[Congressional Record Volume 145, Number 43 (Thursday, March 18, 1999)]
[House]
[Pages H1457-H1462]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




            LOOKING AT DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA WITH FRESH EYES

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under the Speaker's announced policy of 
January 6, 1999, the gentlewoman from the District of Columbia (Ms. 
Norton) is recognized for 60 minutes as the designee of the minority 
leader.
  Ms. NORTON. Mr. Speaker, it has been my habit to come to the floor 
occasionally in order to report to this body concerning your Nation's 
capital. There is a special responsibility that the House and the 
Senate have for the Nation's capital and it is not possible to get a 
real sense of what is happening in this city, even when in it, to see 
it in perspective, without the kind of information that I try to give 
periodically to this body, as we go off to Hershey, Pennsylvania, for 
our second bipartisan retreat.
  Therefore, I want to discuss this evening an issue and a place about 
which I am sure there is agreement that bipartisanship should always be 
the order of the day. It is, after all, the seat of our government, the 
home of more than a half million people, the place where all of us want 
to do all we can to make it the proudest seat of government we can.
  What I would ask of this body, what I think the district has a right 
to ask of this body, what I think the people of the District of 
Columbia, the mayor and the city council have a right to ask of this 
body, is that it look at the District with fresh eyes for, Mr. Speaker, 
there is a new city, if ever there was

[[Page H1458]]

one, before your eyes. It is a city where there is a new mayor. It is a 
city where there is a new city council and where there is a new control 
board.
  I am most appreciative that as the 106th Congress convened, the 
Speaker, the gentleman from Illinois (Mr. Hastert), received the new 
mayor, Anthony Williams, and me, and we had a very good and encouraging 
discussion. The same was true of the chairman of the Committee on 
Appropriations, the gentleman from Florida (Chairman Young); and the 
gentleman from Oklahoma (Mr. Istook). The gentleman from Oklahoma (Mr. 
Istook) has gone into the District over the last few weeks to see for 
himself the city that now comes under his appropriations subcommittee 
jurisdiction. I have gone as well, and the mayor, to visit the chair of 
the Senate District appropriations subcommittee, and the mayor has met 
with the chairman of the Oversight Committee for the District, Mayor 
George Voinovich, himself a former mayor, the mayor of Cleveland.
  May I say that I continue to work, and in the bipartisan manner that 
he and I have long ago established, with the chairman of the 
Subcommittee on the District of Columbia, the gentleman from Virginia 
(Mr. Davis), and that has been a most fruitful partnership and we think 
it is a model for what we should be trying to achieve in the way of 
bipartisan cooperation when we meet beginning tomorrow in Hershey.
  I should indicate to Members that the gentleman from Virginia (Mr. 
Davis) has agreed to sponsor, with me, a reception for Mayor Anthony 
Williams here in the House on April 13, in room 2226 Rayburn. We are 
doing that simply because we think Members would want to meet the new 
mayor of the District of Columbia, about which I am sure we have read a 
great deal and heard a great deal.
  It is seldom that a city experiences the kind of change your capital 
has experienced over the last few months. The city has had a control 
board because, like Cleveland and New York and Philadelphia, it had 
financial problems, although I must say that the financial problems 
that the District had were almost inevitable because it was carrying 
State functions and no city in the United States carries State 
functions.
  May I say how appreciative I am, the elected officials are and the 
residents are, that in its wisdom Congress removed at least some of 
those State functions, the most costly ones, the ones that no city 
could carry, medicaid or at least part of medicaid; courts; removed 
pension liability that was built up when the Congress was in charge of 
the District, enabling the District to breathe and to get control of 
its finances. We are most grateful for the understanding that that was 
a necessary obligation of the Federal Government.
  What we have got in place essentially is an entirely new team. The 
control board is new. Except for one member, the vice chair, Constance 
Neumann, who served so well on the last control board, all the other 
members are new, appointed by the President.
  There is, as I have said, a new mayor and there is a revitalized city 
council. Even the new mayor brings something very different from what 
mayors usually bring to the office. This mayor served as chief 
financial officer and, thus, is himself partly responsible for the rise 
of the District once again to economic strength. He, in effect, served 
an apprenticeship for becoming mayor doing what it is that mayors most 
have to do, and that is balancing a budget and getting control of your 
finances.
  The city council has some of the same members. They are members who 
have proven themselves to want to exercise oversight and they are 
joined by others who were elected precisely because the city now 
demands oversight and accountability, a check on the executive from its 
city council.
  So I ask this body to regard this as morning for the District. It is 
morning again. It is like it is outdoors today; it is spring; it is a 
new season with a whole new set of actors in place. All I ask of this 
body is it leave behind any sense of the District as it was and give 
these new players a chance to show what they can do.
  I believe that they not only will do so, I think if one reads your 
morning papers in the District each day one will see that they are 
doing so. I invite everyone to flip through the Metropolitan Section 
every once in awhile to see that I am, I believe, right on this.
  The District is clearly realigning itself, first for its own 
residents and then, of course, because it wants the Congress to 
understand that it is a new city.
  What I am asking of the Congress is that the Congress realign itself 
so that it is ready to meet a new city. I want to say a word about what 
I mean by a new city because I am not this evening speaking 
rhetorically.
  The city not only has a new administration, it has a new 
administration because it has a new political culture. The reason it 
has a new mayor, a new city council, is because there was a voter 
driven reaction to the state in which the city found itself. It was not 
driven by Congress. It was not driven by any outside force. It was 
driven by the circumstances that District residents found for 
themselves. Essentially, it was driven by a loud and virtually 
unanimous cry of enough from residents. That is why I say there is a 
change in the political culture, the kind of change that I think is 
permanent precisely because it has been driven from the bottom, 
precisely because of its reaction to what voters and residents felt on 
a daily basis about their city and they wanted it to be better. They 
wanted it to be better not because this body insisted so but because 
they had to live with it every day and because these people who were in 
charge were people they could either keep in charge or take from their 
posts, and they have selected among them, and I believe selected 
wisely.
  I am very pleased that all of the signals from Congress have been 
that this body, Senate and House, does understand that this is a new 
city and should be treated accordingly. I am very pleased with the 
bipartisan approach to the city's issues that we have seen thus far, 
and there is evidence that I will allude to shortly.

