About a year ago a friend parked his car downtown on K Street. As he was about to open the driver’s door, a small bus pulled too close and sideswiped his car, ripped off the mirror and continued down the street.

My friend wanted to collect damages from the owner of the bus. It had D.C. government tags. He recalls seeing Department of Recreation written on its side. His calls to the D.C. government were met with nonchalance. Bureaucrats bucked his calls around, lawyers said he had no proof. He tired of the game and wound up paying $3,000 for the repairs.

I couldn’t help thinking of my buddy’s shabby treatment when I read about the way Metro handled Marion Barry’s alleged brush with a bus.

As the Ward 8 City Council member tells it, he was parked on Martin Luther King Jr. Avenue one evening last summer when a Metro bus sideswiped the passenger side of his Mercedes-Benz. He honked, he says, but the bus kept going. Barry didn’t contact the cops or Metro.

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A month or so later, someone in Barry’s council office phoned Metro to report the sideswiping incident. While Metro was investigating, Barry had his car repaired for about $2,200.

Metro staffers reported they could not substantiate Barry’s story; meanwhile, Metro claim adjusters said it would take about $3,200 to fix the car. Ignoring his staff and the actual costs, Metro General Manager John Catoe ordered the transit authority to cut Barry a check for $3,227.40.

It just so happens that Barry is an alternate on the Metro board. That means he can vote in committees, which make major policy decisions. But over the past three years, Barry rarely showed. Responding to a reporter’s questions, Barry brushed off the incident and said he wanted off the board, anyway. “I’ve done enough,” he was quoted as saying. “I don’t apologize.”

Does he ever?

Did he apologize for letting the city schools deteriorate during his four mayoral terms in the 1980s and 1990s?

Did he apologize for succumbing to various addictions, especially cocaine, which wound up convulsing the city in racial tension during his trial on drug charges in the summer of 1990?

Did he apologize when he went to jail for six months?

Did he say he was sorry for not paying federal or D.C. taxes from 1999 to 2004? Or for not paying even after he pleaded guilty and saying he would?

Nope and nope.

The sadness that I have when it comes to Marion Barry is not that he so flagrantly rips off the government and gets away with it. What bothers me is that — despite his infirmities at age 72 and his only occasional attention to his job — Marion Barry is still the strongest voice for the city’s poor and downcast.

Each time he “gets it over on The Man,” he loses credibility, and his pleas for the city’s needy are more easily dismissed.

Rarely has a politician squandered his gifts and his power for chump change.