Selling dreams was easy for District politicians, including Council Chairman Vincent Gray, during the recent primary campaign. But as the legislature returns this week from its summer recess, it faces real work and tough decisions — not the least of which is how to resolve a severe revenue shortfall.
How presumptive Mayor Gray and presumptive Council Chairman Kwame Brown propose to handle the more than $100 million shortage projected for fiscal year 2011, which begins Oct. 1, will be the first test of their political mettle and management acumen. Will they suggest broad and deep budget cuts? Or will the dynamic duo take the easy way out, proposing raising taxes on wealthy residents?
During the campaign, there were spending plans aplenty. The cash register could be heard ringing on every page of Gray’s economic development/jobs blueprint, in which he pledged to reduce high unemployment in Wards 7 and 8. His education reform proposal also seemed to suggest the streets in the District were lined with money trees. His public safety initiative called for putting additional police officers on the street while reviving the Deputy Mayor for Public Safety position created under former Mayor Anthony A. Williams. (Let’s hope that doesn’t mean the return of Margret Nedelkoff Kellems; Already there are legitimate concerns that Gray may bring back former Chief Technology Officer Suzanne Peck, who demonstrated a reckless disregard for local procurement laws.)
When I asked Gray, the day after his primary victory, how he intended to fund his plans given the city’s dire financial condition, he talked about savings in special education.
Maybe I didn’t pose the question correctly. Surely he knows the pittance that can be collected from that segment of the city’s budget won’t resolve the projected shortfall and pay for new programs.
Outgoing Mayor Adrian Fenty kept his 2006 campaign pledge of no new taxes by streamlining the payroll, privatizing select services, dipping into the city’s reserves and jacking up fees for every license, permit and ticket the District issued. Gray and others decried those actions, even as they approved, with minimal modifications, each of Fenty’s budgets. Ward 2 Councilman Jack Evans was the only legislator to vote against the 2011 budget.
Now, as the council returns, the prime focus will be on Gray. Cotton-candy words, camouflaged reality and misrepresented facts maybe the stuff of campaigns, but they do not comprise a praiseworthy chief executive. As he relaunches his mayoral campaign, heading into the general election, he can’t pretend all is well and that the promises he made can be kept.
It’s truth-telling time.
If, as Gray said during that news conference last week outside the Washington Court Hotel, he intends to continue the progress the city made under Fenty, then the financial plan Gray crafts — with assistance from Brown and the outgoing mayor — must include significant budget-cutting. That action must be taken without regard to the long line of Gray supporters queued up and salivating at the government trough.
Jonetta Rose Barras’s column appears on Monday and Wednesday. She can be reached at [email protected].