  I come to report today in a different spirit than I have come to the 
floor sometimes on the District. I do not come in complaint. I do not 
come to say, let the District be the District, let democracy reign in 
the Nation's capital the way it does every place else. I come to say 
that I am grateful for the way in which Congress is stepping back and 
letting the District do what I believe it is doing very well already.
  I certainly hope, and I must say based on our conversations with the 
leadership I do believe, that I will not experience an appropriation 
this year that is anything like the appropriation I experienced last 
year where I stood for 10 hours on this floor. Even though there was 
before this body a consensus budget and almost no changes were made in 
the budget itself, I stood on this floor for 10 hours while Members 
pasted one or another anti-democratic attachment on the D.C. 
appropriation, an appropriation that comes here with only money raised 
from the taxpayers of the District of Columbia and, by right, should 
not be here at all.

                              {time}  1830

  I had to stand here and fight back, for the most part unsuccessfully, 
amendments that Members might have wished to put on to their own 
district, but certainly had no right to put undemocratically on to 
mine. This occurred even though everybody could see that the District 
was on the mend. The former mayor had said he was not going to run 
again, the budget was in order, and yet the budget became a vehicle for 
Members' desires having nothing to do with the wishes of the residents 
of the District of Columbia. I am hoping that the new cast of 
characters, if nothing else, will get the respect of this body so that 
our budget comes through, budget with our own money, without 
attachments, and I have no reason to believe that that will not be the 
case this year.
  I raise it because there is no reason, as I have said to the Speaker, 
and as I have said to our appropriators, why the District should not be 
the first, rather than the last, budget that comes from this House 
where, after all, it is not the money of the Federal Government, it is 
the money of District residents.
  The City was closed down for a week during the government shutdown. 
In the middle of its own financial crisis, one can imagine the 
bitterness that was left with District residents when, as far as they 
were concerned, it was

