Mayor Vincent Gray. (Photo by Alex Wong/Getty Images)

Mayor Vince Gray sent a letter today to President Obama, Speaker of the House John Boehner and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid asking for an “immediate” meeting to discuss the shutdown and urge them to pass legislation that exempts D.C. from its nonsense.

As Gray says in the letter, the Mayor and Council declared all city employees essential, which has kept the government running during the shutdown using contingency funds. “However, those funds will soon be exhausted, and the federal shutdown may continue indefinitely,” Gray wrote. “This means that, without budget autonomy for the District, very soon there will be severely negative consequences for us – consequences that no other state of city will be forced to endure.”

But even with the contingency funds, Gray wrote, “we are already seeing the harmful impact of the federal shutdown.” One impact, he points out and as DCist reported, is delayed Medicaid payments, which could put vulnerable D.C. residents at risk of losing mental health services.

Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton has been urging Congress to pass her District of Columbia Government Shutdown Avoidance Act of 2013, which would “would permanently prevent D.C. government shutdowns by authorizing the District government to spend its local funds in the event of a federal shutdown, just as every other jurisdiction in the country is permitted to do.” The D.C. Republican Party sent a letter last week to Boehner, urging him to pass Norton’s legislation. DCist asked the group to let us know if he responded and haven’t heard anything back.

The House of Representatives approved a bill last week to fund D.C., as well as the National Institutes of Health and the National Park Service. But the Senate is unlikely to pass it.

“I have done all that I possibly can to ensure that the health, safety and welfare of District residents is not endangered by a crisis that our city has had no hand in creating,” Gray wrote in today’s letter. “But time is running out – and, soon, I will have exhausted every resource available to me to protect our residents, our workers, and our visitors.”

Gray’s Shutdown Meeting Request Letter to President Obama by SAEHughes