Martin Austermuhle
Despite being appointed to a third five-year term as the city’s chief bean counter last June, D.C. CFO Natwar Gandhi is resigning, NBC4’s Tom Sherwood reported this morning.
According to Gandhi’s office, his retirement on June 1 comes due to “purely personal reasons.” And while he didn’t offer further explanation in a letter to Mayor Vince Gray, he said that the state of the city’s finances were good enough to allow him to depart.
“I feel comfortable retiring at this time because the city is in excellent financial condition, perhaps the best in its history. The Fund Balance is as high as it ever has been, revenues are rising and, at this time it appears that they will continue to do so. Our bond issues are regularly oversubscribed and sell at historically low rates,” he wrote. Earlier this week Gandhi announced that D.C. had a $417 million budget surplus, all of which went to shore up the city’s reserves, which now stand at $1.5 billion.
Beloved on Wall Street as a steady steward of the city’s finances, Gandhi was nonetheless plagued by repeated controversies and harshly criticized by some city legislators. It was under his watch that the city’s Office of Tax and Revenue suffered its largest theft, a two-decade-long embezzlement scheme worth some $50 million. Years later, auditors found that many of the problems that led to that scheme remained, but that Gandhi was finding ways to keep those reports from going public.
He was also criticized for his revenue forecasts, was accused of knocking $2.6 billion off of the taxable value of pricey commercial real estate and his role in the ever-controversial 2008 D.C. Lottery contract, which remains under federal investigation.
Still, in an interview with the Washington Business Journal late last year, Gandhi defended he tenure. “If the agency were not working right, then you wouldn’t have a balanced budget year after year for the last 16 years,” he said.
In statements, both Mayor Vince Gray and D.C. Council Chairman Phil Mendelson expressed their sadness at Gandhi’s departure, and they thanked him for his work.
“I want to express my profound gratitude to Dr. Gandhi for being an exemplary steward of the District’s finances for over a decade, and I am sorry to see him go,” said Gray. “In the time that he has served as our Chief Financial Officer, he has helped take us from the days of the Control Board to our just-announced $417 million Fiscal Year 2012 surplus.”
“I am sorry to learn of Nat Gandhi’s decision to resign. His stewardship of the District’s finances is the primary reason we have gone from junk bond status to double-A ratings on Wall Street, and the reason why the District of Columbia is in the top rung of financially healthy cities in this country. As with any person who excels in his or her profession, Nat Gandhi has made the work look easy. But anyone who looks closely will realize quickly that guiding the District’s fiscal health is work – hard work,” said Mendelson.
There will be one person that’s happy, though—Councilmember David Catania (I-At Large), who repeatedly demanded that Gandhi resign and voted against a second five-year term for him last year. Catania has not yet responded to a request for comment on Gandi’s departure.
