Top District officials will push for greater independence from federal oversight Thursday at a House hearing on the city’s budget that’s unprecedented in its timing and could have the city’s mayor and council chairman answering tough questions. “The balanced budget ought to be an example that we can make decisions for ourselves,” Mayor Vincent Gray said Wednesday when asked about Thursday’s hearing, where he, D.C. Council Chairman Kwame Brown and Chief Financial Officer Natwar Gandhi are scheduled to testify. The three officials are typically called to Capitol Hill to testify about the budget after it’s passed by the council and signed by the mayor.
“This is unprecedented, it never happens,” said Ward 2 Councilman Jack Evans, who will celebrate his 20th year on the council Friday. “Maybe he’s new,” Evans said of the chairman of the subcommittee that oversees the District.
It is South Carolina Republican Trey Gowdy’s first term, but the hearing also gives committee members a chance to question Gray about an ongoing House investigation into claims the mayor’s campaign paid off another mayoral candidate so he could stay on the campaign trail to attack then-Mayor Adrian Fenty.
Although a committee spokesman said questions would be focused “on the budget and the fiscal stability of District spending,” committee members can ask anything they’d like.
And it seems the committee is ready to get tough with its questions. When it announced the hearing, the House oversight committee raised the prospect of the District returning to the federal control board that took over the city’s government in the mid-1990s and pulled it back from the brink of bankruptcy.
Brown and Gandhi will push back against the control board specter as they ask for greater autonomy, according to copies of their written testimonies obtained by The Washington Examiner.
Brown will ask that Congress “provide those citizens of the United States of America who call the District their home, the right to govern their own affairs through the representation of their elected officials.” Gandhi will explain the fiscal advantages of budget freedom and argue, “[B]ecause of the lack of permanent budget autonomy, the District cannot always react swiftly, appropriately or effectively as possible to meet the needs of residents and visitors.”
Despite the control board language in the hearing announcement, it doesn’t appear the city meets any of the seven factors that would allow Congress to bring the board back. The District is meeting its payroll, making payments on pensions and not defaulting on its debt, among other factors the law creating the control board requires be met for the board to be revived.