[[Page H1459]]

their money and it should not have been up here at all. The delays in 
our budget cost us in interest, when we have to borrow, because of the 
uncertainty the market believes is there when what our council and our 
mayor have done has to go to yet another legislative body and one not 
as familiar with the City because it is not their particular budget.
  Some of my colleagues were not here, so I raise it so that they know 
what has happened in the past, and so that we can make what I hope will 
be a clean break with that kind of past.
  I believe that there is signal evidence that that kind of break has 
already been made. As the session opened, I introduced the first of a 
series of bills. The series is called Democracy Now, and the first bill 
was called D.C. Democracy 2000. It seeks to sunset the control board, 
the board that was necessary when we got into financial trouble early, 
because we are no longer in financial trouble, and it sought to return 
some powers that were taken from the mayor and the city council to the 
mayor and the city council.
  While the second part of the bill was not ripe because the new 
administration had no track record, the part that would sunset the 
control board, that is; I believe that the first part was ripe, and 
that there was no reason why the take-charge new mayor of the District 
should not have what it takes to rebuild the City. To his credit and 
with much appreciation from me, the gentleman from Virginia (Mr. 
Davis), the chairman of the subcommittee, took the first part of my 
bill and brought it through subcommittee and then the gentleman from 
Indiana (Mr. Burton) and the gentleman from California (Mr. Waxman), 
through full committee, and then on to this floor where it easily 
passed in the House as well; and I am pleased to report this evening 
that my bill, or the first part of my bill, which, in fact, became a 
Davis-Norton bill, has become PL106-1. That ``dash 1'' means it is the 
first bill of the 106th Congress to be signed by the President of the 
United States.
  How appropriate that the first bill that a Democratic mayor signed 
was a bill that the Republican House and Senate passed to return 
democracy to the mayor, to the mayor and the city council. We are most 
appreciative. We think it bodes well for the Congress and for the 
District, and it is what I mean when I say the District has to realign 
itself and the Congress has to realign itself, and I believe that that 
shows that both bodies are, in good faith, trying to do exactly that.
  Now, I did not and have not yet pushed for the second half of D.C. 
Democracy 2000, as I have indicated, because I think it is only fair to 
ask even a new mayor who has the confidence of the House to get his own 
track record before our sunset or seek to have the control board to 
sunset a year early. My, how I would wish, however, that as the year 
2000 dawns, the District of Columbia can be free of any oversight, 
except this Congress. That would mean that the control board would go a 
year early.
  Mr. Speaker, let me indicate why I think that should happen. It is 
not simply because we have a new mayor in which I believe everybody, 
residents of the District of Columbia and Congress alike have 
confidence, it is because the evidence is already on the table. The 
Congress, through the control board statute, indicated that the 
District could be rid of the control board if, at the end of four 
years, the City had a balanced budget.
  Let me tell my colleagues what the record is. The District has 
already had not one balanced budget, and that was three years ahead of 
time, but three balanced budgets plus surpluses in each of those three 
years. Mr. Speaker, a $185 million surplus in 1997; a $444.8 million 
surplus in fiscal year 1998, and the City projects a $158 million 
surplus for fiscal year 1999. As if that were not enough in the way of 
surpassing the expectations of the Congress, we had put into the 
revitalization package that this body passed taking over State 
functions in 1997 a provision that would allow the District to borrow 
in the fourth year if it had a balanced budget on the one hand, but we 
had not quite been able to get rid of, an operating deficit that it has 
been carrying now for years. But the District of Columbia is going to 
be able to eliminate its $322 million operating deficit from its own 
revenues without any borrowing.
  This is strong evidence that the District has not only met, but 
surpassed, congressional expectations and is no longer in an emergency 
or crisis status, and when one is no longer in an emergency status, one 
no longer needs a control board. A control board is an emergency 
mechanism; it is not a security blanket. No city gets it, or must have 
it, unless it is in an emergency.
  The District has pulled itself out of a financial crisis in a way no 
one would dare to have predicted a couple of years ago. Nevertheless, I 
can understand that to pass the second half of Democracy 2000, the 
burden is going to be on me, it always is, and therefore, I have not 
requested of the gentleman from Virginia (Mr. Davis) even hearings, 
yet, on the second half of that bill that would sunset the control 
board. Rather, with a new administration that took office only in 
January, it is only fair to let the mayor get his steam up, show what 
he can do, and then have hearings and see whether or not this bill can 
pass the House and the Senate.
  Is the evidence on the table that this new mayor is in charge of the 
City and does not need any oversight from anyone except the voters of 
the District of Columbia? I think the evidence is very clear already. I 
think we need to see it continue for a few more months, but it is very 
clear already. Members have come up to me, came up to me after this 
first big snow the other day and told me that they noted the very quick 
and efficient way in which the streets were cleaned, and that it was in 
contrast to some other experiences that they had had.

