D.C. Council Chairman Vince Gray held the first of eight town hall meetings he hopes will help bring together the city’s deeply divided residents in the leadup to the November general election, but lurking in the background is the District’s troubled financial state.
Tuesday night, Gray met with Ward 5 voters who overwhelmingly supported him in his Democratic mayoral primary victory. He brought with him his message of “One City.”
“We are a city of 600,000 people and we ought to be working hard on how we bridge the gap between us,” Gray said. “The reality is we have a geographic division, an economic division and unfortunately, we have a racial division in this city.”
The chairman, who won the primary with the heavy support of black voters, then reiterated the tenets of his campaign platform of continuing school reform, adult education as a method of reducing unemployment, and adding police officers to improve community policing efforts.
But larger than all those issues is the city’s drooping tax returns, which are pushing Gray and the council to make “tough decisions,” he said.
Earlier Tuesday, Gray said the city is facing up to a $400 million shortfall in the fiscal year budget for 2012, which the council will begin planning for in the coming months. That $400 million, he said, includes the $175 million gap the District is in the process of filling for the current fiscal year.
A spokesman for D.C. Chief Financial Officer Natwar Gandhi told The Washington Examiner that the $400 million budget gap that Gray cited for the fiscal year that starts Oct. 1., 2011 didn’t come from the CFO’s office.
An order that freezes hiring, promotions and salaries issued by Mayor Adrian Fenty on Monday at Gray’s direction is already supposed to slice $100 million off the $175 million shortfall Gandhi projected for the current fiscal year, according to the administration.
Gray didn’t mention the $400 million gap right away during the Ward 5 meeting Tuesday night, but it appears the soon-to-be mayor floated the number to ready District residents for layoffs and cuts to city services.
“I am not looking forward to the tough choices we will be forced to make — and I am sure no one else is,” Gray said Tuesday during a council meeting. “Because these choices will invariably have an adverse impact on people’s lives during incredibly challenging economic times for many District families.”
