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Progressives Fear Business Interests Have Dominated a Key Tax Policy Group Guiding Future Budgets

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A big-time developer, a fiscally conservative former mayor, a few well-connected lobbyists, and some economists walk into a conference room. Is there any reason to think they’ll walk out with an equitable tax plan for D.C.?

That’s what a growing swath of D.C.’s left-wing groups are wondering as they keep tabs on the city’s Tax Revision Commission, a specially assembled panel of experts meant to guide D.C.’s future tax policy. The group’s recommendations won’t be ready before the Council passes the 2024 budget that lawmakers are debating now, but they will surely have an outsized influence on leaders’ long-term plans for coping with the myriad ways COVID has reshaped the economy.

And that’s why the recent rhetoric of some of the TRC’s 11 members has become so concerning to D.C.’s more progressive budget watchers. Lawmakers are unlikely to take up any major tax changes this year, but if commercial real estate values keep declining and eating away at the city’s property tax revenues, they’ll likely need to do something to reorient how D.C. funds its government. But the TRC, stacked with representatives of the business community and political establishment and chaired by mayor-turned-business booster Anthony Williams, could recommend against any tax hikes that would impact big companies or wealthy residents and provide cover for Mayor Muriel Bowser’s recent turn toward austerity.

“In spite of the clear mandate to center racial equity in the TRC purposes and outcomes, commissioners have made concerning public comments that demonstrate an unwillingness to increase taxes on the wealthy, antipathy for business regulations, and contempt for D.C. residents that struggle to make ends meet,” a coalition of 35 of the District’s leading progressive groups, including the Fair Budget Coalition, Empower DC, and Washington Legal Clinic for the Homeless, write in a letter to the TRC released Tuesday. “Labor and grassroots organizations are missing completely from representation on the commission, while powerful business interests are at the table and overrepresented.”

Muriel Bowser Kevin Donahue Jenny Reed budget
Mayor Muriel Bowser presents her 2024 budget alongside City Administrator Kevin Donahue and budget director Jenny Reed. Credit: Darrow Montgomery

A variety of D.C. progressives watching the commission’s meetings have been noting commissioners’ comments with alarm for months before this Tax Day missive and forwarded them to Loose Lips. For instance, in March, Gregory McCarthy, the top lobbyist for the Washington Nationals and a former Williams aide, said outright that “I don’t have any appetite” for raising taxes and wondered whether the city could “target some relief to those sectors that we think would be the job drivers.” David Catania, the former councilmember and current lobbyist, similarly mused at an October meeting that “we need to spend as much time trying to create wealth as we do trying to redistribute it,” not exactly the most subtle way to argue against a progressive tax structure.



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