jonetta rose barras: DC’s fanciful budget

Half-jokingly, I asked earlier this week on my Twitter account whether the DC government needed a therapist, considering the stress it has been experiencing both externally — from MAGA Republicans intent on making the city their pawn in the national 2024 election — and internally, with infighting among various DC Council members as well as battles between legislators — including Chair Phil Mendelson — and Mayor Muriel Bowser.

I stopped being amused, however, following a media briefing about the mayor’s $19.7 billion Fiscal Year 2024 Budget and Financial Plan, $10.6 billion of which comes from local funds. She submitted it to the council during a breakfast meeting between the two branches on Wednesday. 

As the council’s 70-day budget review process gets underway, Bowser is scheduled to make a more formal presentation on Friday at noon in the Council Chambers at the John A. Wilson Building. Beginning on Monday, the legislature will hold public hearings with government agency managers, residents, advocates and special-interest groups before finalizing the budget, voting on it and transmitting it to Congress. 

“The Fiscal Year 2024 Fair Shot Budget is being delivered at a critical juncture for our city. This budget reflects many tough choices, but we are also fortunate that even in tight times, the District remains well-resourced and able to continue delivering world-class programs and services,” Bowser said in a prepared statement presented at Wednesday’s breakfast meeting. 

“As I have said before, when we work together, there is nothing that we cannot take on. The FY 2024 Budget makes the necessary investments to promote and sustain the District’s comeback by unlocking the full potential of our residents, our neighborhoods, and our businesses,” she added, sprinkling the word “proud” throughout her comments during the Wednesday briefing with the council to express her sentiments about the work performed by her budget team and administration in general.

Truthfully, the mayor’s budget is mostly a work of fiscal fantasy, deploying reserve funds, one-time federal pandemic recovery funds, Federal Emergency Management Agency reimbursements and not-yet-realized revenue collections. Regrettably the city’s chief financial officer, Glen Lee, served as co-author of the fictional financial document. With his help, Bowser was able to satisfy vocal political advocates and special-interest groups. 

For example, she chose to convert four “under-utilized” tennis and basketball courts, using $750,000 to satisfy the demands of a small cadre of residents for pickleball courts. Further, she essentially has embraced fiscal excess. She estimated that there are 3,500 funded but vacant positions under her authority within the executive branch. Despite facing a $1.7 billion deficit over the four-year financial plan, Bowser decided to eliminate only 749 of those posts.

“We could have eliminated more. No filled positions were affected either,” she admitted during her discussion with council members. 

One effect of not cutting more of these empty slots is that Bowser has given herself room to use the associated dollars as a slush fund, reprogramming money as she sees fit. The most important and critical effect is that she failed to sharpen the government’s mission through aggressive prioritizing of programs and policies. The latter process could have yielded a leaner, more nimble and higher quality delivery of core services.

To help close the would-be deficit, Bowser used $257 million from the city’s so-called stabilization fund, according to budget director Jenny Reed. By law, the administration is not required to repay that money, she said, but there are intentions to return it using any surplus or excess funds that may be realized over the course of the four-year plan. 

Far worse in my view, the mayor’s financial plan relies on $578 million — more than half a billion dollars — from anticipated “automated traffic enforcement” fines generated from new cameras that have yet to be installed.

What Bowser and her staff have proposed comes all too close to that infamous fifth-quarter contrivance used in the 1990s by Mayor Sharon Pratt and her finance chief Ellen O’Connor to balance a budget floating in the red, which eventually instigated the creation by the Republican-dominated Congress of a financial control board. 

Further, the mayor and her minions provided irrefutable evidence of the historic charge against the city: It uses ticket revenue generated by traffic cameras to balance its budget.

Bowser might be forgiven for her imaginative budgeting if she had resolved serious issues confronting the city. For example, she has proposed no real increase over the next four years for the Metropolitan Police Department (MPD). Instead, Chief Robert Contee will have to fund the cost of about 270 new officers by using money that becomes available as others leave the department. That decision flies in the face of her claim and residents’ concerns that the size of the DC police force is inadequate for current and future public safety needs in the nation’s capital. 

When asked about the flat funding for MPD staffing, City Administrator Kevin Donahue asserted “It is a difficult hiring environment.” What?!

Later, Reed made clear that MPD will see some increase, mostly to fund a collective bargaining agreement. There’s $105 million budgeted for this fiscal year and $46 million for 2024. That money is parked in the workforce investment fund and will move to the agency once the agreement is finalized, she told me in a phone interview.

