The Center for Nonprofit Advancement, a local entity, is encouraging residents/nonprofits to submit a form letter to Mayor Adrian Fenty urging him to shore up the budget shortfall and help protect the city's safety net for its neediest residents:

"This week, D.C. Mayor Adrian Fenty will be finalizing plans to address the District’s new $340 million revenue shortfall. We need to send him a message right now that he should protect key services — especially the safety net — as he works to balance the budget. In particular, we need to urge the Mayor to tap DC’s rainy day fund and to raise revenues — as more than half the states have done this year."

Read More "Non-Profit Urges Write-In Effort To Protect District Safety Net" »

As mentioned by LL in an exhaustive budget rundown, At-Large Councilmember Phil Mendelson kept funding in the city budget for a program that helps the poor pay for attorneys. Today, Bread for the City cheered the news on its blog ("Beyond Bread"):

"Yesterday, the DC Council Judiciary Committee voted unanimously to maintain funding for civil legal services for low income DC residents.

Under the approved budget, more than $3.5 million will be allocated for civil legal services (including loan repayment for eligible lawyers). This is essentially the same amount of funding that was allocated to legal services for the poor in the FY 2009 budget. Considering the fact that this funding stream is just barely older than the economic downturn, and given the scale of DC's current budget crisis, it is no small beans to see the funding maintained."

Beyond Bread shares some stunning statistics on just how deep the need is for representation.

Read More "More Should Be Done For Legal Aid Funding" »

Last spring, Mayor Adrian M. Fenty and the D.C. Council took heat from LL and others for their earmarks in the yearly budget. In his initial FY09 budget proposal, Fenty included $27 million in noncompetitive grants, which the council later upped to $70 million. Things got to the point that Council Chairman Vincent C. Gray pushed through new restrictions on the earmarking practice.

Needless to say, in these times of fiscal rectitude, earmarks are very, very hard to come by, and this year's draft budget legislation no longer includes the exhaustive list provided in the past. But the earmarks are still there; they're just smaller and harder to find. One honeypot that LL has been able to identify is the Neighborhood Investment Fund---a pot of money set up as a sop to the Washington Interfaith Network and other activists during ballpark negotiations in 2004. The NIF, which is funded with up to $10 million yearly from personal property tax revenue, was intended to fund revitalization projects in a dozen underserved neighborhoods through a rigorous planning process.

The mayor is proposing taking $11.6 million from the NIF and spreading it to various places around the government. Much of it, under the proposal, is to stay under the control of the deputy mayor for planning and economic development---for instance, a $2.1 million subsidy to "fully fund the operating expenses of parking operations" at the DC USA development in Columbia Heights. And another $2.4 million is being set aside, vaguely, to "[r]estore adequate funding for current economic development operations."

Read More "Mayoral Earmarks Include $2.1M for DC USA Parking" »

Buried in budget legislation [PDF, p.121] submitted today to the D.C. Council are a number of changes to the District's property-tax appeals process.

The Board of Real Property Assessment Appeals (BRPAA---pronounced "BURP-uh") has had its share of trouble over the years. The board came in for a harsh review last fall from D.C. Auditor Deborah K. Nichols, who wrote that longtime chair Paul Strauss had "provided a dubious level of service to residents and businesses of the District of Columbia." Earlier this year, the board was again subject to unflattering headlines when one member resigned, publicly citing mismanagement by interim chair Towanda Paul-Bryant. And then, news that tax appeals had cut city revenues by some $100 million led to widespread calls for BRPAA reform.

And reform is what they shall get. Attorney General Peter Nickles says he convened members of BRPAA and the city finance office earlier this month: "I said, you know this agency does not appear to me to be working."

Read More "Budget Proposal Includes Changes to Property Tax Appeals Board" »

The FY2010 budget proposal submitted by Mayor Adrian M. Fenty on Friday contained a number of fee hikes. Many of those are intended to fall on businesses, but there was one that will fall broadly on District residents: A "Street Light User Fee," intended to "cover the costs associated with the operation and maintenance of streetlights in the District."

