D.C. Mayor Anthony Williams might have wanted to take an easy Sunday away from the grind of managing a city of 570,000. He might have woken late, sat down to a hearty breakfast, sipped coffee, and flipped through the morning papers while glancing at the Sunday morning talk shows. But yesterday's Sunday routine was probably rudely interrupted by the Post, whose front-page, above-the-fold story titled "District Dodges Spending Laws: Companies Snare Contracts With Connections, not Competition" detailed some $425 million in unauthorized payments and no-bid contracts over the course of 3,317 words spread over two full pages of newsprint. This was no regular Sunday for Williams, much less would it be a regular week.

The Post's story, and a follow-up published today, was one many residents had heard all too often. Government largesse amounting to hundreds of millions of dollars is funneled to well-connected contractors with little or no oversight or supervision, often in violation of ethical standards and laws meant to protect against such acts. The difference with the violations as they occurred in the District is that Williams has prided himself on setting straight the city's financial standing, one wrecked by years of mismanagement and corruption under former mayor Marion Barry. Williams even used to be the city's Chief Financial Officer, the official most knowledgeable of the minutiae of government finances and spending. If the Post uncovered anything, it is that an administration that boasted of efficiency and responsibility might be anything but, and the man leading it, a man well-versed on the city budget and spending, was either hopelessly unaware of the wasteful and illegal spending or completely aware and supportive of it. Either way, Williams and his administration may have taken a serious blow with the Post's revelations, so much so that it may affect his remaining year in office and embolden his opponents and detractors.

The gyst of the Post's investigative analysis of five years of government documents is that city officials regularly overlooked established rules and procedures governing the granting of lucrative government contracts. In one case, the city granted a computer consulting company 146 no-bid contracts worth some $13 million, and in another the city directed $5.4 million over seven years to a well-connected businessman with a history of fiscal mismanagement. What the Post did not call the instances it discovered is what they truly are -- corruption.

The revelations have so caught city officials off guard that Williams declined to comment while others were left to either blithely admit their mistakes or shamelessly defend them. Anthony Pompa, the head of accounting for Chief Financial Officer Natwar Gandhi, may have sealed the administration's admission of guilt when he stated, "We screwed up. We shouldn't do those things. We're going to clean it up." Gandhi, probably the man most likely to be held responsible, went one further, attempting to justify the no-bid contracts, saying, "I will be damned if a child is without textbooks or an AIDS patient is without medicine just because some bureaucrat did not file the paperwork right." Most disturbing was the reaction of Deputy Mayor Herbert R. Tillery, who took charge of city contracting last fall. As recounted by the Post:

Deputy Mayor Herbert R. Tillery, who took over the contracting department last fall, insisted in an interview that it is impossible to spend money without a contract.

"That can't happen," he said. "If you can identify who . . . we'll know who to put in jail."

When shown records of more than $400 million that had been spent recently without authorization, Tillery turned to his staff and asked for an explanation.

One city official refuses to comment, another can do nothing but admit guilt, a third tries to mount a defense, and yet another professes absolute ignorance. We may well be witnessing the first act of a scandal in the making.

Much of this scandal was foreshadowed earlier this year. In May, City Administrator Robert Bobb came under fire from D.C. Auditor Deborah Nichols for $150,000 in no-bid contracts granted to close professional associates, while Gandhi has consistently been attacked for under-estimating how much the land needed for the new baseball stadium in Southeast would cost. While these two cases could be seen as isolated mistakes, they can just as well be seen as proof of an administration prone to cooking the books and ignoring established contracting procedures.

Beyond the political firestorm that Williams may now face and the trouble this may add to his plans to seal the deal on the $535 million stadium and $400 National Capital Medical Center, heads are sure to role. While Williams may be loath to admit that any wrong-doing occurred -- or, if it did, that he had any role in it -- he will have to mete out some form of punishment to salvage what little reputation the District's government may have left. Expect someone in the CFO's office to go, quite possibly Gandhi, at right. Beyond that, we can expect that Williams' most consistent opponents, especially council-member and mayoral candidate Adrian Fenty (D-Ward 4), will jump on the news and use it to describe how they would do things differently. Anyone seen as close to Williams -- such as council-member Jack Evans, who is running for council chair and himself has skirted financial disclosure laws -- is sure to take a hit.

All told, Williams may now wish his Sunday has progressed differently.