  Let me cite the way in which the new administration gets hold of 
problems, because he cannot promise us that there are not huge numbers 
of problems left over. The real question is, is he in charge of them? 
Does he gain control of them? Do we have an administration that knows 
how to get rid of problems? Because the fact of problems are going to 
be there for some time.
  An example is an article in the Washington Post, a series, exposing 
problems in homes for retarded people. The District did a very good 
thing in taking retarded people and other disabled people out of a huge 
monstrosity of an institution, taking them out of institutionalized 
care and spreading these disabled people in homes around the City. 
Well, The Washington Post did what they were supposed to do. They went 
around and looked at these homes and these homes have been in existence 
now for 3 or 4 years and they are private homes all around the City run 
by contractors, and it found evidence that some of them are not 
treating retarded people very well, and that is itself, I will not say 
criminal, but it is pretty close to it when we consider that we are 
talking about people that are pretty close to helpless. There was a 
time when there would be exposure of problems like that and then we 
would wait to hear word that something had happened.
  Well, the articles ran a couple of days ago. This morning's paper 
said that the mayor has moved in already to debar two of the 
contractors in two of the homes, and to move the people out.
  That is what I mean by ``take charge.'' That is what the Congress 
cannot do, what the control board cannot do; that is what only a fully 
empowered mayor can do and what, with his powers fully intact, he is 
now doing.
  Mr. Speaker, there are many, many examples of management progress in 
the City. Let me just take two, the first being perhaps the institution 
most exposed to the public and about which the public most cares 
because they affect their lives so directly: Schools. This may be the 
institution in the District where the Congress has had the greatest 
concern, the public schools. To say they have done very poorly is to 
speak far too lightly of schools that deserve nothing but contempt for 
what they had done to our children.
  What has happened in the District now is that a new, bold, energetic, 
collegial superintendent named Arlene Ackerman has come to the 
superintendency and things began to happen immediately. Her Summer 
Stars program will probably be a model for the country where she took 
children and said, in order to eliminate social promotion, they were to 
go to summer school and that if one wanted

[[Page H1460]]

to get ahead, one could also go to summer school so that the children 
were not stigmatized, and that there would be a ratio of 15 children to 
every teacher, a very low ratio. Here is the kind of summer school that 
no one has ever seen much of. It was over-subscribed, and in the 
morning, children were put to very intensive reading and math 
instructions, and in the evening, or afternoons, she was able to get 
funding from private sources to take these youngsters all around the 
region to cultural and fun activities that would otherwise have been 
unavailable to them.
  Even before she began with the Summer Stars program, she had so 
changed the regime in the schools with respect to how teachers were to 
confront their job that the scores in every grade had risen 
significantly. It can be done if we have the right people in charge.
  Arlene Ackerman is so good that I am sure some Members would like to 
steal her, and we will not let that happen. Because that kind of 
progress from a school system that was in the gutter, it was so bad, to 
so quickly see it come up in the hands of somebody who knows what she 
is doing is precisely what this City has needed.

