In a new filing this week in a lawsuit over the deployment of the National Guard, Attorney General Brian Schwalb says that documents obtained from the federal government indicate that the National Guard may remain in D.C. through next summer.
Brigadier General Leland Blanchard, the commander of the D.C. National Guard, has told officers “to plan and prepare for a long-term persistent presence” in the city, according to those documents.
There are currently 2,400 Guardsmen from D.C. and eight states operating in the city (though most states have indicated they will withdraw their troops this fall), and they have been deputized as federal law enforcement. Schwalb’s lawsuit says they have actually overstepped their bounds, and have instead unlawfully taken on local law enforcement responsibilities. The city’s attorneys will be making their case to a federal judge on Friday.
The Trump administration has responded by saying that the deployment is legal since D.C. isn’t a state and the president is the ultimate commander of the D.C. National Guard. In a separate filing seeking to dismiss the lawsuit, 23 Republican attorneys general have gone further, arguing that the deployment was lawful and necessary to protect the city and federal government from street crime — which they compared to the British sacking of D.C. in 1814.
In other news, National Guardsmen helped rescue a cat stuck in a tree in Lincoln Park this week.
We’re now starting to learn more about what those cuts actually cost this city — and it looks like plenty.
During a hearing this month on agency overspending — a topic that’s become a significant focus of late — Bowser’s budget director Jenny Reed told lawmakers that the congressional action forced the city to actually spend more money than it had initially budgeted.
Why? In short, agencies were told not to hire for unfilled positions because of the spending freeze, which meant they instead had to rely on existing workers and pay them overtime to pick up the slack.
Although the city did exempt frontline positions, there were still delays in hiring, according to Reed.
The impact was acutely felt at the Department of Behavioral Health, where overtime spending accounted for a portion of a $24 million budget overrun the agency experienced in the fiscal year that ended September 30. Reed specified that many of these positions were for critical positions and services (like staffing at St. Elizabeths psychiatric hospital), so simply not picking up that workload wasn’t an option — hence the overtime spending.
Making sausage that tenants may not like
There’s an age-old saying about laws: just like sausages, it’s better not to see how they’re made. But over the last month we’ve been witness to that very act of legislative sausage-making, one that is likely to leave at least some D.C. tenants unhappy with the outcome — and some lawmakers frustrated with the process.
This week, the council gave final approval to the RENTAL Act, a bill originally written by Mayor Muriel Bowser to reinvigorate private investment in the city’s housing market. It attempts to do so by allowing some tenants to be more quickly evicted (a process that had been slowed down during the pandemic) and by exempting newer buildings from the Tenant Opportunity to Purchase Act, a four-decade-old D.C. law that gives tenants the first crack at buying their buildings when an owner wants to sell.
While the bill had worked its way through the council over many months, it wasn’t until the final vote in September that lawmakers suddenly pushed to include a new provision exempting almost all buildings with fewer than five rental units from TOPA. The last-minute amendment hadn’t been vetted or debated in public, and some lawmakers were confused about its wording and broader impact. (According to the Urban Institute, there are almost 7,000 buildings in D.C. with between two and four units, making up 11% of the city’s rentals.)
But they approved the bill, with an agreement that they would clarify it further and come back for another vote in early October. But that vote was put off amidst more wrangling over wording and how to limit the TOPA exemption to individual building owners instead of large businesses.
That vote finally happened Tuesday, but not before a contingent of lawmakers tried unsuccessfully to derail it by arguing that such a significant change to TOPA shouldn’t have happened as a last-minute addition — and without any public input.
"The proposal didn't emerge from data… it was rushed. And when it was added, it was poorly written, and we spent a month trying to fix it. There was no hearing and no serious study," said Ward 4 Councilmember Janeese Lewis George. “If the council believes changes are needed to TOPA for two-to-four unit buildings, we should study it.”
The Ward 4 councilmember pointed to the last time the council made a significant change to TOPA: That was in 2018, when it voted to exempt single family homes from the tenant-friendly law. In that case, she said, the council held a seven-hour public hearing. But on the newest exemption that was dropped into the RENTAL Act, there was no hearing at all.
“There is a better way to do this, which would be a hearing to scrutinize the proposals and come up with something we all felt works,” said Ward 3 Councilmember Matt Frumin.
As WAMU reported last month, Frumin initially voted for the exemption when it was added to the RENTAL Act last month — only to backtrack when he realized he didn’t understand what the ultimate impact could be. And he stressed this week that he isn’t necessarily opposed to the on principle, but rather the process by which the council ultimately decided on it.
“It is a complicated issue,” conceded At-Large Councilmember Anita Bonds, who spearheaded the move to exempt two-to-four unit buildings from TOPA. She argued that TOPA can make property sales unnecessarily complicated, even more so for the mom-and-pop landlords that often own the small buildings. (The Urban Institute found that more than three-quarters of these buildings are owned by individuals, not corporations.)
Still, tenant advocates and some lawmakers argue that without more time and a public hearing, there’s no way for the council to truly understand what the new exemption will mean — both good and bad.
“I understand folks are ready to be done with the RENTAL Act, but not like this,” said Ward 1 Councilmember Brianne Nadeau, who has pushed alternative legislation to update TOPA. “We still don’t have answers to all of the questions.”
Earlier this month I asked Mendelson about what seemed like a less-than-ideal approach to legislating. “What happened with this is a lesson to members that these things need to be more carefully vetted before they’re put before the body,” he conceded. “But any legislative process is messy. You know the metaphor about sausages.”
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