Is the District’s financial honeymoon over?

This morning, Chief Financial Officer Natwar M. Gandhi told the mayor and the D.C. Council—and later reporters—that according to his estimates, the District will take in $131 million less in fiscal 2009 than originally anticipated. (The fiscal year starts Oct. 1 of this calendar year.)

The shortfall, Gandhi explained, is primarily, but not exclusively due, to a foreseen decline in revenue from capital gains taxes paid by individuals—a consequence, he said, of “the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression.”

Gandhi, characteristically, went to great lengths to put the number in context, explaining that the District remains in far better budgetary shape than surrounding jurisdictions. At one point, he said, “Two point five percent is not that big a deal….I’m confident that this mayor, this council can manage this.”

Later, Gandhi clarified his statement, saying that the cuts will indeed have to be substantial: “That will mean a real impact on services, a real impact on people.”

Those are impacts that Mayor Adrian M. Fenty has thus far been able to avoid.

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I must admit to being a little pumped about the big Dog Days Sale that hits U Street’s arty shops this weekend. These are the shops that aspire to be eco-friendly, support local artists/designers, or just sell really interesting vintage stuff. And they are all significantly out of my price range. But maybe not tomorrow as the stores will be slashing prices!

A list of participating stores can be found here.

Is it me? We’re you shocked over the Food & Friends honcho’s salary revealed in today’s Post? Executive Director Craig M. Shniderman makes $357,447.

Wow.

Schniderman makes more than most if not all agency heads in the city. And he runs a non-profit. That simply feeds people.

The rule of thumb on judging non-profits is how much money the non-profit devotes to their core mission vs. how much money they spend on administrative costs and salaries. Food & Friends budget obviously feels a bit off.

Schniderman’s defense to the paper of record: His salary increased just 4 percent this year. So let me get this straight. He’s been making this huge salary for a couple years now. That’s not much of a defense.

From the Post:

Last year, Shniderman received a salary of $270,290, as well as $31,318 in various insurances and a pension plan and $55,839 in deferred compensation.

He goes on to tell the Post that he has no plans to take a pay cut. Of course, the non-profit announced it will be scaling back its operations due to rising costs and slacking donations.

In March, after the mayor submitted his fiscal 2009 budget, several city hall wags told LL to check out the cover of the budget books produced by the Office of Budget and Planning. The cover contains background art composed of what looks to be an image of one of those new Metro canopies superimposed over a picture of cute, smiling kids in parks-and-rec T-shirts on Freedom Plaza, with the Wilson Building in the background. Also in the background: Standing just behind the kids, oh-so-faintly, is a woman wearing, gasp!, a Playboy bunny T-shirt!

It’s not often that LL finds a piece of political controversy too minute for his attention, but this was one of those occasions.

But things have changed! Yesterday, LL picked up a fresh set of budget books—the ones issued when the budget is through the council and ready for submission to Congress. The cover, at first glance, appeared to be the same: very same smiling kids and very same Metro canopy. But lo and behold, Playboy bunny lady was gone—Photoshopped out!

Check the closeup:

LL applauds the budget office’s attention to detail; you wouldn’t want some Neanderthal Republican congressman catching a glimpse of America’s foremost symbol of lasciviousness while sitting in judgment of the District’s financial plan, would you?

LL has inquired about the Bowdlerization with the Office of the Chief Financial Officer and will completely on top of this story as it develops.

Full covers after the jump.

UPDATE, 2:23 P.M.: OCFO spokesperson Karyn-Siobhan Robinson reports that he agency wasn’t aware of any complaints about the original budget books. Rather, the design changes can be attributed, she says, to a desire to make the two versions look different. Besides the Playboy editing, Robinson points out that all of the teenagers in the background were deleted, as well as the name tags on the kids. “It appears to me that they wanted to simplify the design,” she says.

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Well, looks like Council Chairman Vincent C. Gray’s plege to rein in pork-barrel spending will wait one more year for implementation: The D.C. Council is about to approve about $48.4 million $72.7 million in earmarks for various city groups in fiscal 2009, including the controversial $10 million for Ford’s Theatre contained in the mayor’s budget proposal.

