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Parker Tees Up Budget Fight With $391 Million Spending Plan

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It’s rare to see much harmony at the Wilson Building come budget season, but the Council’s success in fending off the worst of Mayor Muriel Bowser’s proposed cuts has lawmakers feeling pretty chummy so far this year. The question is just how long those good vibes will last Tuesday.

Chairman Phil Mendelson’s proposed edits to Bowser’s budget, released Monday, earned pretty positive reviews from lawmakers and advocates, all things considered. His decision to redirect money from the controversial K Street Transitway and other sources into housing programs, in particular, quelled many of the gravest concerns about Bowser’s austerity measures for the 2024 spending plan. But lawmakers could still spar over what more the city could do for its lowest income residents if the District took in a bit more revenue.

Ward 5 Councilmember Zachary Parker is moving ahead with a proposal to pause the phaseout of a tax increase on large commercial property transactions, a move championed by progressive groups that Loose Lips first reported on late last week. Specifically, he is pitching an even more ambitious move to raise revenue than some of those groups originally envisioned, aiming to keep the tax hike in place for the next several years and raise nearly $391 million through 2027 for a variety of programs, which will surely dominate debate as the Council holds its first vote on the budget Tuesday. Parker expects to move these measures as standalone amendments, so they could pass with a simple majority of seven councilmembers as additions to the broader budget, much like the Council’s tax increase on the wealthy two years ago.

Mendelson and Ward 2 Councilmember Brooke Pinto have already come out as vocal opponents of the plan, arguing that leaving the higher “deed and recordation” tax rate in place will destabilize downtown transactions just as the neighborhood recovers, but Parker is taking a two-pronged approach to heading off such worries. For one, he plans to exempt all office-to-residential conversions from the deed tax across the District, since the real estate lobby was particularly concerned about the tax’s impact on these costly projects that are crucial to downtown’s revitalization. And Parker plainly hopes to overcome any other hesitancy by showering a variety of lawmakers’ pet programs with money.

“It is easy to dehumanize these unmet needs in conversations about a ‘tough budget year,’” Parker writes in a letter to his colleagues Monday. “It is easy to fall into the trap of believing that this is a moment where our hand is forced, and we have no choice but to acknowledge that more District residents will undergo the trauma of losing their home or living in hunger. But we do not have to accept that the past will be prologue. We have agency. We have a choice to make. We must center our comeback plan around investments in District residents.”



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