Local
Fenty slashes $52M from budget
By: Michael Neibauer
Examiner Staff Writer
October 29, 2008
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| Police take the biggest hit from Mayor Adrien Fenty's budget cuts. (Examiner File) |
The $52 million reduction, implemented by executive order, covers only 40 percent of the projected fiscal 2009 shortfall. The council must take legislative action to close the remaining $79 million hole.
Fenty was flanked at a midmorning news conference by at-large Councilman David Catania, who offered a budget-cutting proposal of his own: The health committee chairman said he will delay several health initiatives, including the Healthy DC universal insurance program, and sock away the resulting $20 million savings in a reserve fund to use if the District’s revenues continue to fall.
“Each of us have to be prepared to go to our most cherished constituencies and say, “We all must share in the sacrifice to protect the larger family,’ ” Catania said.
Catania has rejected Chief Financial Officer Natwar Gandhi’s revenue projections as “fantasy.” The numbers, developed before the stock market’s recent collapse, “do not really reflect the state of the economy,” Catania said, and the council must “dig deeper” to meet larger challenges down the road. It in unclear whether Catania’s colleagues will follow his lead.
The government has made little progress tackling the city’s budget problem since Gandhi issued his estimates more than a month ago. Fenty said Tuesday the council is “rightfully looking at all the proposals the executive has put together,” but the administration “must move forward.”
The mayor slashed the budgets of 52 agencies, most by eliminating vacant positions, as a first “managerially prudent” step toward bridging the gap. The Metropolitan Police Department paid the highest price, $4 million, while the employment services, consumer and regulatory affairs, health, transportation, unified communications and technology offices all lost more than $2 million.
Critical services are not expected to suffer.
The mayor, in an Oct. 21 letter to Council Chairman Vincent Gray, urged quick council action on his full gap-closing proposal. But Gray told colleagues in a Monday memo that his office is “still awaiting a complete proposal that the Council can meaningfully consider.”
The budget situation, Gray wrote, “has become more protracted than we could have imagined.”
