D.C. Officials Raise the Roof Over Curbs on Home Rule

WASHINGTON — Imagine the 25-year experiment of home rule in the nation’s capital as a troubled marriage. Congress is cast as the aloof head of household and the District of Columbia government as its financially dependent spouse. For most of their debt-ridden union, the breadwinner has quietly seethed at the deterioration of the family home. The house is constantly in disrepair, and some parts are unlivable. The children aren’t studying. Crime and disease are constant worries despite heaping sums of money spent to prevent them.

Finally, the head of household can tolerate no more. Unilaterally, the employed partner pays off much of the crushing debt and absolves the spouse of some unwanted housekeeping duties. But rescue comes at a humiliating cost: A mistress is brought in to run the household.

Mayor Marion Barry, who personifies the city’s financial woes for many on Capitol Hill, reacted with hyperbolic outrage to his loss of clout and district residents’ loss of representation. “Democracy has been raped,” he thundered.

This is the state of affairs playing out here in the wake of President Clinton’s signing of the bipartisan budget legislation. Among the measure’s provisions demanded by GOP lawmakers is an order for the district’s mayor to give over most of his power to a financial control board appointed by the president and authorized by Congress.

Even in the best of times, the nation’s capital is a seething caldron of plantation politics, abstruse constitutional issues and toxic mismanagement. It would make the Southern aristocrats of antebellum Charleston envious, the revolutionaries of Boston throw tea into the harbor and the machine politicians of old Chicago proud.

But this is a particularly low point. In a deal struck by White House budget negotiators and Republican congressional leaders, the federal government has taken responsibility for such city services as fire, police, health and public works. It also assumed an estimated $5 billion in pension liabilities.

In exchange, Congress insisted that the control board, which it formed two years ago to address the district’s financial troubles, assume even greater control over the day-to-day duties previously handled by Barry and the D.C. Council.

Although the control board is headed by a black man--former Federal Reserve Board member Andrew F. Brimmer--Barry and his supporters view it as a symbol of the district’s return to a federal colonialism that circumvents the will of the city’s voters, a majority of whom are black.

Even the White House and Delegate Eleanor Holmes Norton (D-D.C.), who participated in the deal-making and initially defended the outcome, have expressed concern over the aggressiveness of the control board’s resulting actions.

“We think the control board has shown insufficient sensitivity to the role of elected officials to set policy and set priorities in the district,” said Franklin D. Raines, director of the White House Office of Management and Budget.

Norton boycotted the White House budget-signing ceremony to protest Republican-inserted provisions that called for immediate changes among Barry’s top department heads. “The price was too high,” she said of GOP demands. Norton, elected to represent the district’s 540,000 residents in Congress, has no voting powers there.

For most of its history, Washington was governed by a three-person commission, appointed by and answerable only to congressional leaders--typically powerful Southern Democrats who ignored residents’ demands for the right to elect their own leaders. During the 1960s, that system gave way to gradual home rule; an appointed administrator replaced the three-member governing commission, and residents eventually elected a school board, city council and mayor.

In 1973, Congress granted D.C. residents limited home rule, which allowed elected district officials to set policies subject to federal oversight. Congress retained ultimate authority over the district’s finances--an ever-present sore point for district leaders, who note that they are controlled by Congress members whom they can neither elect nor replace.

E. Ned Sloan, a Washington attorney and activist, calls it a “unique relationship” that effectively prevents district residents from governing themselves. Worse, said Sloan, when Congress granted limited home-rule powers, it also left the district with a large deficit.

“We started out in the hole,” he said. “We were established to fail.”

But GOP leaders--often pointing directly at Barry--view the district’s problems as byproducts of political corruption, mismanagement and administrative bungling.

After the Republicans took over Congress in 1995, the new leadership expressed frustration with Barry’s management. Recent stories in the Washington Post compared the D.C. government to municipalities of similar size and found that the district has the largest municipal payroll per capita yet provides fewer and poorer quality services. The district spends more for police and fire services, for example, but has a higher crime rate and fights fewer fires, the newspaper reported.

Most recently, district residents were alarmed to learn that public schools will open on Sept. 22, three weeks late, to allow time for the court-ordered repair of thousands of fire code violations. This marks the fourth time in five years that at least some district schools have opened late.

“That’s the biggest tragedy in this whole affair,” Sloan said. “Our children are being thrown out into a world without any skills. The schools, like so much of the rest of the city, are in such disarray.”

Conceding he has at times failed to pay close enough attention to city management and oversight of the district’s $5-billion annual budget, Barry argues that he has done as well as anyone could have given his situation. While the district provides many services normally handled by states and financed by state tax revenues, Barry notes, Congress prevents the district from imposing a tax on workers from nearby Maryland and Virginia suburbs who commute and consume services.

Congress, however, stopped listening to Barry a long time ago. Indeed, House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.) once proposed circumventing the elected D.C. council and mayor to turn the district into a “laboratory” for conservative social programs. Two years after appointing the control board, the Republicans are on the move again.

Sen. Lauch Faircloth (R-N.C.), chairman of a Senate panel that oversees the district, pushed the provisions in the budget legislation that empower the control board to act as a city manager with powers far greater than Barry’s.

And control board chairman Brimmer wasted no time. Almost immediately, he ordered Barry to install new managers--of Brimmer’s choosing--over nine major city departments.

The changes left the proud and embittered mayor with only titular authority and direct supervision over the city’s public libraries, recreation department and tourism office.

“We intend to try to do something to the perpetrators of the rape,” Barry said defiantly.