December will mark the end of the D.C. Council’s two-year legislative cycle, meaning that lawmakers will be even more rushed than usual to get bills passed this fall.

Eric Gilliland / Flickr

The weather outside is cooling, but debates in the Wilson Building are just about to start heating up.

That’s right, it’s that time of the year when D.C.’s lawmakers return from their two-month summer recess to the harsh reality that they have too many bills and not nearly enough time to debate and pass them all. And the issue of timing is even more critical than usual: The D.C. Council’s two-year legislative cycle ends in December, meaning that any bill that hasn’t gotten the requisite two rounds of votes by the council to be sent to Mayor Muriel Bowser will suffer an inglorious legislative death. (This also means that December turns into an orgy of debates and votes.)

It’s also the end of an era, so to speak; Councilmember Mary Cheh (D-Ward 3) is making her way towards retirement after 16 years in the city’s legislature. Additionally, the trio of Kenyan McDuffie (D-Ward 5), Anita Bonds (D-At Large), and Elissa Silverman (I-At Large) are engaged in a competitive eight-way race for two At-Large seats; it’s a guarantee that at least one of them won’t be back next year.

The council’s first legislative session (there’s always one the first Tuesday of each month, but more often get added when bills pile up) is on Sept. 20. The council’s full calendar of hearings, votes, and committee meetings is here.

Free Metro for all?

Speaking of Cheh — who chairs the council’s transportation and environment committee — she seems to want to go out with a bang. Her office says Cheh is looking to advance a bill from Councilmember Charles Allen (D-Ward 6) that would give all D.C. residents $100 a month to be used towards Metro fares, effectively making public transit free (or at least significantly cheaper) for most city-based users. The devil will certainly be in the details, especially in terms of how the money is doled out. But even if the bill were to clear the council before the close of the year, the much bigger sticking point could be how to cover a price tag that’s estimated to hover around $100 million a year. That could make for a fascinating budget season in 2023, one that Cheh won’t be around to partake in.

Cheh is also interested in pushing forward a bill from Councilmember Janeese Lewis George (D-Ward 4) that would ramp up traffic safety around schools, and is scheduled to hold a hearing on one of her own measures that would allow D.C. to more aggressively boot cars with outstanding traffic fines. And because she’s apparently a glutton for punishment, Cheh has also set a hearing on a bill that would dramatically shrink the size of Residential Parking Permit zones across the city, decoupling them from ward boundaries and instead linking them to Advisory Neighborhood Commission lines. (This would mean that RPP parking privileges would apply to smaller areas around where a resident lives.) This bill has plenty of potential for pushback: Urbanists like the broader idea but disagree on what boundaries should be used; plenty of residential parkers who like their current ward-based privileges may vociferously contest the need for any changes at all.

Relatedly, Cheh also has a bill expanding incentives for the adoption of solar power.

Ranked-choice voting remains stalled

Despite its somewhat successful rollout in New York City and a more recent (and notable) use in an Alaska special election for a congressional seat, ranked-choice voting isn’t likely to be coming to D.C. anytime soon.

Lawmakers held a hearing on a bill to adopt the novel voting system last November, but there’s been enough concern from some quarters over how complicated ranked-choice voting could seem, along with questions about who would actually benefit from it to put the measure on ice for the time being. (Much the same happened in Richmond this week.) According to multiple council sources, there are not even enough votes to move the bill out of Allen’s five-member judiciary committee; Allen himself says in a statement that “this is the time to continue strategically building momentum and raising public awareness” ahead of next year, when the measure could be re-introduced. A separate bill that would introduce mobile voting in D.C. — voting by phone or tablet, that is — is similarly expected to die by the wayside. Critics say there’s simply too many security unknowns to move forward with the idea, and enough lawmakers seem to agree.

But other changes to how the city runs its elections could come to pass before the end of the year. Most notably, Allen is interested in pushing a bill that would allow non-citizen legal residents to vote in local elections. (New York City passed a similar measure, though a judge knocked it down earlier this year.) He’s also aiming to pass a broader bill that would enshrine many of the pandemic-era changes to how D.C. residents cast their ballots, notably by making voting-by-mail permanent. Finally, he wants the council to approve a measure that would change and simplify the city’s system of automatic voter registration, which allows residents to register to vote while getting other government documents, like a driver’s license.