                              {time}  1845

  Let me take another agency that of course is of great, great concern; 
the police department. The District went out and did a nationwide 
search and got itself a first-class police chief. They got him from a 
much larger city, Chicago.
  They got a police chief whose reputation has been made in community 
policing. No approach is more popular in this body than community 
policing where we put the police on the ground. They get to know 
people. They get to deal with problems at the ground level, and we get 
rid of crime.
  Chief Ramsey has brought his community policing and his management 
style from Chicago to the District, and we are already seeing the kind 
of control and innovation that had been absent for too long.
  For example, the Chief, instead of having what we used to in most 
cities, which is the command sitting in headquarters, has moved the 
command into the field so that one can hold cops accountable, because 
the command is not somewhere downtown. The command is right there in 
the neighborhood.
  This man means it when he says community policing. That does not mean 
just a cop on the street. It means everybody is involved in community 
policing.
  Troubled police department. Slow to take down crime. It is finally 
going down significantly in the District, and it was before even this 
police chief came. But here is a man who knows how to keep that 
progress going, with a real live management style that trucks no 
excuses.
  An example, he found a police department that, according to, again, a 
series of articles, had excessive shootings. Again, the Washington 
Post, just as it did a series on how retarded people were treated in 
group homes, earlier did a series that showed that the police 
department, albeit before Chief Ramsey, came to the city a few months 
ago, had one of the highest excessive shooting rates in the country. 
High crime rate, and our cops were apparently using their guns and 
firing them more than they should. This flowed from a whole set of 
problems, including too little training.
  What the Chief did seems to me is an example for all of us who are 
public officials. He believed that, if his internal affairs unit took 
this evidence that was in the paper, of shootings that had occurred, 
allegedly, excessively over the years; and if he did his own 
investigation, that the public would not have the greatest confidence 
in a police department investigating itself concerning these 
accusations.
  So he went to the Justice Department, and he asked the Attorney 
General if she would assign some objective investigators to look at the 
problem of excessive shootings. One, had they occurred? Had they been 
excessive? What should be done about them?
  Here, you have the opposite of what people have come to expect in 
many cities, no cover-up, but rather a police chief pulling the covers 
off and saying investigate us and tell us what should be done. If that 
does not inspire confidence in the police department, nothing will.
  But, Mr. Speaker, there is wholesale confidence in the various 
sectors in this city. There is great and new business confidence. The 
First Lady was, just a few days ago, at an event in the District, 
attended by the great corporations and small businesses of this region, 
that was about efforts that they had made over the past year on their 
own to raise money for a real private/public partnership with the 
District. It was very encouraging to see how private business in the 
city and in the region were responding to the new District of Columbia 
of which I speak.
  One such response I must bring to your attention, Don Graham, the 
publisher of the Washington Post, and business leaders in the region 
and in the city came to see the gentleman from Virginia (Mr. Davis) and 
me about an idea that they were themselves going to match.
  They noted that we have only one small public open admissions 
university in the District. So if one does not fit that university, one 
has no other public university in the District the way they would if 
they lived in Virginia or Maryland or New York or California.
  They proposed that a youngster in D.C. be able to go to public 
universities elsewhere, such as Virginia, with the Federal Government 
paying the difference between in State tuition and the out-of-State 
cost.
  So that would mean, for example, at the University of Virginia where 
it costs $16,000 if one lives out of State, but only about $5,000 if 
one lives in the State, that a youngster from D.C. could go for the 
$5,000. Boy has this been greeted with hallelujah in the District of 
Columbia.
  There are many sacrifices that people make to live in the District of 
Columbia. One is that, when one's kids get to be college age, there is 
no public university except an open admission one, and a very important 
open admission one, but it certainly does not fit every student. 
Students have flocked to this idea.
  In order to make clear that this proposal was meant to take nothing 
from the need to build our own open admissions city university, I have 
achieved an agreement with the chairman that our open admissions city 
university would itself get a grant that would be an annual grant so 
that it can assist the university in its own rebuilding.
  So there is going to be a win-win situation here. For youngsters who 
remain in the District, and many of them who graduated from our schools 
will have to remain here and will want to remain here, there will be a 
University of the District of Columbia which has some added money on an 
annual basis.
  For youngsters who want to go out of the District of Columbia, the 
District of Columbia College Access Act, cosponsored by me, introduced 
by the gentleman from Virginia (Mr. Davis), will provide a subsidy so 
that the parents, the families will have to pay only the in-State 
tuition cost.
  Meanwhile, these business leaders have not just come to us and said 
come up with some Federal money. They have already raised $15 million 
themselves to supplement youngsters who, indeed, go to college anywhere 
in the United States, including in the District of Columbia, whether or 
not they take advantage of this in State tuition subsidy.
  So that means that if one, for example, wants to go to the University 
of Virginia, somehow one's family gets the $5,000, that is, the in-
State tuition rate, one still has a lot to come up with if one is going 
to live outside the District. This private fund will be functionally 
necessary for many to even take advantage of the Davis-Norton bill that 
would subsidize in-State tuition.
  The name of our act is the D.C. College Access Act. The name of the 
private program is the D.C. College Access Program. So they are a kind 
of coherent approach with a subsidy for tuition from the Federal 
Government and a subsidy for living expenses and for expenses that 
prepare these youngsters for college that makes sure that they remain 
there once they get there. So it is just the kind of synergy that the 
Congress likes to encourage.

