Last week’s confrontation between D.C. Mayor Vincent Gray and D.C. Council Chairman Kwame Brown over the mayor’s $77 million supplemental budget request ended with a humiliating defeat for Gray and a victory for D.C. taxpayers. Brown managed to rally every single council member to defeat most of Gray’s midyear spending spree unanimously. The showdown highlighted the mayor’s political weakness and put to rest any idea that Gray would have an easier time dealing with the council than former Mayor Adrian Fenty did when Gray was chairman.
The confrontation did not come as a surprise. In January, Mayor Gray received a letter — signed by every council member except Ward 1 Councilman Jim Graham — informing him that they would not support his plan to spend what was then a $42 million budget surplus for fiscal 2012. Council members made it clear they wanted to park any surplus funds in the city’s reserve account to offset a projected budget shortfall in 2013.
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Gray ignored the warning. Not only did he make plans to spend almost all of the surplus, now up to $79 million, but he also planned to use $20 million to reimburse city workers for the four-day furloughs imposed upon them last year in order to close a $172 million budget gap.
In the middle of an already tense situation, a top Gray aide told The Washington Examiner’s Alan Blinder that Brown was “a do-nothing chairman.” This was probably a bad move. After Brown correctly pointed out that the mayor should not be using surplus funds to reward city agencies for overspending, council members united behind him, allowing the mayor to spend just $15 million of the $79 million surplus on charter schools and the Unemployment Compensation Fund, which hundreds of city workers had recently been caught pilfering. Even Graham was on board this time.
Brown withdrew his sharpest jab at Gray — emergency legislation he had introduced that would have required Gray to notify the council even of capital budget reprogramming requests under $500,000 — but only after Ward 6 Councilman Tommy Wells warned it might hold up current projects. But he had made his point. Chairman Brown, who earned a pejorative nickname over his “Fully Loaded” SUV, is not about to let the mayor tag him with another.