Law & Order: Special Legislative Unit

One of the more ambitious criminal justice-related proposals before the council is a rewrite of the city’s criminal code. The sweeping proposal — the result of years of work by an independent Criminal Code Reform Commission — aims to define crimes and penalties more clearly and scrap outdated language. (Large swaths of the code date back as far as 1901, and many cities across the country have already undergone similar revisions to clarify their codes.) The bill would also restore the right to a jury trial for most misdemeanors and get rid of mandatory minimum sentences. And it would provide anyone who has served 15 years in prison the opportunity to petition a judge for early release (D.C. currently provides that opportunity to some incarcerated residents, but only those who committed serious crimes before they turned 25.)

Advocates for criminal justice reform say the revision is an important step forward for the city, arguing that the bill not only makes the city’s criminal code clearer and more proportionate but also advances racial equity. But the proposed revisions have some powerful opponents. The Office of the U.S. Attorney for D.C., which prosecutes most crimes in the District, has said that while it supports the broader goals of the reform effort, it objects to several of the proposals in the bill. Those include the proposed expansion of resentencing opportunities and proposed changes to the definitions and penalties for robbery and carjacking.

And if a wholesale code rewrite wasn’t big enough, council sources say that Allen’s judiciary committee is also likely to draft an omnibus bill that will include a number of police-related measures that have been introduced over the last 18 months. It’s still unclear what will be in it, but pending bills in his committee include one to codify the Metropolitan Police Department’s policy prohibiting most police chases into law and one prohibiting police from performing other types of potentially dangerous maneuvers with their cars. Another would eliminate qualified immunity protections for officers who commit wrongdoing; and yet another would make disciplinary records for MPD and D.C. Housing Authority police officers available to the public. (Last year, a Reveal and DCist investigation that drew upon leaked MPD internal files found that police officers accused of crimes routinely had their proposed punishments reduced.)

Allen’s committee is also likely to consider a package of proposals aimed at improving support for victims of crime. The bill would expand eligibility for certain forms of victims’ compensation. For example, it would make victims of elder abuse eligible to receive payment under the D.C. Superior Court program that currently offers financial assistance to victims of violent crime. The bill would also give certain crime victims, including victims of shootings and stabbings, increased access to a dedicated advocate to help them navigate the legal system and law enforcement. It also shields survivors of sexual assault from being arrested on a warrant while they are seeking emergency medical treatment.

Oh, and there’s more: there’s a pending bill to restructure the city’s troubled crime lab.

Rapidly reforming rapid rehousing?

When it comes to getting people off of the street, D.C.’s most widely used tool is rapid rehousing. The basics are simple: Individuals and families are placed in apartments for up to a year, during which they are expected to pay a nominal portion of the rent, with the city picking up the rest. The thinking — well-supported by advocates and research — is that getting people housed first means they gain critical stability to search for work, services, and permanent housing.

But some advocates for people experiencing homelessness have long said that rapid rehousing — whose use has exploded in recent years — isn’t working, largely because once the subsidies end people are pushed into the city’s expensive rental market, and many end up homeless again because they can’t afford it.

Spurred on by those activists, in June D.C. Council Chairman Phil Mendelson introduced legislation that would reform rapid rehousing by decreasing the amount people are expected to pay towards rent while in the program and requiring the city to prioritize people in the program for permanent affordable housing. The first hearing on the bill is set for Oct. 20.

Relatedly, on Nov. 17 Councilmember Brianne Nadeau’s (D-Ward 1) human services committee will vote on a pair of her bills to help foster youth stay housed, and another from Councilmember Christina Henderson (I-At Large) to increase the monthly payment for participants in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP).

A new office for migrants

The council’s first legislative session comes on Sept. 20, and lawmakers are likely going to have to respond to the brewing situation of the thousands of migrants that have been bussed to the city by Republican governors in Texas and Arizona.

