Tangles Over City Budget Reflect a Deeper Divide
Despite Mayor's Promise of 'Open Government,' Some Council Members Say They Feel Shut Out

By David Nakamura and Nikita Stewart
Washington Post Staff Writers
Sunday, May 4, 2008; C07

Mayor Adrian M. Fenty's $5.7 billion spending proposal sprawls over six thick books that are so heavy they were delivered to the D.C. Council on a cart.

But when council members delved into the volumes, they said they were shocked at the little information they contained. Gone were the narrative descriptions that former mayor Anthony A. Williams (D) used to lay out in detail. In their place were tables of numbers showing shifts in spending -- with little explanation.

"This is the most opaque budget I've ever seen. . . . The information is scant. It's difficult," council Chairman Vincent C. Gray (D) said at a public hearing last week. "I've begun to lose faith in [the administration's] ability to provide us information. . . . Every committee has struggled to make informed decisions."

As the council approaches a vote May 13 on the budget, some members say they are frustrated. They say the mayor is marginalizing them in his breakneck effort to advance his reform-based agenda and fulfill his promises to residents. Members have said that although Fenty (D) talks publicly about creating an "open government," he has not been transparent with the legislative branch.

Fenty, several members said, has refused to send administration officials to oversight hearings, has asked the council to approve emergency legislation retroactively to support his actions and has misrepresented key initiatives to win public support.

Making matters worse, they said, is the mayor's determination to punish those who criticize or cross him -- for example, by not inviting them to news conferences in their wards. More stark was his recent refusal to distribute tickets for a city-controlled luxury suite at Washington Nationals' games to four rivals on the council.

"There are frequent reminders from the executive branch that perpetuate the tension," said Phil Mendelson (D-At Large), one of the few council members to criticize Fenty publicly. "Instead of going out of their way to improve relationships, they've gone out of their way to make things worse."

It's what has kept many council members publicly quiet and privately fuming.

Fenty's relations with Gray and others have been rocky for months, but until recently there seemed to be little collective will to fight back against a mayor with such a powerful mandate. Fenty was elected in a landslide and has used his popularity to outmaneuver critics as he has taken over the public schools and installed a new schools chancellor and police chief.

Not all council members chafe at Fenty's style. The mayor has several strong allies who say his boldness is notable mostly because it differs from the approach of his predecessor, Williams, who avoided confrontations.

Fenty is "like a normal mayor," said Jack Evans (D-Ward 2). "If you [mess] with him, he'll [mess] with you worse. There are consequences for bad behavior."

The council is struggling to check an increasingly powerful mayor during the budget season. It has approved legislation aimed at forcing Fenty to provide more budget details. And in a show of solidarity, the council agreed to Gray's suggestion that all 13 members refuse to use the Nationals' luxury suite until Fenty gives all of them tickets.

Fenty has continued to withhold the tickets. But the council's actions prompted him and Gray, who have gone weeks without speaking, to meet twice recently at city restaurants to discuss their misgivings.

"Both of us recognize that the most important thing is the progress of the city," Gray said.

"They've been excellent meetings," Fenty said. "We've discussed a variety of topics."

They pledged to meet regularly. But the bad blood has played out in deliberations over key budget and legislative matters.

In February, Allen Y. Lew, Fenty's chief of school modernization, sent the council a series of emergency contracts necessary to pay workers who had repaired school boilers. But Gray and Mendelson balked, saying that the work had been improperly authorized without written contracts. They complained of a disturbing pattern in the administration.

"In the past 14 months, the Council, at the request of the Executive Branch, has considered more than 20 emergency actions to compensate contractors for goods and services that have been received without benefit of a written, valid contract," Gray wrote to Fenty in a letter April 2. "These actions total millions of dollars. There does not appear to be an end in sight to these actions, and there is a definite need for the Executive Branch to exercise some critical discipline in these instances."

In response, Lew and David P. Gragan, the city's chief procurement officer, provided more details on the contracts. Lew said the boiler work had been previously authorized but had cost more than expected, so the contracts had been amended.

Lew also said that his office had been trying to meet Fenty's pledge that the heat would work in all schools by last Oct. 15. And he expressed concern about the council's pace on the contracts. "Many of the subcontractors are [small, minority-owned] firms who have not been paid for several months and are facing severe financial difficulty," Lew wrote.

The administration withdrew one contract, and the council approved the rest April 15. But, Mendelson said, the administration's tone was "arrogant and disrespectful." He had previously complained of three examples in which the administration had refused to send city agency leaders to his oversight hearings.

"There are always questions that make proposals better," Fenty said of the fight over the emergency contracts. "What director Lew did in that case was figure out whatever additional information they needed and got it to them as soon as possible."

Another letter Gray sent to Fenty highlighted the council's frustration at the way the administration has presented a key element of the mayor's budget proposal.

In January, the council approved a commercial-property tax cut to help small businesses. In February, city financial officials announced that revenue projections had flattened and that the city faced a budget deficit. Fenty, who during his campaign had pledged not to raise taxes, was in a bind.

Ultimately, he chose to close the gap by phasing in the council's tax cut over three years. At the unveiling of Fenty's budget proposal in March, City Administrator Dan Tangherlini told the council that the administration's plan would provide more than $100 million in relief over three years -- compared with $96 million in the council's plan. "It's more relief over a longer period," Tangherlini said.

After reviewing the numbers, Gray, who had co-sponsored the council's tax cut plan, was incredulous. In a letter to Fenty, he said that the mayor had disingenuously compared one year of the council's tax cut to three years of the administration's plan. In fact, Gray said, the council's plan would cut taxes for businesses by $300 million.

Gray said he was "at a loss" to understand Fenty's logic, and he has pledged to restore as much of the council's tax plan as possible.

Such actions by the administration have led Gray and others to say that it has not been forthright. At a recent hearing, Gray demanded that Fenty provide written descriptions of all the instances in the budget in which money had been moved from agencies this year. Later that night, Fenty's budget chief, William Singer, sent an e-mail with a 311-page attachment with figures and charts to Gray's office. Singer, 27, a longtime Fenty aide, had been a key voice in the look of Fenty's budget.

To Singer, Williams's budgets were cluttered with unnecessary verbiage. The new charts were cleaner and easier to read, he has said. Yet even after receiving Singer's e-mail attachments, Gray was not satisfied, and Wednesday, the administration sent Gray a third set of documents with written explanations.

But Fenty aides did not write them. They created a computer program that translated numbers from their spreadsheets into sentences. The result was one sentence for each change.