Wilson Building Bulletin: The D.C. Council lawyers up against Mayor Bowser

Is Judge Judy available to settle a little intra-government dispute?

This week the D.C. Council opened the door to suing Mayor Muriel Bowser over a years-long fight involving closely held budget documents. It’s a fight the executive branch has already lost in a related court case, and could soon result in contempt proceedings against her.

The dispute revolves around budget enhancement requests, documents that city agencies send the mayor’s office early in the budget season to detail how much money they think they need. The mayor uses those documents in part to help craft her annual budget.

Lawmakers have long asked to see them; they say it can help them better scrutinize what the mayor wants to spend money on — and whether it matches the asks of individual agencies. A city law dating back some two decades requires the executive to turn the enhancement requests over, but Bowser has generally refused, calling them internal work documents that are critical to the deliberative process around formulating the city’s annual budget. (Some lawmakers grumble that her administration has struggled with transparency.)

But it’s not just lawmakers who’d love to take a peek. Back in 2020, the local public interest law firm Terris, Pravlik & Millian sued the mayor to get the budget enhancement requests as part of a broader legal fight over city services for preschool kids with disabilities. The case made its way through D.C. courts, and last year the D.C. Court of Appeals (the city’s Supreme Court, in effect) ruled that Bowser had to turn over the documents. She still hasn’t, and last month the law firm asked a D.C. judge to hold her in contempt. 

The council has watched the lawsuit play out — submitting its own legal brief on TPM’s side — all the while making the same request of Bowser every budget season: Send along those enhancement requests, please. She has remained steadfast in her refusal, instructing agencies to reject the council’s requests for enhancement documents from the past two budget cycles as recently as last month.

This week Council Chairman Phil Mendelson upped the ante, introducing a resolution that would give the legislature the option of pursuing legal action against Bowser. 

“We are an equal branch of government. We alone are the ones who appropriate the dollars,” he said during a debate on Tuesday. “We have requested this information repeatedly. And I don’t think we should be like the Congress and sit by while the executive disregards what a court has ordered.”

To Mendelson, knowing what city agencies say their budgetary needs are would better allow the council to assess and change Bowser’s annual budget proposal. Some of his colleagues, though, were more skittish about doing legal battle with the mayor. 

“It is not that I don’t think these documents are interesting,” said Ward 3 Councilmember Matthew Frumin. “It’s that I do think it is part of a deliberative process within the executive to allow for candid discussion in order to formulate the budget.”

At-Large Councilmember Christina Henderson agreed with Frumin. 

“There are times when we have to use the extreme measure of suing the executive,” she said, recalling a similar situation in 2024 when the council threatened to sue Bowser over an increase in food benefits she refused to implement. “On this I feel like we have to pick our battles, the ones that are meaningful. I’m not sure what we gather from these forms that we can’t gather from honest conversations with directors.”

Frumin also pointed out the seeming irony of the council demanding more transparency of the mayor when just last year Mendelson engineered a change to the city’s open-meetings law to allow lawmakers to meet behind closed doors more frequently. (Transparency for thee, but not for me?)

For her part, Bowser had a warning for the council: “Litigation initiated by the council to compel the executive to produce internal, deliberative budget enhancement requests is an extraordinary escalation of this issue,” she wrote.

But if anything is extraordinary, Mendelson seems to think it's Bowser's position — along with that of Frumin and Henderson. “They’re willing to accede to an executive that wants to withhold information from the council,” he told his colleagues. “What we know is that executive agencies withhold information from the council, and information is the lifeblood of the budget process. If information is withheld from us, then what is being withheld from us is the ability to make an informed decision.”

Ultimately, a majority of the council agreed with Mendelson, with Ward 7 Councilmember Wendell Felder and Ward 8 Councilmember Trayon White joining Frumin and Henderson in opposition. Is a lawsuit coming any time soon? Not necessarily, though the council is now properly lawyered up in case it opts to take that step.