Details of the fee have been reveled in draft legislation submitted to the council today: The fee will be assessed on your Pepco bills. Residential customers, under the proposal, will pay $4.25 a month ($51 a year); commercial customers will pay $16.75 monthly ($201 yearly), and all others $42 monthly ($504 yearly).

Now, the proposed legislation pumps all of this money into a separate streetlight fund to be held separate from the city's general operating fund---so there's little danger the city will use your streetlight money to, say, pay for potholes. Also, the language provides that low-income residents can get assistance paying the fee from the city energy assistance office.

The D.C. Council, of course, has to approve this. Don't like it? Call your home councilmember, and you might also drop a line to Ward 1 Councilmember Jim Graham, who oversees the transportation department---(202) 724-8181.

The D.C. Council's right there, too!

It's busy times in the office of council budget director Eric Goulet, who has the requisite amount of paperwork in his office---tons!---to prove he's worthy of his title. It's a messy office, but an organized messy. "I'll show you my folders," he exclaims.

And indeed he does. There's the folder for the FY '10 budget; folders for FY '10 budget earmark requests, of which he already has a half-dozen (pork isn't just a congressional thing!); there's even the 2009 federal stimulus package folder. There's probably some folders in there, too, for budget-director-relevant items like zoned infrastructure bonds and recreational zoned bonds.

In this world of acronyms and baselines and targets, however, there's possibly nothing more pressing at the moment than MOEs.

Say what? Yes, MOEs. It's a stimulus term that stands for "Maintenance of Effort." What it all means is that the city must maintain effort---or provide a certain, respectable level of services---in order to qualify for stimulus cash.

--By Mike DeBonis

Late February at the John A. Wilson Building is a tough time to be a spreadsheet. That's because City Administrator Dan Tangherlini and his budget people are crunching the living daylights out of the District's numbers from early in the morning till late at night, trying to get a document that'll pass muster at the D.C. Council.

On this particular day, Tangherlini is doing the yeoman's job of agency budget reviews. Meaning that directors and top staff of the city's various departments are making the trek to the 5th floor CapStat room in the Wilson Building, the better to talk about something called the "baseline" with Dan Tan.

Earlier today, Dan Tan and his budget director, Will Singer, sat down with the people from D.C.'s Office of Contracting and Procurement. They allowed Loose Lips columnist Mike DeBonis to sit in for the opening (read: generic) comments. Singer said something trenchant: "This really is the most challenging budget year for the District since the control board...We've asked every agency to look deep inside the baseline for possible savings."

What on earth is a baseline? It's the amount of money needed to maintain the level of services offered in the past budget year. This year, the mayor's people ordered agencies to roll back the baseline. More with less, in other words.

Before the parties got into any real discussions, they kicked Loose Lips out of the room.

Reporting by Mike DeBonis

Across the country, states, counties, and municipalities have been scrambling to come up with plans for sucking up the billions lawmakers have promised in stimulus dollars.

Make that states, counties, municipalities, and a District.

Earlier this month, Mayor Adrian M. Fenty outlined in a letter [PDF] to Eleanor Holmes Norton, the District's delegate to Congress, his list of priorities for federal dollars that might be disbursed in coming months in attempts to jumpstart the economy.

What are those priorities?

Well, one's no secret: schools. In his letter, Fenty talks up his DCPS reform efforts, but notes that "many of the buildings in which these reforms are occurring do not meet the high standards to which we are holding our teachers and students....With Federal support, we could cut in half my 5-year plan to rehabilitate all of the city's educational space." He also notes UDC could use an injection of capital funds.

Moving on to public safety issues, he mentions a pair of "shovel-ready" projects that could move forward immediately with federal funding: a new police evidence warehouse and forensics lab, which the letter says "could be underway within 90 days of funding."

Also in the shovel-ready category are a bunch of transportation projects---including the South Capitol Street and 11th Street bridge replacement projects, as well as streetcar implementation and other transit projects. The more pie-in-the-sky request in the transportation category is to change the federal transportation funding formula to reflect the fact that most cars on District roads are from out of state---"Therefore, some additional targeted funding might be necessary to reflect the unique Federal/Regional aspects of the District's transportation infrastructure."

Read More "Fenty Stimulus Priorities: Schools, Cops, and “Green” Stuff" »