[Congressional Record Volume 141, Number 199 (Thursday, December 14, 1995)]
[House]
[Pages H14909-H14911]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                    KEEPING THE DISTRICT IN BUSINESS

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under a previous order of the House, the 
gentlewoman from the District of Columbia [Ms. Norton] is recognized 
for 5 minutes.
  Ms. NORTON. Mr. Speaker, this is day one of the countdown to 
shutdown. I have been on the floor virtually every day since the last 
shutdown. But I speak not of the shutdown of the Federal Government. 
There was an unintended consequence. The city I represent was also shut 
down.
  A shutdown of a complicated big city is nothing short of a 
catastrophe. If there is a continuing resolution, it will be marginally 
better, but imagine putting handcuffs and a straitjacket on a city at 
the same time and then saying, ``Run your city well on a weekend CR or 
a weeklong CR, and keep from over-obligating, and make sure you spend 
enough money.''
  I am here this afternoon to express my gratitude to the Committee on 
Government Reform and Oversight and to the DC Subcommittee.
  Mr. Speaker, these two committees unanimously passed a bill to allow 
the District of Columbia to spend its own revenue instead of being shut 
down. I express my gratitude to the gentleman from Pennsylvania [Mr. 
Clinger], the 

[[Page H14910]]
chairman of the committee, and to the gentleman from Virginia [Mr. 
Davis], the chairman of the subcommittee. I will put an op-ed piece by 
Mr. Davis on this very subject into the Record at the conclusion of my 
remarks.
  The op-ed piece is headlined, ``Why Shut Down the District?'' The 
gentleman from Virginia [Mr. Davis] marshals all the arguments for not 
doing so.
  Why was there such bipartisanship on this bill? In the first place, 
it was a matter of sheer principle. The Members knew and saw that 
shutting down the District was not their intent. They did not mean to 
catch a whole city in this fight. Then of course the Members saw up 
close what happens when you shut down a city and the trash is not 
collected, and the city cannot go about its daily business, and the 
citizens suffer. It is not a pretty picture.
  It is our money and only our own money that H.R. 2661 speaks to. The 
Federal payment would be left here at the discretion of the Congress.
  What is happening in the District of Columbia as I speak? The 
district is preparing to shut down. What a terrible diversion for a 
city on the brink of insolvency, when this Congress has told it to do 
otherwise, to prepare for reform of its financial and management 
operations.
  The gentleman from Texas [Mr. Armey] was just on the floor saying 
that there could be a weekend or a weeklong CR. There could be two such 
CRs. Nobody can expect the District to run well in that way, even if it 
were healthy, as of course we know it is not.
  Speaker Gingrich encouraged us to continue with the bills. He has 
been very helpful to the District in the past. I am asking him to bring 
the bill to the floor today, so that before midnight on Friday this 
body can guarantee that the city, where this body sits, will in fact be 
open for business.

                              {time}  1515

  Only a few hours stand between us and closedown of a city we do not 
mean to close down. At midnight on Friday, the District of Columbia 
goes dark and hundreds of thousands of innocent bystanders will see 
their city go dark, while the Congress remains in session uninjured by 
any shutdown. No Member of this body desires that. No Member of this 
body would want to defend that.
  Please, help me to keep my city open. Help me to help my city 
recover. The city wants to do what the Congress has mandated it to do: 
get its house in order. This Congress has put a Control Board on the 
city, and now the Control Board has testified that the last thing the 
city needs is to be shut down and have to pay its employees for not 
coming to work--as would have to be the case since they would be forced 
onto administrative leave. That is not the way to run even a small 
town.
  I am here to say to my colleagues, we cannot run the Capital of the 
United States this way, and we cannot allow the word to go across the 
wires and around the world that some Federal agencies went back to work 
(and I congratulate you that some appropriations have now passed; it 
looks like ours will not, indeed, pass), but that the Congress of the 
United States allowed the Capital of the United States to close down 
catching 600,000 innocent people in the wake of our own special storm.
  I appreciate what the gentleman from Pennsylvania [Mr. Clinger] and 
the gentleman from Virginia [Mr. Davis] have done. I appreciate that 
the Speaker has encouraged us to keep this bill going forward. Now, a 
little more than 24 hours stand between us and keeping the city of the 
District of Columbia, Washington, DC, open. Please, help us to do just 
that.

               [From the Washington Post, Dec. 14, 1995]

                      Why Shut Down the District?

