Today the city council held its hearing on B17-0909, the bill that seeks to rename the portion of South Capitol Street that runs next to Nationals Park as "Taxation Without Representation Street, SE." Four witnesses testified in favor of the bill, although the support of three of them (DC's two shadow senators and the head of DCVote) was not exactly a surprise.

Reader M., who keeps a better eye on the Monument Half Street web cam than I do, has passed along the word that, within the past week, the Half Street Hole (just north of Nationals Park) has started being re-filled with dirt, except for the far northern portion where additional underground garage space next to the 55 M Street office building is being completed. The small piece of garage construction is where a new street dubbed "Monument Street" has been planned, to connect Half to Cushing Street to the east; doing this work also will now give southern walls to the 55 M garage. The rest of the block is where Monument had plans for a 200-room hotel and 340 residential units, along with lots of ground-floor retail. I don't know anything beyond what I'm seeing on the webcam, so we'll have to wait to find out What This Means (though certainly filling back in a three-story hole isn't particularly likely to indicate a project moving forward).