It’s that time of the year. The pools are closed, the schools are open, and the Wilson Building is bustling. After a summer recess, D.C. councilmembers have returned to the dais for a new legislative session, with a hefty plate of bills on their lap.

Over the next few months, lawmakers will spend their days in hearings, roundtables, and legislative sessions hoping to push through at least a few of the bills on their agendas. (Because it’s the middle of the council’s two-year legislative cycle, if a bill doesn’t make it to a vote by December, it can live through to next year without needing a reintroduction.)

Lawmakers will hold their first legislative meeting on Tuesday, Sept. 19. A full calendar of hearings and meetings can be found on the council’s website. It’ll be a busy fall, but we’ve rounded up some of the top-line issues we’ll be watching for.

Addressing violent crime 

After a summer of violence, lawmakers are returning to the Wilson Building with the task of nailing down a permanent bill to address this year’s increase in violent crime. An uptick in homicides – a 28% increase over this time last year – and gun violence has left residents traumatized and exhausted.

Before the council went on summer recess, lawmakers pushed through an emergency public safety bill amid mounting pressure from Mayor Muriel Bowser, who proposed a broader crime bill in May. The council’s legislation, introduced by Ward 2 Councilmember and chair of the judiciary committee Brooke Pinto, passed 12-1, with Ward 4’s Janeese Lewis George as the only no vote. The bill created new offenses for firing a gun in public and expanded pre-trial detention for adults accused of committing a crime, among other provisions. (Pinto did not return DCist/WAMU’s request for an interview in time for publication.)

The council’s emergency bill was a narrower version of what Bowser proposed. The mayor’s package of legislation would tilt the law more heavily in favor of pretrial detention for children and adults, and increase penalties for certain gun crimes. This fall, the council will need to discuss and pass a permanent version of the bill. Councilmembers told DCist/WAMU that they’ll be trying to examine the impacts of the emergency bill — and whether it accomplished its intended goal — but those metrics for measurement aren’t entirely clear yet.

“What we have seen it yield in terms of data and outcomes, I think those are things we want to be able to take a look at — so I’m looking forward to getting data so we can understand what that looks like,” Ward 6 councilmember Charles Allen told DCist/WAMU in an interview.

Lewis George said in an interview that she doesn’t know yet how the council will be measuring the impacts of the emergency legislation as it considers a permanent bill. She said she hopes lawmakers have an extended dialogue about the implications of extending pretrial detentions when considering permanent legislation. While she supported a number of provisions in the emergency legislation she ultimately cast her no vote due to the bill’s extension of pretrial detention to a number of offenses, which she argued is not proven to increase safety, and contributes to mass incarceration. She introduced an amendment to remove the provision from the bill, but it was voted down 11-2.

In an interview with DCist/WAMU, Lewis George said regardless of what legislation is passed this fall, one bill alone — and the council alone – can’t solve the issue of rising crime. Back when the emergency bill was discussed over the summer, political tensions boiled over between the mayor and the council; Chairman Phil Mendelson called Bowser out for, in his eyes, blaming the council for the rise in crime and placing the sole responsibility for solving it in their hands.

“You can’t legislate leadership,” Lewis George said in an interview with DCist/WAMU, referring to multiple executive agencies within what leaders call the “public safety ecosystem,” which has been frequently criticized for operating in silos. Notably, the city’s crime lab still lacks accreditation, hampering the ability to solve cases, and the city’s beleaguered 911 system faces understaffing and allegations of mismanagement, which has resulted in long hold times, deadly errors, and an erosion of public trust and confidence in the agency.  “The systems are not working, they are broken and it’s really at this point, a matter of will and less a matter of legislation,” she added.

Into the fall, Lewis George is hoping that a bill she introduced over the summer, which would require conflict resolution to be taught in all public schools, from elementary to high school, gets a hearing in the Committee of the Whole, which includes all councilmembers and is chaired by Mendelson.

Other public safety bills up for discussion include the Accountability and Victim Protection Amendment Act of 2023, which would eliminate or extend the length of statutes of limitations for certain serious crimes, and another, introduced by Charles Allen, that would require D.C. to preserve all evidence collected after a sexual assault, even if the survivor chooses not to report it. One bill would reimburse small businesses for security camera systems, while another would create a Wheel-Lock Help Incentive Program, to encourage the installation of wheel locks to prevent theft. All four of the bills will be discussed in a public hearing on Monday, Sept. 18.

