D.C. Council members on Thursday called for independent investigations of the city’s Summer Youth Employment Program in the wake of its severely busted budget and suspect paycheck practices.
Council Chairman Vincent Gray, Ward 8 Councilman Marion Barry and at-large Councilwoman Carol Schwartz have separately asked the D.C. inspector general and D.C. auditor to launch probes into Mayor Adrian Fenty’s summer jobs program. Schwartz, chair of the government operations committee, dubbed the program a “debacle.”
What was originally a $14.5 million undertaking is now costing taxpayers $52.4 million. Most recently, Chief Financial Officer Natwar Gandhi approved Fenty’s request to use $20.1 million from emergency cash reserves to meet the exploding payroll demands of 21,000 enrolled teens.
The problems have mounted, according to council members: Some youth are being paid to do nothing, some are being paid late and others aren’t being paid at all. Council members also report anecdotal evidence that non-District residents are receiving paychecks.
“Young people deserve better than they’re getting,” Barry said. “Taxpayers deserve better accounting of their money.”
In a statement issued Thursday, Fenty said the program has “seen tremendous growth, but has also experienced major and unacceptable administrative problems.” City Administrator Dan Tangherlini’s office, Fenty said, has launched a full investigation “that will identify how the problems happened, who should be held accountable and how to ensure these problems will not happen again.” The Fenty administration anticipated cost increases, documentation shows.
The council last December added $7 million to the program’s original $14.5 million budget at the executive’s request. Tangherlini said in testimony before the council that the job program would expand from six to 10 weeks, grow from roughly 10,000 to 15,000 participants, and cost more due to an increase in the federal minimum wage.
But in a July 2 letter to Gray, Fenty said he would need another $10.8 million to cover an “unanticipated four-week extension” of the program and “higher-than-anticipated hourly wage rates.”
Either the Fenty administration “grossly underestimated” the funding needs “every step of the way,” Gray wrote in a letter to Fenty, “or high-level policy decisions were made to continue increasing spending on a program that was clearly exceeding its approved budget.”
Putting District teens to work is still a workable goal worthy of taxpayer dollars, Barry said.
“It’s not too unwieldy,” he said. “It’s apparently too unwieldy for the people doing it now.”
