The two just don’t seem to jibe: lamentations by elected officials about the tough decisions they are being forced to make and the generous $11.4 billion local fiscal year 2025 operating budget as submitted last week by Mayor Muriel Bowser. Overall, “the proposed FY 2025 Local funds budget increased by $789.1 million or 7.4 percent,” according to documents posted on the website of the Office of the Chief Financial Officer.
The total gross operating budget is $20.9 billion — $1.1 billion more than FY 2024.
Not to put too fine a point on this massive spending proposal, but the mayor’s submission also includes a six-year capital budget of $11.8 billion — including $3.1 billion in FY 2025 spending alone, according to the chief financial officer’s transmittal letter.
That, my friends, is a lot of money for a municipality with only 700,000 people and an economy suffering a version of long COVID. “For every dollar she cut, she spent two,” joked one finance expert with whom I spoke.
City Administrator Kevin Donahue defended the mayor’s fiscal management and decisions during an extensive interview with me earlier this week. He described a systematic process he and the administration’s budget staff went through, reviewing areas of funding, service levels and specific programs. They performed initial cuts and then took their results to the mayor: “We said, we can go deeper, or we can raise taxes.”