Also this fall, the council will hold a confirmation hearing for Bowser’s appointed police chief, Pamela Smith. A public roundtable for Smith’s confirmation will be held on Wednesday, Sept. 27, at 11 a.m.

Increasing penalties for dangerous drivers 

As of Sept. 12, 34 people have been killed by traffic violence in D.C. – a 42% increase from this point in 2022. Despite ongoing attempts (and reworked Vision Zero plans) to reduce traffic violence and penalize dangerous drivers, the city has long struggled to curtail the problem. A slate of bills aimed at increasing the penalties for bad drivers is up for a joint hearing on Oct. 4 with the Public Works and Operations and Transportation and the Environment committees.

“My focus is, let’s shift the emphasis from infrastructure and street design, which is now in progress and still needed, to systems of accountability, because the enforcement that we should be doing on road safety really does need to be firmly rooted in that accountability piece,” said Ward 1 Councilmember Brianne Nadeau, who chairs the Committee on Public Works and Operations.

Transportation Committee chair Charles Allen introduced the STEER (or Strengthening Traffic Enforcement, Education, and Responsibility) Amendment Act of 2023 in July, which contains several provisions aimed at increasing consequences for drivers with numerous offenses. It would add license suspension as a possible punishment for accumulating tickets and require a safe driving course to regain it. It would also streamline the process for revoking a license if a driver has repeated DUI offenses – an issue that drew particular attention earlier this year when a woman who had three prior DUI convictions in D.C. and another two in Virginia killed three people in a fatal crash on Rock Creek Parkway. Police alleged Walker was intoxicated at the time of the crash. The D.C. Department of Motor Vehicles said they weren’t aware of her previous convictions, which should’ve resulted in a revocation of her license.

Allen’s bill would also allow the D.C. attorney general to sue the most egregious out-of-state drivers in civil court – a work-around to ticket reciprocity, which Virginia and Maryland do not want to participate in. Essentially, as things currently stand, drivers in Maryland and Virginia don’t have to pay for tickets from D.C. traffic cameras. The bill would create a mechanism for D.C. to hold drivers with a large number of tickets accountable by working similarly to other civil situations that cross state lines.

A second bill from Councilmember Henderson would immediately suspend licenses for people who negligently kill someone with a car, leave the scene of a crash, or drive under the influence. Currently, licenses can be suspended after convictions for certain traffic violations. Another would assign points to a driver’s license for camera tickets; currently, camera tickets only result in a fine. Lastly, the Fraudulent Vehicle Tag Enforcement Amendment Act of 2023, introduced by Nadeau, would increase penalties for vehicles with missing, fraudulent, stolen, or intentionally obscured tags. Transportation and the Environment and Public Works and Operations committees will hold a joint hearing on all four bills on Oct. 4

“I think what everyone is acknowledging is that we have to take traffic enforcement more seriously as it’s contributing to the other parts of violence that we’re seeing in our city,” Henderson said, referencing carjackings and vehicle theft. According to MPD data, motor vehicle theft is up 109% over this time last year.

Changes at the D.C. Jail 

Brianne Nadeau intends to introduce legislation to re-up a longstanding effort to end the use of solitary confinement in the D.C. jail. The final text of the bill is still being ironed out, but it’s a narrowed version of a bill introduced last summer by former Ward 3 Councilmember Mary Cheh which failed to make it to a vote in the previous session.

Nadeau’s proposal seeks to ban all forms of solitary confinement for any reason, including for discipline and long-term suicide prevention. It would also prevent solitary confinement from being used to separate residents for administrative reasons (like when residents are moved or reassigned for safety reasons or to reduce conflict) or to separate transgender and otherwise vulnerable residents from the rest of the population. The only exceptions would be for short-term suicide prevention or medical isolation.