When at-large Council member Kenyan McDuffie asked about the impact of fewer police officers on the downtown comeback plan, Bowser responded that she appreciated his support for hiring more of them but that in the battle to increase public safety, if “we need more presence it won’t necessarily be police.” She said the city will have to look at “other non-police personnel to have that presence.”

It’s a time of reverse conversions. Some council members have finally admitted the city needs more police officers. Ward 7 Council member Vincent Gray even introduced legislation to bring the total force up to 4,000 officers, renewing his unsuccessful effort in 2017 to boost the size of MPD 

Now the mayor and others who fought against police reductions and certain reforms, and who preached that people didn’t feel safe, have seemingly decided that the current number of 3,378 officers is fine, thank you very much. Even if Bowser continues to say she wants a larger force, her budget document is louder than her rhetoric.

Bowser hasn’t flipped her position around funding for traditional public schools, however. Ignoring pleas from parents, teachers and education advocates, she continued to violate the Schools First in Budgeting Emergency Amendment Act of 2022, choosing to cut the current budget for more than three dozen schools — many of them in low-income communities of color. When I raised this issue during the staff-led budget briefing on Tuesday, I was advised by administration officials to consider a more nuanced analysis of the problem since they said it related principally to one-time funding obtained from federal pandemic relief. 

I refuse. For years, far too many DC children of color have not received the resources they need. That has produced a ripple effect that fewer parents register their children in those facilities; the resulting drop in the student population often has instigated further budget cuts. It’s a vicious cycle that Bowser seems unwilling to end. 

Mendelson, whose Committee of the Whole has oversight of public education, has been standing against Bowser. Last month, he said he would wait until the mayor submitted her budget to decide his next step. Interestingly, this wasn’t among the handful of objections he cited about the mayor’s budget in a statement issued Wednesday afternoon.

No one should think for half a second that the council will right the city’s fiscal ship. As Bowser was developing her proposal, legislators sent her wish lists that total $2.5 billion in spending. That was $800 million above the $1.7 billion financial gap the mayor and her team sought to close. 

While they obviously didn’t get everything they wanted, legislators seemed satisfied with many of the mayor’s choices for additional funding. Ward 5’s Zachary Parker called them “thoughtful investments.” He and other council spendthrifts made clear they would be on the hunt for money for their pet issues or programs and services that were important to their constituents. 

“There will be disagreements along the way,” Ward 6 Council member Charles Allen said, as he praised Bowser and her team for the “incredible amount of work” they had done, before asking about investments to address climate change. Allen has oversight of the Committee on Transportation and the Environment.

After not saying much at the breakfast briefing, Mendelson went after the fiscal proposal in his press release: “Although next year’s budget will have more money to spend than this year’s, and the Mayor has chosen the theme of ‘recovery,’ a closer look reveals budget choices that set back recovery for low and middle income residents,” he wrote. 

“The budget reflects choices and priorities,” Mendelson continued. “Our choice and priority is to focus a ‘recovery budget’ on the recovery of our citizens.”

Among the items he highlighted in his statement was funding for fare-free buses. He and Allen have been engaged in a fairly heated battle with the CFO over money for the Metro for DC Amendment Act of 2022, which they thought would be funded from excess recurring revenue based on Lee’s December projections. However, the CFO rescinded that decision in February after he adjusted previous revenue estimates downward. 

In a letter dated March 20, Mendelson chastised Lee for his actions: “It is for the mayor and ultimately the council to decide whether and how to offset revenue growth.”

He also told the CFO that “you must advise the mayor that her proposed budget must address the funding” for the fare-free law.

Bowser’s budget did not include the $128 million needed annually to fund that project. Four days before Mendelson wrote to the CFO, she had sent her own letter to Lee, noting that the Federal Transit Administration had advised the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority that if it provided free fares for District residents it had to do the same for those who take MetroAccess. “It is important to understand the true and complete cost of launching and maintaining the program,” Bowser wrote in her letter dated March 16. “I ask that your office expedite this financial analysis and share it with our residents.”

Raise your hand if you think District residents would really choose free rides for everyone over increasing money for schools east of the Anacostia River or additional funding to prevent low-income families from being evicted.

Maybe council members will come to their senses and realize the bus fight is the least of their troubles. They have a budget before them built on unreal assumptions that they will have to fix unless they enjoy chasing unicorns and preparing for yet another financial control board.

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jonetta rose barras is an author and freelance journalist, covering national and local issues including politics, childhood trauma, public education, economic development and urban public policies. She can be reached at thebarrasreport@gmail.com.