The City Paper’s Alan Suderman reported yesterday that the final tab for D.C. Council Chair Kwame Brown’s two fully-loaded luxury SUVs that caused such an uproar earlier this year could well approach $25,000.

In the grand scheme of a District that runs on a $5.3 billion budget, that’s a drop in the bucket. But for all the spending cuts that have been going around, it’s also bad optics for Brown — his desire for luxurious transport costs way more than most families in the city could comfortably parts ways with.

So what could have Brown’s $25,000 mistake have gotten us?

• Any one of the 301 other vehicles that Carmax has listed for between $24,000 and $25,000 at dealers within 250 miles of the District. And yes, there would be plenty of SUVs to pick from — a 2008 Ford Explorer Limited (with black interior and DVD video system!), a 2008 Hummer H3 (with 51,000 miles on it; a motivated seller!) or a nearly-new Honda CR-V LX (that gets 21 miles to the gallon in the city; voters love environmentalists!). There’s even a Mini Cooper up for grabs, though Mayor Adrian Fenty was more the small car sort of guy.
• Season tickets to the Washington Redskins. Oh, wait — there’s a “waiting list” that’s three generations long. Or is there?
• Roughly 16 months of rent for a resident paying the average of $1,521 for the District.
• Depending on location, some 6,200 cupcakes, 2,700 fancy celebrity burgers or 1,250 lobster rolls from the Red Hook Lobster Pound.
• A 300-year membership to Capital Bikeshare, a year’s worth of full-day ZipCar usage or a fully, fully-loaded SmarTrip card.
• A semester and a few weeks of tuition at George Washington University. Or, more depressingly, enough money to pay for the public school education of one D.C. student, but not enough for two.
• Six months of salary for a staff assistant or Capital City Fellow in the District government, or a full year’s pay and then some for a Constituent Services Specialist, administrative aide or legislative aide in a Council office.
• Lots of tickets for tonight’s Powerball drawing, which could bring in $107 million — or one-third of the recent budget gap the D.C. Council had to close. (What better way to repair a political reputation than winning the District millions in a game of chance?)
• 862 Thanksgiving meals that can feed families of four through Bread for the City.

You get the idea. While the amount the city will finally pay for what was two ill-advised leases isn’t nearly as much as other in current government scandals (Councilmember Harry Thomas, Jr. is accused of misusing $300,000 in city funds, by comparison), it’s high enough to be depressingly memorable.