With a mere two weeks left in the District's 2011 fiscal year, D.C. CFO Natwar Gandhi told Mayor Vince Gray that he stumbled across an additional $89 million in cash today. more ›

Some positive budget news from the District's Chief Financial Officer today: thanks to an uptick in tax revenue, the city's budget gap for fiscal year 2012 has been reduced from as high as an estimated $600 million to about $322 million. more ›

In yesterday's Go Home Already, I linked to a story which talked about the results of a report conducted by Wider Opportunities for Women. The report discussed the amount of money that people under certain conditions in different areas around the Washington metro area need to make in order to feel financially "secure." Of course, there's serious wiggle room in that phrase, and plenty of commenters argued the validity of the numbers cited -- for instance, a single person without children to support in the District was deemed to need a yearly income of $32,000 per year to be "stable." I finally got a chance to peruse the report, titled "The Basic Economic Security Tables for the Washington, DC Metro Area," this morning, and thought that I'd share some of the information inside of its pages for you to squabble over. more ›

During his year-long struggle to stop same-sex marriage from becoming law in the District, Bishop Harry Jackson has loudly claimed to speak on behalf of the many District residents he says oppose marriage equality. But as campaign finance documents show, none of those residents seem terribly invested in his cause. more ›

Attention investors: The D.C. Office of the Chief Financial Officer has set up a new web site, www.buyDCbonds.com, in order to offer approximately $270 million in income tax-backed bonds for sale on August 18 through 19. The impending bonds offer comes at the same time that CFO Natwar Gandhi announced today that the city has retained its high marks from all three ratings agencies: Standard & Poor’s once again gave D.C. a AAA rating, Moody’s Investors Service’s assigned a Aa2 rating, and Fitch Ratings a AA designation. In a memo to D.C. Mayor Adrian Fenty, D.C. Council Chair Vincent Gray, and D.C. Council Finance Committee Chair Jack Evans (Ward 2), Gandhi also announced that all three rating services have given the bonds a "stable" ratings outlook. "I must emphasize that the affirmed ratings and stable outlooks are particularly commendable given the widespread strain in the current national economy. Many other states and local governments have experienced downgrades including California and Michigan, or a change in outlook to "negative" as the Washington Post reported about New Jersey yesterday," Gandhi wrote in the memo.
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