Cheh’s previous bill specified the instances in which the Department of Corrections could use “safe cells,” or housing cells designed for people at risk of self-harm or suicide. While the drafting is not complete, Nadeau’s bill – crafted with the help of a working group consisting of local activists and residents who experienced solitary confinement – would be narrower and she hopes easier to work through the legislative process. It has yet to receive a hearing in the council’s judiciary committee, chaired by Ward 2 Councilmember Brooke Pinto.

Another bill, this one from Pinto, aims to increase access to healthy food within DOC facilities. The legislation would require DOC to follow basic nutrition standards and provide residents of DOC facilities with access to hospitality career training and employment upon release.

Office of Dis-unified Communications… 

On Oct. 5, the Judiciary and Public Safety committee will hold a public hearing on the operations of the city’s Office of Unified Communications (the agency that manages the city’s 911 emergency services) as well as a piece of legislation aimed at increasing transparency from the agency. (An emergency version of that legislation passed over the summer, but now the council will need to vote on the permanent bill.)

For years, OUC has been beset by errors – the most recent involving the death of ten dogs at a flooded doggy day care in Northeast. Other deadly mistakes in recent years involved a fire that killed two people, one of them a nine-year-old boy, when OUC took more than four minutes to dispatch responders, and a boating accident in 2020, when OUC dispatched responders to the wrong river and three boaters were later found dead.

The agency has long been criticized for its mishandling of emergency responses and its apparent inability to improve its operations. On Friday Sept. 7, in accordance with the emergency legislation, the agency released public data cataloging the agency’s performance. In addition to instances showing that call-takers sometimes hung up on residents calling 911, or that some people waited on hold for three or four minutes, the dashboard also revealed that last month, nearly 40% of shifts at the facility were understaffed.

Allen, who previously chaired the Judiciary and Public Safety Committee, said the dashboard did not reveal anything that was not already known or revealed through oversight hearings. The council has previously passed legislation funneling dollars into training and recruiting incentives and has also stepped in to effectively block Karina Holmes, who led the agency from 2015 to 2021, from being re-appointed to the role last year. (Heather McGaffin was appointed as directed earlier this year.)

“We will continue to do oversight, we’ll continue to do funding, but this is an executive agency; I don’t run that agency. We’ve got to have the leadership there to really fix it first to acknowledge there’s a problem and then to fix it,” he said.

Green new deal(s)

Ward 4 Councilmember Janeese Lewis George has two bills aimed at improving the safety and availability of affordable housing in the city that are expected to be discussed this fall. Her version of a D.C. Green New Deal would create mixed-income public housing and accelerate the removal of lead water service lines.

The Green New Deal for Housing Act would create the city’s first-ever “social housing” model, a concept embraced in Austrian cities in which mixed-income residents would reside in a publicly-owned building. The higher-income tenants would pay market-rate rents, thus subsidizing their lower-income neighbors who would reside in designated affordable units. The bill would create an entirely new agency that would oversee the construction, maintenance, and growth of mixed-use developments, ensuring that the buildings are constructed with net-zero emissions standards. Funding for the developments would come from several pots, including the Housing Protection Trust Fund – a pool of government dollars that subsidizes development projects. (While the law currently requires 50% of HPTF dollars to go towards housing for the city’s lowest-income residents, in 2022 only 19% of the funds went toward that purpose, according to an annual HPTF report.)

A second bill, the Green New Deal for a Lead-Free D.C., which Lewis George expects to be advanced this fall by the Transportation and Environment Committee, would streamline the removal of lead pipes and bolster the city’s lead remediation workforce by creating new jobs within the city’s D.C. Infrastructure Academy. The bill, which was originally introduced in 2022, had a hearing earlier this summer and has received strong community support, as well as eight co-sponsors.

Opioid Epidemic 

As opioid deaths continue to break records in the city, Henderson, chair of the health committee, told DCist/WAMU that the council plans to call on the mayor to declare a public health emergency over the epidemic in the coming weeks, which would fulfill a long-standing demand from some of the city’s health advocates. This wouldn’t be in the form of legislation, but a sense of the council memo —  a resolution expressing the council’s opinion regarding a situation or event. By declaring a public health emergency, the mayor could tap into additional funding measures and use executive authority to create policies aimed at curbing overdoses. Through May 31 of this year, the city has recorded 192 fatal opioid-related overdoses – 17 more than by this point last year, which was already the deadliest year on record.