                        (By Thomas M. Davis III)

       Shutting down the federal government because Congress and 
     the president fail to agree on a budget resolution is an act 
     that has many unintended victims and numerous unintended 
     consequences. The damper these failures put on recruiting and 
     maintaining the best and the brightest for our federal work 
     force will be with us for some time. On another level, the 
     backsliding it inflicts on our efforts to change the District 
     of Columbia government are profound.
       The D.C. government is not just another federal agency. It 
     is a front-line government providing vital health, safety and 
     personal services to 570,000 residents and 300,000 
     metropolitan commuters. When federal agencies shut down, 
     citizens in any city in the country can still get a driver's 
     license and register their automobiles. When federal agencies 
     shut down, the states can continue to process AFDC and Social 
     Security applications. But when the District government shuts 
     down, people needing services, whether medical care at a 
     clinic or trash collection from their homes, are not served.
       Congress should act immediately to ensure that the District 
     of Columbia can spend its own locally generated tax dollars 
     during such a shutdown. We can do this before this week's 
     expiration of the current continuing resolution Del. Eleanor 
     Holmes Norton has introduced legislation, H.R. 2661, to allow 
     the District to spend its own revenues even if its budget has 
     not been approved by Congress (the budget will still be 
     subject to approval by the control board). I am a cosponsor 
     of H.R. 2661, which yesterday was approved by the House 
     subcommittee that oversees the District and is scheduled for 
     full committee action today. It is imperative that Congress 
     pass it for two important reasons.
       First, without passage of H.R. 2661, the District 
     government is subject to being shut down again, as it was 
     Nov. 14-19. That's because the District's own appropriation 
     has not been enacted, and there may be no continuing 
     resolution to keep the government open.
       The unique status of the District--the city cannot spend 
     one penny of its budget, either local or federal revenues, 
     without an appropriations bill being passed by Congress and 
     signed by the president--has never before seemed important. 
     In past federal shutdowns, the District appropriation had 
     been enacted so that the city government could continue 
     operations, or else the District has been put under a 
     continuing resolution along with federal agencies that were 
     without approved appropriations.
       But this time there was no District appropriation and no 
     continuing resolution. This places on the District of 
     Columbia a unique burden. Every other city or state in the 
     country can continue to operate its own programs, and may 
     even take up the slack of missing federal funds from its own 
     revenues when the federal government is shut down. But the 
     District is stymied.
       This situation is inexcusable even in normal times, but in 
     the current financial crisis it has become extreme. The 
     District lost more than $7 million in productivity during the 
     recent shutdown, according to the control board, and it 
     failed to collect up to $70 million in revenue that it was 
     owed. Meanwhile, contractors around the metropolitan area are 
     going bankrupt every day, and the IRS files liens for unpaid 
     tax withholding because the District of Columbia doesn't have 
     the cash to pay its bills. Allowing the District to fall even 
     farther behind in its revenue collection is tantamount to 
     negligence on the part of Congress.
       In addition to lost productivity and lost or delayed 
     revenues, the very officials who have so much work ahead to 
     rebuild and reform the city were forced to spend their time 
     deciding what services and employees were ``essential'' in a 
     government that is already notoriously dysfunctional. Instead 
     of working on privatizing city services, City Administrator 
     Michael Rogers had to write furlough notices. Instead of 
     reviewing contracts and improving cash management, Chief 
     Financial Officer Anthony Williams had to figure out new ways 
     not to pay bills. Instead of pushing ahead publicly with the 
     council on urgently needed reforms, Mayor Barry could only 
     wonder what new disaster he would have to deal with next. And 
     the control board, which is trying to push the District 
     forward, could only make certain that the District complied 
     with the provisions of the Anti-Deficiency Act and shut down 
     everything that was not an imminent threat to health or 
     safety. This is no way to run a city in the grips of a 
     financial crisis.
       Congress and the president could keep the federal and 
     District governments open either by reaching a budget 
     agreement or by enacting another continuing resolution. I am 
     hopeful that one of these two events will occur before 
     there's another shutdown. No one can possibly expect to 
     escape the public outcry that would come from sending 
     hundreds of thousands of workers home 10 days before 
     Christmas.
       But there is an even more compelling reason to enact H.R. 
     2661 immediately. While operating under a temporary 
     continuing resolution, the D.C. government has no legal 
     authority to obligate funds beyond the expiration of that 
     resolution. Since continuing resolutions are emergency, 
     stopgap measures, this forces the District government to 
     operate on an emergency basis, signing contracts and planning 
     spending schedules from week to week. This ad hoc operational 
     mode is not only bad for contractors and other service 
     providers; it runs exactly counter to what is most needed in 
     the District government: stability and the ability to make 
     long-range decisions.
       Unless H.R. 2661 is enacted and the District is allowed to 
     obligate its own revenues, even without an appropriation 
     bill, the District will continue to limp from crisis to 
     crisis, lacking the ability to take concrete, long-term 
     actions or to make the decisions that would be in everyone's 
     best interest.
       Congressional oversight and ultimate control would not be 
     threatened, because the District's federal payment is not 
     included in H.R. 2661. This legislation would not free the 
     District from federal oversight and would not give the city 
     budget autonomy. It would simply allow the District to escape 
     from the 

[[Page H14911]]
     threat of shutdown and the gross inefficiencies of operating on a week-
     to-week basis, and to at least be able to crawl along on its 
     own revenues during a budget impasse.
       I am pleased that Speaker Gingrich, President Clinton and 
     the control board support this legislation. Congress should 
     act now to pass it, and thus prevent further paid furloughs 
     and a shutdown of city operations.

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