Do you live or work in the District of Columbia? Do you know what the District’s biggest problems are and how they should be solved? Wanna make $5,000 in the telling?

Thanks to a reader using our new fangled Suggest A Story link, I’m here to tell you that DC Appleseed, with a grant from the June and John Hechinger Family Trusts is holding a very cool contest, Solving DC’s Problems where you can post, comment, and vote on reader’s opinions of the biggest DC problems and their creative fixes. The three winners will get to present their ideas to the Mayoral candidates at a forum in June.

What might DC folks think are issues and solutions? Here’s a random sampling sure to get you thinking, wondering, or all out laughing:

• Dog Racing at RFK - unlike other greyhound parks, RFK could be turned into a kid friendly avenue
• Paintballing Bad Drivers - each citizen be provided a paint-ball gun and 5 special pellets per year
• Spatula Cars “capable of flipping double parked cars out of the way and up into the air to any predetermined location - yard, tree top, small body of water, sidewalk, building roof, etc.”
• Smack people in the head when they do something stupid - Arm the citizenry of DC with foam padded batons.
• Chocolate Milk Solves Everything - all city water fountains to offer a choice between water and chocolate milk

Chocolate Milk!

So I’ve picked just the funny ones, but there are others there as well, real gems that I hope will be presented to government officials, and candidates running in the District’s 2006 elections.

It is a good way to have city leaders listen to how we think the city should be run, and to infuse the elections this year with the issues that matter most to us.

Still, I’m down for chocolate milk.

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4. Jamba’s non-dairy dairy
5. VA Hybrids Get Another Year of HOV