While all
eyes are focused on the looming October 17 deadline for Congress to raise the
debt ceiling or force the country into default, the residents of the town where
all the drama is happening are worrying about a different date: On or around
October 13, the District of Columbia will run out of money to keep its own
local government open.
The city council of
Washington, DC, has no control over its own budget. Rather, since the roughly 600,00 residents of DC don’t have a governor or a state to call home, the
city government of the District needs Congressional approval to spend money —
money that it makes through local tax revenue, not U.S. taxpayer dollars. That
approval is wrapped up into every budget that Congress passes and, when it
doesn’t get a budget passed in time, the DC government is not allowed to spend,
just like the federal government.
The only reason that the DC
government didn’t shut down on October 1 is because Mayor Vince Gray (D) declared all city employees
“essential” and
tapped into the city’s “rainy day” fund to keep paying them until Congress got its act together.
But there’s not enough
money in the fund to last until October 17th, when all hopes are that Congress
will finally work out a deal to both fund the government and avoid default.
Rather, city officials estimate that the rainy day fund will be tapped out by October 13. After
that, the DC government will go into shutdown mode — meaning that public
schools, fire departments, trash collection, some buses, the city’s university,
and a host facilities and programswill be put on pause.
On Tuesday, Mayor Gray sent
a letter asking for a meeting with President Obama, House Majority Leader John Boehner (R-OH),
and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D). He hopes to convince them to pass
legislation that allows DC to spend its money freely during the remainder of
the shutdown — and, moreover, to “decouple” Washington’s city budget from the
federal government’s.
“In no other part of our
country are Americans facing the loss of basic municipal or state services due
to the federal government shutdown,” he wrote.
Gray’s letter also pointed
out that many of the city’s services are already feeling the consequences of
the shutdown: Payments for Medicaid providers in the District are on hold, and
DC failed to make its quarterly
payment to the
Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority this month. Gray alsoordered city workers last week to start collecting trash from the parks that are owned
by the National Park Service. They are already shut down, but since there’s
trash inside the garbage cans there, there’s a growing problem of “rodents and other vermin.”
That also means DC’s picking up the $58,000 billfor the
work.
That could only get worse
if DC can’t pay for its water and sewage authority,
keep its unemployment benefit offices open (especially needed given the number
of furloughed federal employees in DC), issue permits and licenses from the
Department of Motor Vehicles, pick up trash and sweep the streets, or keep its
brand new healthcare marketplaces established by Obamacare running.
During the 1996 shutdown,
Congress appropriated funds to keep DC’s city services running while they worked out a deal
for the federal government. That’s a lesson they only learned, as Mike DeBonis
points out in the Washington Post, after an earlier shutdown cost the city
“$7.3 million in wages paid to employees who were not required to report to
work, plus about $78.5 million in revenues that went uncollected or were
collected late.”
Gray hopes that his meeting
can convince Boehner, Reid, and Obama to do the same thing now — approve
one-off legislation to allow DC to keep using its own funding to run the city.
In fact, the House already passed emergency legislation that would do just that. But because House Republicans have used a
so-called “piecemeal” approach to refund only the government programs they
like, the Senate has thus far blocked any measure that would independently fund
one thing without restoring funding to the whole government.
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