As the D.C. Council enters the last frantic days of negotiating a dramatically slimmed down city budget for 2011, it’s becoming more and more clear that the impact of the recession and the difficult choices our elected officials are choosing to make require a broader discussion of where we are, where we’d like to go and what it will take to get there.
Since Mayor Adrian Fenty introduced the budget, the council has held limited-access discussions on where cuts need to be made to close a $500 million budget gap. But given the tight time-frame that they’ve had to operate on and the fact that this budget lands smack in the middle of an election year pitting Fenty against Council Chair Vince Gray, those discussions don’t appropriately prepare District residents for what’s to come.
What can be done? Simple. We need a summit akin to the one President Barack Obama hosted in the midst of the heated debate over healthcare reform.
While some may have called the move simple theatrics, there was something refreshing in seeing political opposites openly and honestly discuss an issue of such importance. I don’t see why our elected representatives can’t do the same.
I’m not advocating that we put the District’s entire leadership in a room and make them go through the city’s finances line by line, dollar by dollar. But I do think having them openly discuss and debate the city’s economic, social and financial health for the coming years would remove the usual politicking that’s involved in budget negotiations, let much needed sunlight into the process and allow District residents to better understand the state of their city.
Such a summit would be additionally valuable now because the city is in the midst of dramatic changes, and not everyone feels like the changes are evenly distributed or accurately representative of the District’s diversity. These insecurities are corrosive for District politics, and instead of running away from them, our elected representatives should openly talk about them.
Let’s get through this budget cycle, allow tempers to cool and move forward with a summit on the future of the District.
