Last Tuesday, Mayor Fenty released his proposal to close a $188 million budget gap for the current fiscal year, continuing a pattern of balancing the budget largely with cuts in services. The DC Council will hold a public hearing on the mayor’s plan tomorrow at the John A. Wilson Building.
More than half of the gap-closing ‘ $111 million ‘ would come from cuts in a broad range of city services, according to an analysis by the DC Fiscal Policy Institute. Yet the largest share of the cuts ‘ 39 percent’ would fall on services for low-income residents, even though these programs represent just 26 percent of the locally funded budget and have been cut substantially over the past three years.
The new proposal cuts even deeper into city agencies that have already seen budgets reduced over the past three years due to the Great Recession. The Fiscal Year 2011 budget approved last spring was already $600 million lower than the budget in Fiscal Year 2008, adjusting for inflation. The Mayor’s new proposal to close the FY 2011 budget gap would make further cuts in a wide array of services: adult job training, tree trimming and planting, police training, out-of-school-time programs, arts funding, affordable housing, child care, and small business assistance, among others. It would halt implementation of the new Healthy Schools Act, which is intended to increase the nutritional quality of school meals. And it would require DC government employees to pay a higher share of their health care costs.