  But this time, the notion of the in-State tuition, Federally 
subsidized, and the notion of the private subsidy have come from the 
business community. That is what I mean when I say there

[[Page H1461]]

is confidence in this city. It is coming from every sector. It came 
first from the voters who elected a whole new set of actors or at least 
the many of whom were new. It comes from the Congress, which has 
already passed a bill to return powers to the mayor and the city 
council. We see that it comes also from the business community.
  The question of new money for the District is still on the table, 
because, while the Federal Government has taken over the most costly 
State functions, the District has lost population. Like most big 
cities, the difference is, if one loses population from Chicago or 
Baltimore, if one loses population from Atlanta or New York, there is a 
State to back one up. We have nobody but ourselves. We are orphans.
  Therefore, we do not pretend that we are permanently in the best 
shape. We know we are now with the good economy. We also know that we 
are going to have to find other revenue sources.
  But the mayor agrees with me that the first thing that the new mayor 
should do is, not come to the Congress and say give me some money; that 
if I believe the mayor needs to have a track record in order for the 
Control Board to sunset early, I also believe the mayor has to have a 
track record and has to devise an approach before he can come here and 
say he needs more money.
  He was the first to agree with this. He had no intention of coming to 
ask for more money. Even though, in order to get the State functions 
taken back by the Federal Government, we had to turn in our Federal 
payment. So we do not get any Federal payment, which means that the 25 
million visitors who come to the District of Columbia every year have 
the services paid for essentially out of the pockets of the people I 
represent. They are in a city with a declining population.
  At some point, we have got to design an approach to make sure that 
the District is able to handle this as it is handling it now. The 
importance of the revitalization package which took the State functions 
cannot be underestimated.
  The mayor is not asking for more money at this time. I am sure that 
we will have conversations over the next few years with how to increase 
revenue in the District.
  Meanwhile, look at what the mayor has just done this week. He has 
come forward with a very bold budget that is itself a policy document 
that is a paradigm for what a budget ought to be. Whether one agrees 
with this budget or not, the fact is it is a budget unlike budgets the 
District of Columbia has seen for a long time, because it points to new 
directions and does not simply indicate where money will be spent. If 
that is all a budget document is, it simply plugs in dollar signs for 
what is already there, that is not what the District needed.
  Some parts of it are already very controversial, like the proposal to 
sell the existing campus of the University of the District of Columbia, 
Northwest, and move that campus to Southeast, use the money as an 
endowment for the University of the District of Columbia and put it 
beside a new technology high school and Department of Employment 
Service office.
  All of that looks like it is an interesting idea. There is great 
concern in the university about moving them to a part of the city which 
has had some crime and other problems. There is also a problem because 
the land is not owned by the District of Columbia. So I am not sure if 
this is feasible.
  I am sure of this, it is the counterproposal that the District of 
Columbia ought to be debating. It is proposals that are bold that it 
ought to be debating, even if it decides that is not what they ought to 
do.
  What we do not need is simply to put forward budgets like we have put 
forward in the last 10 years, budgets that one year look like they did 
before and the year before. We have got to wake up and smell the coffee 
and say, yeah, now that I have seen that, I like it or I do not like 
it.
  In the democratic exchange between the counsel, the mayor, and the 
public, this matter will be settled, and there and only there must it 
be settled. This body, I am sure, does not want to have anything to do 
with a proposal that is as complicated as that. It is not for us to say 
I have no idea where I stand on it.
  Do my colleagues know what I am waiting for, I am waiting for the 
hearings in the city council so I can find out whether it is feasible, 
whether it does make sense, in the same way that I wait for hearings in 
this body before I know where I stand on important breakaway issues.
  The mayor's budget is full of such breakaway proposals. He wants D.C. 
agencies to compete with private sector for city contracts. He knows he 
must work with city unions and city workers in order for that to work.
  I am sure I do not need to tell him that no one can support it unless 
he brings the workers in because he is an expert in management and 
bringing management and policy together.
  I am sure that the two will come together because this kind of 
composition, where it has worked in other cities, and, very often, if 
not most often, indeed, the public workers who know the job have in 
fact won the contract. So there is nothing to fear but fear itself if 
we have a level playing field and if everybody gets around the table 
and designs the process together.
  The mayor has put a priority on increasing funding for D.C. public 
schools and youth programs. I love the part of the mayor's program that 
says he wants to increase after-school programs.