Bowser wants to create a new government office that would be responsible for supporting the migrants, and has already drafted emergency legislation in the hopes the council takes a quick vote to approve it. The office — which will be housed in the Department of Human Services — will administer “time-limited” services,including “welcome and other reception services,” “food, clothing, and other necessities,” “temporary shelter,” “medical services,” “relocation services,” “cash assistance,” and “social and legal services and referrals.” The bill aims to streamline support directly to individuals arriving from southern border states and paroled into the U.S. after January and awaiting immigration proceedings.

The bill may not be without controversy, though. While they support tailoring aid to the community, some volunteers and homeless advocates are concerned by provisions that would preclude migrants receiving help from the new office from getting services under the city’s longstanding Homeless Services Reform Act, which includes longer term housing support. The bill also changes eligibility for homeless services, including the ability to use enrollment in Health Care Alliance (insurance that undocumented residents rely on) to qualify for other local programs.

DHS Director Laura Green Zeilinger tells DCist/WAMU only one person has used Alliance to enroll in other programs in her seven years there. She says the D.C. government is creating a new system, influenced by the nonprofit SAMU’s response, because the existing shelter system is not equipped to handle the needs of migrants. “I’m not saying… one is more or less than the other, but they’re just different,” she says.

“We’re not going to change the way that we operate low-barrier shelters,” says Zeilinger, adding no one will ask for immigration status at the door. “But what we do hope is that fewer people will default to the homeless services system because there are not adequate services to meet them.”

The Migrant Solidarity Mutual Aid Network is calling on the council to vote no on the bill, with one organizer saying the bill will “starve migrants out of the city.”

The dollars and cents of D.C. schools

Despite D.C.’s ample spending on education, just about every year brings a new fight over the budgets for individual DCPS schools, with parents, advocates, and even lawmakers struggling to understand how money is being allocated and why certain school-level cuts were made.

Mendelson says he wants to change that, and he’s making it a priority to pass a bill he wrote that would set a baseline budget for every school based on what they got the year prior (plus some increases based on inflation and the like), instead of letting those budgets swing from year to year. The bill would also require that city money be set aside for individual schools first, with the DCPS central office getting whatever is left over.

“Most businesses set their annual budgets by building on their current year’s budget. That’s how DCPS, overall, is budgeted. Why should the schools themselves be budgeted differently?” he wrote when he introduced the measure in late 2021. “Why is it OK every year for principals to not really know what their next year’s budget will be? How do we build individual school communities when each year they are fighting cuts rather than building on this year’s strengths?”

Some advocates of public schools have said the bill would be a positive step; DCPS budget guru Mary Levy opined recently that it “would bring stability & transparency” to the school budgeting process, though she warned of some possible unintended consequences. But D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser and DCPS Chancellor Lewis Ferebee are likely to fight Mendelson’s bill hard, having already warned that it would create chaos in the school budgeting process.

Mendelson is holding a hearing on the bill on Sept. 16.

A holding pattern on marijuana legalization

If D.C. lawmakers had their way, they probably would have legalized the recreational sales of marijuana years ago. But they have not; despite having a bill ready to go, the council remains at the mercy of the seven-year-old congressional provision that prohibits D.C. from legalizing marijuana sales.

There is a possibility that the ban (known in legislative-speak as a budget rider) could be pulled out of a federal spending bill that’s being negotiated this month, but similar hopes were dashed just this March when congressional Democrats — who support letting D.C. make its own decision on legalizing sales — couldn’t get the job done. Earlier this month, Mendelson expressed his ongoing displeasure with the situation in a letter to congressional leaders.

“This is not simply an injustice, it is also untenable,” he wrote in the missive, which was signed by eight of his colleagues. “It is estimated that cannabis sales in the District exceed $600 million annually. A vast majority of these sales are unregulated because of the rider, complicating efforts to ensure consumer and public safety and jeopardizing the financial viability of legitimate medical cannabis businesses licensed to operate in the District.”

Some other notable hearings we’ll be watching

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