Natwar Gandhi, photo by DCCAThe ongoing contracts dispute between the D.C. Council and the administration of Mayor Adrian Fenty is heading to court.
Days after D.C. Council Chairman Vincent Gray once again extended the deadline to resolve the matter of whether the council will order payments stopped on $875 million in contracts that were never submitted for approval, CFO Natwar Gandhi has announced that he’ll be taking the matter before a judge.
The issue stems from a large batch of what are referred to as “option year” contracts, which Attorney General Peter Nickles has argued were legally renewed without going through the council because the initial agreements had already been approved before. But the Council has maintained that the law dictates that all contracts over $1 million must to be submitted to them, regardless of whether they are new or merely being renewed.
Since the council and the mayor have not yet been able to resolve the dispute, and large parts of the D.C. government could effectively shut down should the payments be ordered stopped, Gandhi wrote in a letter today that he’s retained his own counsel and will ask the D.C. Superior Court “to determine the controlling law in this disagreement.”
Full letter after the jump.
