Another week, another apparent scandal involving D.C. government officials. This one gets a bit wonky, involving a city agency that isn’t often in the headlines, contract bids, and hundreds of pages of testimony before a D.C. Council committee.
D.C.’s Department of General Services oversees construction projects—and the lucrative bids for them. Director Christopher Weaver abruptly and mysteriously resigned last August. Within two weeks, it came out that Weaver stepped down rather than fire two employees, as directed by City Administrator Rashad Young, who had recalibrated how DGS evaluated bids. A heavyweight local construction company that donated to Mayor Muriel Bowser’s campaign lost out on two contracts, and it appeared the administration wasn’t happy about it.
One of the employees filed a lawsuit, suing the city and Young for $10 million, saying he was “terminated in retaliation for failing to cooperate with [the Mayor’s office’s] efforts to award the contract” to a political donor and then “publicly defam[ed] and embarass[ed].”
Ward 3 Councilmember Mary Cheh, who oversees the D.C. Council committee with oversight of DGS, decided to look into the situation. “I wanted to see if there was anything improper, but I was also interested to report if there’s nothing improper,” Cheh tells DCist about her decision to open an investigation. “It’s not a good thing for the government for allegations to swirl around, that there’s a notion that improprieties are occurring.”
Keep reading this article at: http://dcist.com/2017/06/whats_this_about_a_dgs_investigatio.php
