers to be considered news media and given the exemption to FOIA fees that journalists are entitled to. In this case, Stroup is digging up important information about the workings of the government that are interesting to the public, and publishing it. That’s called journalism.