Around Town

An outdoor coworking space launched in Rosslyn as a temporary pandemic-era amenity for local workers will be sticking around as a permanent feature of the neighborhood.

O2: Outdoor Office is an outdoor workspace that debuted last October at Gateway Park (1300 Langston Blvd). Organized by the Rosslyn Business Improvement District, the outdoor office features work stations available by reservation and free Wi-Fi.


Around Town

A pair of political hucksters is behind flyers posted along the Wilson Blvd corridor promoting a To Catch a Predator-like YouTube video series.

The series was announced last month by Jack Burkman and Jacob Wohl, known for telling wild tales that later turn out to be false, often holding press conferences outside Burkman’s Rosslyn townhouse as part of their publicity campaigns.


Sponsored

This sponsored column is by Law Office of James Montana PLLC. All questions about it should be directed to James Montana, Esq., Janice Chen, Esq., and Victoria Khaydar, Esq., practicing attorneys at The Law Office of James Montana PLLC, an immigration-focused law firm located in Falls Church, Virginia. The legal information given here is general in nature. If you want legal advice, contact us for an appointment.

Kremlin political intrigues are comparable to a bulldog fight under a rug. An outsider only hears the growling, and when he sees the bones fly out from beneath it is obvious who won.” – Winston Churchill.

The Trump Administration, in both its first and second iterations, has not lived up to that Churchill quotation, not least because its principals are so paranoid and unprofessional that they usually air their grievances in public. Sometimes, when facing unfriendly questioning before Congress, a leading Administration official bangs the table about how the Dow Jones Industrial Average has broken 50,000; sometimes, when a bottle of bourbon goes missing, a leading Administration official threatens to polygraph and prosecute FBI agents. This is not, as a general rule, a thin-lipped bunch of Silent Cals.

The Department of Homeland Security has been an honorable exception to that general rule; its personnel have been, at least by Trump Administration standards, fairly disciplined about airing their grievances in public. That’s where the Kremlinology comes in. The latest intel suggests that a real behind-the-curtain fight is happening between two factions at DHS – one, personified by policy majordomo Stephen Miller, and the other, by bureaucratic knife-fighter (and Cava enjoyer) Tom Homan. The Homanites appear to be winning. The purpose of this advertorial is tell you why we think that is true, and provide a bit of speculation about why.

First, why do we think it is true? Not every resignation means a change in policy; sometimes, when the chief of the Border Patrol resigns after widespread accusations that he flew to Thailand, Colombia, and Mexico to avail himself of the services of prostitutes, it’s just an HR thing. But some reshuffles are more significant, and we think the following four suggest a new policy direction.

(1) Kristi Noem is out, and Markwayne Mullin is in. Secretary Noem performed her duties in vapid, vigorous, indecent, indecorous style, and she consistently personified the most outré and bizarre actions by the immigration enforcement bureaucracy, from calling protesters ‘domestic terrorists’ to LARPing as a HSI agent during raids. Former Sen. Mullin has taken a different public tack. Secretary Mullin – echoing public comments from Tom Homan – has repeated in interviews that DHS is targeting “the worst of the worst” rather than engaging in broad sweeps, and has said that the Minnesota operation, which led to the deaths of several American citizens, will not occur again. ” Secretary Mullin recently remarked, “[m]y goal in six months is that we’re not in the lead story every single day.” We don’t think you’ll see him posing at CECOT in a Rolex. (more…)


News

A man who was arrested for attempting to rob a store in Arlington two days ago had just posted bond for another arrest in Fairfax County on Monday.

Karim Clayton, a 44-year-old D.C. resident, attempted to steal electronics from a pharmacy in the Buckingham neighborhood on Tuesday, according to Arlington County police. On Sunday, a Fairfax County Police Department official said he was arrested for assault and battery and held on a $2,000 secure bond.


Announcement

Running now through May 23rd, at Gunston Arts Center, Ghost Limb is a timely and haunting examination of authoritarianism set during Argentina’s Dirty War that draws poetic inspiration from the Persephone and Demeter myth. When Consuelo’s son is “disappeared” by the military, she discovers a psychic link between her injured arm and her tortured child-and races to find him before it’s too late.

90 minutes with no intermission


Opinion

“A backward situation.” That’s how Arlington School Board Chair Barbara Kanninen described the planning process for the expansion of the Career Center during the Board’s Sept. 21 work session on the upcoming Capital Improvement Plan (CIP).

What’s backward is staff’s proposed timeline that has the School Board voting in October to set a budget and the number of seats for the Career Center project. Instead, these decisions should not be made until the School Board votes on its next CIP in June.


Event

Join us for a delightful Sunday afternoon at the BlackRock Center for the Arts as Cruise Planners Beth & Rod present a special travel-inspired matinee featuring the beloved film Under the Tuscan Sun.