                              {time}  1900

  I cannot think of anything the mayor could do that could be more 
important. There we get youngsters and we capture them so they do their 
homework, we capture them so that they are not latchkey kids, we 
capture them so that they are in a safe and productive place between 
the hours of 3 and 6, or whatever they turn out to be, and those are 
the hours when youngsters get into trouble or commit crimes. So it 
takes care of so many things at one time, and he has put a priority 
there.
  He has a bold proposal to provide health insurance for almost 40,000 
poor uninsured residents so that they do not cost the city money by 
going to emergency rooms, and so that, in fact, they get health care 
early rather than later, at much greater expense to the city.
  He wants to restructure the city's debt using the savings to cut 
taxes on small businesses. To do that, of course, would begin to 
reinvigorate our small business sector.
  The mayor has one budget request that, thus far, I believe, is being 
received well. I do not have a specific indication from the 
appropriators yet, because I am sure they want to study it, but somehow 
we got into our appropriation a requirement that the District have two 
reserve funds. Now, the District does not mind having one, but having 
two is a bit much.
  There is a provision that the District have a reserve fund of up to 
$250 million. A lot of money, but I think it is right to do so, so that 
we carry that reserve fund so that we can use it on a rainy day. Then 
there is something else that, probably, Congress did not mean to be in 
there. The two never, it seems to me, never came together. And that is 
a reserve fund for $150 million put away for each year. So that would 
just build up. The District would have $350 million the second year and 
so forth.
  I do not think the Congress really meant to have the District build 
up that kind of reserve. I think it meant to have the District do what 
every other city does, and that is to have a healthy reserve fund, the 
way the reserve fund of up to $250 million would be. So the mayor is 
saying that he would like to be relieved of the second $150 and do the 
first $250.
  I strongly support that. Because if the mayor is not able to produce 
something in investment to the city, if he is not able to say, I am 
giving some of this back to a city that has sacrificed so much during 
the hard fiscal crisis years, he is not going to be able to do the hard 
job of continuing to streamline the city and to make it a more 
efficient city.
  I do not think anybody meant to have the District simply build up 
reserves that grow and grow and grow while no investment or little 
investment is made in the city itself. And given the mayor's own proven 
track record for fiscal prudence, I hope that this proposal will be 
given every consideration.
  As it is now, because the mayor does not know and because of his own 
careful and honest budgeting, he has one

