Get ready for Greater Greater politics coverage
Photo by Larry Miller on Flickr.
Perhaps you’ve heard: there is a primary in DC on April 1. Over the next few weeks, Greater Greater Washington and Greater Greater Education will be posting a series of video interviews with the candidates for DC mayor and the DC Council Ward 1, Ward 6, and at-large seats.
I spoke with almost all of the candidates over the past 2 weeks, and Martin Moulton recorded the conversation on video. We’ll divide it into a series of topical posts for each race, looking at what each candidate for a particular contest said about housing, transportation, education, and more.
As we post each portion, this post will include a link to that segment. Below is the list of races, candidates (arbitrarily, in the order they spoke to me), and topics for posts.
Ward 6 council: Charles Allen, Darrel Thompson
- Housing (February 18)
- Transportation (February 19)
- Education (February 20)
Ward 1 council: Jim Graham, Brianne Nadeau
- Housing (February 21)
- Zoning update (February 24)
- Transportation (February 25)
- Education (February 25)
Council at large: John Settles, Nate Bennett-Fleming, Pedro Rubio (and see note below)
- Housing (February 27)
- Transportation (February 28)
- Education (March 5)
Mayor: Tommy Wells, Jack Evans, Vincent Gray, Muriel Bowser, Andy Shallal (and see note below)
- Housing supply (March 4)
- Affordable housing (March 5)
- Bus lanes (March 6)
- Streetcars (March 7)
- Charter schools (March 7)
- Middle schools (March 11)
All races:
- Soccer stadium, Reeves Center land swap (March 24)
- Football stadium, RFK site (March 25)
How did we select the candidates to speak to? We polled contributors on which candidates they wanted to hear from, and included anyone that contributors nominated.
Mary Cheh is unopposed for re-election in Ward 3. Kenyan McDuffie’s Ward 5 re-election contest appears unlikely to be competitive, and contributors did not feel they needed to hear more about that one. There are no competitive primaries for mayor or council outside of the Democratic Party. Finally, we did not include races for Delegate, Shadow Senator or Shadow Representative, or state party.
Besides the candidates listed here, we reached out to Anita Bonds, Vincent Orange, and Andy Shallal. Shallal was scheduled to speak with me on Thursday, February 13, but the interview was canceled due to the snow and we have not yet been able to reschedule we were subsequently able to talk with him.
Orange returned one voicemail and expressed interest in the interview but never followed up from multiple subsequent attempts to reach him. We never received any response from Bonds to any of our inquiries. We would, however, still be happy to speak to any of these candidates before the relevant interviews go live.
We conducted the interviews at the Watha T. Daniel/Shaw library and the Gibson Plaza apartments, a mixed-income market rate and affordable housing building also in the Shaw neighborhood.