Date & Time: Sunday, May 31 | 3:00 PM – 6:00 PM


Events

Columbia Pike pet fair “Paws on the Pike” is returning this weekend after being held virtually last year.

The event by the Columbia Pike Revitalization Organization (CPRO), now in its fourth year, will be from 1-5 p.m. on Sunday at Centro Arlington apartments (950 S. George Mason Drive).


News

Arlington police are investigating more gunfire on the same block near Drew Elementary as another shots fired incident this past weekend.

The shots were fired around 12:30 a.m. this morning, on the 3200 block of 24th Street S., police say. Officers responded to the area and found evidence of gunfire but no one who was shot.


News

Arlington County's transportation division is kicking off its ambitious plan to eliminate traffic deaths with a series of relatively quick safety projects.

For now, most of those projects appear to be in North Arlington. 

Four months ago, the Arlington County Board adopted a five-year action plan that aims to eliminate traffic fatalities and severe injuries, known as "Vision Zero." The plan lays out a systematic approach to safety improvements, addressing the most urgent needs through data analysis, equity and community engagement.   

These improvements vary in scope: "quick-build projects" address immediate needs quickly using low-cost materials, while larger-scale projects require funding from the county's Capital Improvement Program or grants. Others include pilot projects and regular maintenance work. 

"We're focusing initially on small-scale operational improvements... a small but important part of program," said Dennis Leach, the director of transportation for the Department of Environmental Services.  

Residents will see upgrades such as curb and median extensions, improved bus stops, curb-and-gutter repairs, new ramps and new high visibility crosswalks. DES has already completed eight "quick-build" projects and 11 are underway, according to its website.

Staff identify projects by analyzing crash data and considering reports by police, Arlington Public Schools and community members. They are constructed on a rolling basis.

For example, this month, staff completed a new mid-block crosswalk across N. Ohio Street that will improve access to Cardinal Elementary School and Swanson Middle School School. Staff are now installing a crosswalk with accessible curb ramps over Sycamore Street for better access to Tuckahoe Park and Tuckahoe Elementary School. 

Of the 19 completed and under-construction projects, only three appear to be in South Arlington. One Twitter user mapped out the geographic spread of these projects, raising questions about how these projects are chosen and when DES will make its way south, given that equity is a core tenant of Vision Zero. 

https://twitter.com/CarFreeHQ2/status/1442889831034597379

Leach said that could be because there are a number of older community and school requests being worked through. 

"I think there's an issue of a pipeline of small projects that may have gotten their start in early years," Leach said. "What you see in the pipeline of quick-build projects has been built up over years... These projects may have gotten their start before Vision Zero was adopted." 

Transportation and Operations Bureau Chief Hui Wang said these projects are "a very small, skewed piece of the transportation program" because they don't show large-scale investments, such as those on Columbia Pike.

"When we're talking about balance, equity, we have to make sure that we're not looking at it through a shaded lens," she said.  

Leach agrees. 

"[Columbia Pike] is our single largest focus areas, as it has some of our oldest infrastructure," he said. "In other parts of the county, like the Rosslyn-Ballston corridor, private development builds a lot of the infrastructure. In Columbia Pike, until recently, there's been little private development -- there's more now -- but it's been left to county to actually make those investments in advance of redevelopment."

When asked if certain communities generate more traffic reports than others, Wang said DES doesn't map out community reports because it's hard to categorize them and her team doesn't have the resources for that. 

"My team is focused on the engineering part -- our goal is trying to get things done," she said. 

The data-based approach helps weed out what is a perceived safety risk versus actual safety risks, Wang noted.

"We use crash data to identify real problems," she said. "We're using data as a guiding force, focusing on high-injury networks." 

Chris Slatt, who is president of transportation advocacy group Sustainable Mobility for Arlington County, said it's not surprising that initial projects will skew toward North Arlington. 

"Complaint-driven processes are well-known to reflect the biases of whom within the community is best equipped to spend precious time and energy complaining, so we would fully expect that method of identifying projects to skew toward the more affluent areas of Arlington unless staff works intentionally to correct that bias," he said.

(more…)


Around Town

Michael Wardian walks off the pickleball court at the Lubber Run Community Center, paddle in hand, proclaiming, “well, we just got trounced.”

The record-setting, headline-making, age-defying ultramarathoner from Arlington has taken up one of the region’s fastest growing sports and, despite his recent loss, he’s getting pretty good at it.


News

One minute after midnight this morning, car-sharing company Free2Move ended its services in Arlington over issues with parking in the county.

It marks a short-lived run in Arlington for the European company, which launched its services in July 2019 after expanding into D.C. in October 2018.