[[Page H1462]]

budget with the $150 million in it and one budget without the $150 
million. We are going to ask the Congress to relieve us of this 
complication; take the $150 million out, be satisfied with the $250 
million, and let the mayor do his job.
  Mr. Speaker, I have today introduced a D.C. Budget Autonomy Act and a 
D.C. Legislative Autonomy Act that goes along with the mayor's budget, 
and I introduced it precisely because the mayor's budget came forward 
this week. It is a take-charge budget that I thought made the case for 
the District of Columbia Budget Autonomy Act.
  The legislation simply says that, particularly because there is no 
Federal payment any longer, when the District passes its balanced 
budget, especially now with the control board in place, that should be 
it. It should not have to come here to an appropriation committee and 
to the Senate to an appropriation committee, which has no appropriation 
for the District of Columbia.
  Remember, the District clause would still allow the Congress to 
intervene into the budgetary process in any way it saw fit. So it could 
still come to the floor and say, I want to change this or that, or I 
want to do whatever about it without the budget coming over here. 
Meanwhile, the District budget could go into effect when it was passed 
and would not hinge upon when we pass our appropriations.
  This would save the District money; save it an inestimable amounts of 
time, and I have put that in today because I believe the mayor, in good 
faith, has come forward with the kind of prudent, exciting budgeting 
that the Congress wanted to see, and I believe the Congress ought to 
respond in kind by saying, it is his budget, we believe in devolution, 
we are going to show it by letting him do his budget his way without 
our intervention. Remember, we are talking about a city that has run a 
surplus for 3 years, when this body expected to have a balance only 
after 4 years.
  The second bill is a Legislative Autonomy Bill, because I am sure 
most of the Congress is unaware that after a piece of legislation is 
passed it has to come here and sit for 30 or 60 days, depending on the 
kind of legislation it is. The problem with that is that these 30 or 60 
days have to be legislative days, so that the District legislation 
cannot become final often for months, because the Congress does not sit 
in blocks of 30 legislative days at one time.
  It creates havoc in the District government. It has to go through a 
Byzantine process just to get its laws to go into effect when passed, 
and then they are not truly in effect. Unnecessary all together since, 
again, Congress could, whenever it wanted to, simply come to the floor, 
introduce a bill to overturn a piece of legislation. Republican and 
Democratic Congresses alike, out of over 2,000 bills only 3 have been 
overturned in 25 years of Home Rule.
  The Congress has the power. It can always use it. Congress does not 
need the hold in order to effectively do so. The hold creates havoc in 
the District. It means that the District is streamlining its process, 
we are not streamlining our relationship to the District. We ought to 
respond to what the District is doing by letting the District's bills 
stay with the District, letting the District's budget stay with the 
District, unless we decide that we want to intervene, in which case the 
District clause of the Constitution gives this body every opportunity 
to come forward. That is all we ought to need. The congressional power 
is still intact.
  I want to thank the leadership on both sides for the way in which the 
District, the new District, if I may be so bold, has been received. I 
know I speak for Mayor Anthony Williams and City Council Chair Linda 
Cropp when I say there is a great feeling of hope and very good feeling 
toward the Congress in the District. There is the very same, as we have 
already seen, here in the Congress, because the Congress has already 
passed very important legislation to return powers to the District.
  I would hope that Members would come for just a few minutes on April 
13 to the reception that I am having for the mayor. The chairman of our 
subcommittee, the gentleman from Virginia (Mr. Davis), is joining me in 
sponsoring that reception. He is as pleased as I am with the way in 
which the city is proceeding, I think I can say without fear of 
contradiction. The reception will be held in Room 2226 Rayburn, and 
Members will be receiving an invitation.
  Expect me to come back, sometimes in 5 minutes, occasionally for a 
full hour, to give my colleagues some real sense of what the city, 
where my colleagues all meet, is doing to meet its own expectations 
and, by doing so, to meet my colleagues' expectations.

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