D.C.’s unique system of governance positions the city’s chief financial officer to be the bad guy as lawmakers advance plans for new spending. And CFO Glen Lee has played that role with aplomb in the first tight budget cycle of his tenure.
Lee managed to seriously piss off both Council Chair Phil Mendelson and At-Large Councilmember Kenyan McDuffie with his management of their proposals for free bus service and baby bonds, respectively, and that was just the start of the acrimony. The CFO’s obstinance also aggravated a group of progressive councilmembers looking to fund an expansion of food stamps in the budget’s waning days. Now lawmakers must embrace a distinctly risky method of paying for SNAP benefits at Tuesday’s second and final vote on the budget. And that’s had ripple effects elsewhere, making the process of providing checks to excluded workers much more complicated and angering their advocates in the process.
“In this difficult budget year, it feels we’ve exhausted all other feasible options,” Ward 1 Councilmember Brianne Nadeau, one of the lawmakers working on the issue, said Tuesday.
Lee’s predecessor, Jeffrey DeWitt, courted similar fights during his tenure. The CFO has the power to threaten not to certify the entire budget if they don’t like how the Council has funded one program or another, and DeWitt exercised that as recently as 2019 in a relatively petty dispute about Events D.C. funds. But DeWitt served in the role long enough to earn a healthy bit of respect, particularly from Mendelson and other moderate members, despite these skirmishes. Lee doesn’t exactly have the same track record to lean on, stoking suspicions that Mayor Muriel Bowser is overly influencing the nominally independent bean counter.
The frustration this time around stems from Lee’s refusal to allow Ward 4 Councilmember Janeese Lewis George to pay for enhanced SNAP benefits by pulling money from the fund that supports the city’s paid family leave program. She hoped to secure about $39.6 million by reducing the amount of money the city is legally required to set aside for the paid family leave fund, according to a memo circulated by her staff last week. This would only fund a year of enhanced benefits—a far cry from what At-Large Councilmember Christina Henderson’s legislation, which the Council passed but never funded, calls for. But Lewis George sees it as a good place to start, noting that her proposal comes as congressional Republicans are busy demanding new work requirements for benefits as part of a deal with President Joe Biden on the debt ceiling. (Ward 5 Councilmember Zachary Parker’s plan to leave a key tax increase in place would have paid for all this, but his proposal fizzled during the Council’s first budget vote.)
Lewis George had every reason to expect that her plan would work, given the financial strength of the paid leave fund since the program launched three years ago. DeWitt took a pretty cautious view toward how much money the city would need to hold in reserve until it could figure out how much demand the program would generate and how much money the District could raise in payroll taxes to support it. That enabled Bowser to pull cash away from the fund to cover revenue gaps as the pandemic first struck; lawmakers went a step further last year, slashing the tax rate while also increasing the generosity of its benefits due to the health of the fund.
But Lee turned Lewis George down this year. A spokesperson for Lee declined to provide an explanation, saying that the CFO’s office has a longstanding policy not to discuss debates with the Council ahead of the budget’s certification.
So Lewis George was forced to turn to a well-worn, if less than ideal, source: leftover revenues. If city revenues exceed Lee’s estimates this September, then any extra money will go toward funding the $39.6 million in SNAP expenses. The next $20 million after that will fund checks for workers excluded from federal pandemic relief, like street vendors and undocumented people.
“Our team worked to identify funding that could be included in the FY24 budget without contingencies and without negative effects on the District’s finances,” Will Singer, Lewis George’s top legislative aide, wrote in a memo circulated to the full Council Monday. “But OCFO rejected each of our proposed funding sources, and so this amendment represents the most viable alternative.”
No one in the Wilson Building is happy funding programs this way, and with good reason. There’s no telling whether revenues will match Lee’s expectations given the continued uncertainties of the pandemic’s impact on commercial property taxes, so there may not be any excess to count on. Even if there is, this mechanism counts on Lee’s acquiescence in actually letting the money flow to the program. Consider that Mendelson and Ward 6 Councilmember Charles Allen got burned when they tried to fund the free Metrobus plan this way; they believed the CFO certified in December that there was enough excess revenue to fund the program, but he changed his tune when tax collections started to drop in February, prompting the messy, but ultimately fruitless fight with Bowser over defunding the K Street Transitway project to fund the bus service.
“I certainly support the intent behind this amendment, but folks should not walk away from here saying, ‘Ah, we funded SNAP,’” Mendelson said Tuesday. “And it’s even more difficult to assume we’ll have the additional revenue growth for the excluded workers.”
Indeed, this is a particularly raw deal for excluded workers, who have to hope not only that there’s enough money for SNAP and for their checks, but also that the cash actually goes out the door this time. For obscure reasons, the Council entrusted Events D.C. to distribute the $20 million last year, and it simply didn’t do so. That allowed Bowser to move that money to cover budget gaps elsewhere. (Mendelson is hoping she doesn’t do this to avoid the sort of protests from excluded workers that dampened his evening Friday night; but he had a chance to find the money earlier in the budget process and declined to do so, so perhaps these demonstrations are understandable.)
“I’ve gone to see the chairman three years in a row to demand support for excluded workers, and I will do it again because it is a matter of survival for my family and my community,” Norma C., an organizer with the Restaurant Opportunities Center United for D.C., wrote in a statement Friday.
Loose Lips sees this situation as another demonstration of the limitations the growing progressive bloc on the Council faces moving forward. Lewis George’s SNAP plan passed easily, as she built support first among left-leaning lawmakers and eventually won unanimous backing of the full Council. But her more creative funding solution was easily dismissed by the CFO, an office that is almost by definition conservative due to its mission and the very spirit behind its creation in the Control Board days. The influence of a fiscally conservative mayor like Bowser only compounds the issue. Will lawmakers be able to come up with a plan to counteract it?