For 10 years or so in the late 1980s and early 1990s, the District was horribly violent, bankrupt, deserted and embarrassed. Its limited home rule status was a chimera: Home rule has always been heavily circumscribed. The advent of a financial control board in 1995 and the concession of mayoral power to that board was almost too mundane an end to the hellish decade that preceded it.
And yet now, the Lord smileth again on the District. It has posted a surplus for fiscal year 2001. That may not sound sexy, but we have become a District that frolics in the budget numbers. They represent a sense of order that has not existed for years. This surplus is especially sweet since it is the first one since the control board disbanded?it is the first that the District government produced on its own.
Now is as good a time as any to revisit what preceded these recent five years of budgetary bliss. Students who matriculated this year did not confront the legacy of District history in the form of the control board. So here’s a toast to the hope that we never forget how we got into this mess.
The collapse of the District is wrapped up in a history of segregation, racial politics, fiscal malfeasance and megolomania. That there are two Districts has been palpable for decades, and it is not all that dissimilar from other major cities. To call some of the places in Southeast “schools” is to do violence to the term. Journalist Jonetta Rose Barras notes the subtle, and at the same time glaring, means of segregation in Washington: “Housing patterns keep black and whites separated by a park, a river and monuments.”
There is therefore a distrust, Barras argued, that can be tapped, and former mayor Marion Barry did that. He didn’t start out that way, though. He was admired by white liberals as an energetic and bright former leader of the civil rights movement. Immediately, he made responsible, but unpopular, budget cuts to compensate for the excess of his predecessor. Polls early in the 1982 campaign showed he was behind, so he shifted his emphasis to “a racial and emotional appeal,” as Rutgers professor Howard Gillette noted in an essay last year.
That seemed to mark an important point in Barry’s politics. The reelection emboldened the already cocksure mayor. After 1982, one could guess he figured that he could always win the black vote. So despite repeated indictments of staff members for kickbacks, Barry did not humble himself and play pious. Barry later acknowledged his addictions to drugs, alcohol and sex, but, as the City Paper noted, he never admitted his addiction to power. And so he hung on until his 1990 conviction, while still mayor, for crack possession. He marshaled the compassion of the black community in 1994, however, and marched right back into One Judiciary Square as, in the City Paper’s words, “the mayor for life.”
But his management of the city in the late 1980s and in the 1990s suffered. Sharon Pratt Kelly, who governed the city from 1990 to 1994, also shares some blame for budgetary excess. But Barry?who left office in 1999?is often identified as the man responsible for padded government payrolls and deep cuts in services that enabled the city to pay back its debt. The cuts left “police cars without gas, trash not picked up, [and] bodies piling up in the morgue,” Gillette wrote.
Enter the control board in the mid 1990s and the rest is recent history. From that history, we’ve got to learn two lessons. First, don’t turn your back on a whole swath of the city and let economic and racial divisions swell. Second, do not be blinded from the truth that is in the budget numbers, because that budget has too often been highjacked for political use damaging to the common good.
A reasonable budget is our responsibility. Let us hold fast to it.