Mayor Adrian M. Fenty had proposed about $27 million in earmarks, but in draft budget legislation circulated today, various councilmembers had added more than $20 million $45 million to that, just about matching far exceeding the level from last year’s budget battle. LL still needs to go through the list and see what the mayor got to keep and what he didn’t.

But Gray did follow through on promises for greater accountability for earmark beneficiaries. A section of the budget legislation imposes a list of items such groups need to submit by July 15, including articles of incorporation, a recent financial audit, tax forms, and a “detailed Program Statement” explaining what they plan to do with the taxpayer money. Also new: random audits from the D.C. Auditor.

UPDATE, 6:55 P.M.: LL neglected to include the earmarks falling under David A. Catania’s health committee. $20.15 million is allocated to specific groups and businesses; about another $4 million is set aside for grants to groups to be determined.

Full list of earmarks after jump.

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I can’t remember the last time I heard a story more alarming and simultaneously hilarious. It’s a dream scenario: file your taxes, sift through your mail a week later and discover a check from the D.C. government refunding everything you paid over the year.

A friend of mine recently filed his tax forms, indicating that he owed the District government $9,831 in income taxes for the last year. He was a few dollars short, and was planning on sending in a check this week. But, before he even got a chance, he received a $9,831 tax refund. “I looked back over my tax forms and everything was fine,” says the man, a District lawyer named Michael, who didn’t want to use his full name to keep his finances private. When he called the Office of Tax and Revenue, even the people on the other end of the line thought the story was a chuckler. “I was laughing with the lady on the phone. Whoever had input my information for my tax form had put it in wrong. She was trying to explain, they put in a zero [as my income], instead of the income I have. And therefore, the system itself just thought, oh, he paid almost $10,000 in taxes on no income.”

The dream ends there. He’s sending the check back. “If the numbers were off, I really would be questioning as to what happened. But, I really think they just…” He pauses. “Well, you know, who knows?”

Mayor Adrian M. Fenty’s budget, announced last week, indicated a hike in ambulance fees expected to generate an additional $7.24 million in fiscal 2009. There was, however, no accounting at that time of just how much of a bump there would be.

Well, the numbers are out—they were included in an emergency rulemaking published in last Friday’s D.C. Register. And they represent a significant jump.

A “basic life support” ambulance, which includes care from firefighters/EMTs, now costs $268 a ride. An “advanced life support” ambo, which is staffed by paramedics, costs $471.

Under the proposed rules, BLS ambulance rides will cost $530—a nearly two-fold increase, while ALS rides will cost $832. The new rules also add a third category, for “Advanced Life Support—Level 2,” that will cost $953. “Level 2″ fees apply when a certain amount of intravenous drugs are administered or when any number of medical procedures are performed, including manual defibrillation, intubation, central-line insertion, or surgically opening an airway.

Also new: A $6.60 per mile surcharge on top of the rest of the fees. (It’s not specified whether that charge includes the trip to pick you up or just the trip to take you to the hospital.)

William Singer, Fenty’s budget czar, says the fee hike was recommended by a task force on EMS reform created in the wake of the David Rosenbaum death. After consulting a survey of 200 cities done by a national EMS organization, he says, they found that the District was “well below the mean” when it comes to ambulance fees.

Singer makes the point that this is a burden rarely borne directly by the average citizen: “This is a medical service and we can recover some of the cost from private insurers and Medicaid,” he says. The District, he says, rarely pushes to collect the fees from uninsured patients. Another hope is that hiking the fees will lead to fewer uses of ambulances for nonemergency uses—transporting patients between hospitals or nursing homes, for instance.

Care to tell the mayor how you feel? A public hearing is being held this morning at 10 a.m. at Fire & EMS headquarters at 1923 Vermont Ave. NW—that’s only seven days after publication of the rules in the D.C. Register. That’s quite a bit less than the 15 days customary for rulemakings like these. (Written comments are being accepted until April 10.)

Singer says the short notice is appropriate: “This issue has been talked about quite a bit over the last year.”

Photo by Daquella manera