Today’s day-long hearing on the Universal Paid Leave Act of 2015 at the D.C. Council featured 16 witnesses, many of whom contested how much the bill would actually cost the city to implement—with figures that varied by hundreds of millions of dollars.

City administrator Rashad Young said that, while Mayor Muriel Bowser’s administration supports the principles of paid leave, more work needed to be done on the bill in question because its cost “could come at the expense of other vital programs.”

Young suggested a task force to further investigate the “scope and burden” of the policy, and how it would interact with a potential November ballot measure to increase the minimum wage to $15 an hour.

But many councilmembers saw the task force as a delay tactic. “You say you’re supportive of this, but lay out a plan to completely put a stop to it,” At-large Councilmember David Grosso said in response to Young’s suggestion.

Later on in the hearing, Council Chairman Phil Mendelson questioned the idea of a task force, too. “We are the task force,” he said, referring to the D.C. Council, and added that “there’s an opportunity there for mischief and derailment” with a working group.

Grosso and At-large Councilmember Elissa Silverman introduced the Universal Paid Leave Act in October. Similar to unemployment insurance, the city would set up and administer a fund that all private employers would pay into at a sliding scale pegged to salary.

At the highest end, employees who make more than $150,000 a year would contribute 1 percent to the fund and at the lowest end, minimum wage workers would contribute 0.6 percent. Federal government workers (who live in D.C.) and D.C. residents who work elsewhere could also contribute personally to the fund.

When a worker needed to take that leave, they would make a claim directly to the fund. Under the bill, the fund would pay out 100 percent of an employee’s salary for the first $1,000 a week. After that, it would pay out 50 percent, for a total of up to $3,000 a week.

Many of these details could change, though. “I believe there are shifts that can be made” to make paid leave “as universal as possible throughout the city,” said Grosso.

The District began offering eight weeks of paid leave to government employees last year, D.C. has codified and extended protections afforded to workers after pregnancy, and the D.C. Family and Medical Leave Act guarantees up to 16 weeks of leave—but it is unpaid, and only mandated for employees who have worked for more than a year and have completed 1,000 hours at a company with 20 or more employees.

In the “numbers-heavy hearing,” as Silverman described it, one study carried out by the Institute for Women’s Policy Research said that paying for the leave afforded by the the bill would cost $281 million, while a report commissioned by the Greater Washington Board of Trade says one year’s payouts would cost $721 million.

D.C. Chief Financial Officer Jeff DeWitt suggested (jokingly) that the economists duke it out in a cage match.

The third hearing on the Universal Paid Leave Act of 2015 will take place on February 11 at 4 p.m.