D.C. currently has millions of dollars to spend on opioid abatement from the major lawsuit settlements with pharmaceutical companies and drug manufacturers, but the money can’t be used until the city forms an advisory commission to distribute the funds. The advisory commission will be made up of both Council and mayoral appointees, as well as officials from the Department of Behavioral Health. Earlier this summer, the goal was for the group to meet and begin doling out the funds in August but Henderson told DCist/WAMU that by Sept. 11 the council had still not finalized its appointees.

“There has been absolutely no movement thus far on this commission, which has been incredibly frustrating because millions of dollars [are] sitting in an account that we cannot use because we have not named individuals to this commission,” Henderson told DCist/WAMU.

Insurance reform and bolstering the city’s health provider network 

While Henderson says it’s not the most glamorous of legislative priorities, the health committee will be looking to pass a number of bills that would reform insurance policies and provider licensing in the District.

One bill expected to be marked up this fall, the Prior Authorization Reform Amendment Act of 2023, would regulate the practice of prior authorization, or when an insurer needs to review a medication or procedure before allowing a plan to cover it. The bill would set timelines for when insurers need to respond to prior authorization requests and also prohibit insurers from requiring prior authorization solely based on cost.

The health committee is also awaiting legislation from the mayor’s office that would update the city’s Health Occupations Revision Act – essentially the legislation that governs how professional health licenses are distributed in the District. An updated version is expected to make it easier for courses, counselors, and other providers to work in D.C., Maryland, and Virginia, without having to go through a licensing process if they switch jurisdictions.

“The largest piece of that is about strengthening the healthcare workforce,” Henderson said, referencing a longstanding staffing issue that’s persisted in D.C.-area medical facilities since the pandemic.

Restaurant relief 

Restaurateurs have a sympathetic ear with the Council. Last spring, two councilmembers introduced separate bills that provide relief to restaurants amid major changes to the industry, including the passage of Initiative 82, which phases out tipped minimum wage.

One bill, introduced by At-Large Councilmember Kenyan McDuffie, already got a hearing. It’s unclear if McDuffie will hold a vote on his bill anytime soon; his office did not respond to request for comment by publication time. Another similar bill, introduced by Charles Allen, has yet to move.

McDuffie’s bill is controversial because it takes a stab at a contentious issue: service charges. Among other things, the bill would incentivize businesses to add a service charge as well as define the nebulous fee. Initiative 82 organizers oppose the bill, saying it undermines their intent to increase workers’ wages while also obscuring what patrons pay.

McDuffie assured critics that he is accepting feedback, so he will likely circulate a revised bill.

Another bill that could be up for a vote is Councilmembers Brooke Pinto and Christina Henderson’s bill reforming liquor liability insurance, a major expense for restauranteurs.

Independent investigations 

Now-sustained allegations of sexual harassment against one of Mayor Bowser’s top officials earlier this year led the council to revisit how the city handles such accusations — a conversation that will continue through the fall.

Over the summer, lawmakers passed emergency legislation requiring the city’s inspector general to review an internal investigation that substantiated accusations of sexual harassment by former deputy mayor John Falcicchio.

Falcicchio, the deputy mayor of planning and economic development and one of the most powerful city officials, resigned abruptly in mid-March. Shortly after his mysterious departure, Bowser launched an investigation into accusations of sexual harassment, the findings of which were substantiated in a four-page summary. The city released the findings quietly over a long weekend in June, and the timing and depth of the public report raised concerns from lawmakers that Bowser’s officer had not thoroughly investigated harassment or other potential misconduct.

The emergency legislation passed in July required the city’s inspector general to hire an outside law firm to delve further into any complaints related to Falcicchio’s workplace conduct – including bullying and allegations of retaliation. The firm is also expected to make recommendations about how D.C.’s government should handle instances of sexual harassment accusations against officials.

Per a 2017 mayoral order, nearly all sexual harassment claims are to be handled internally, with each executive agency having a designated Sexual Harassment Officer who receives complaints and looks into them. In the council, any claims of sexual harassment against a lawmaker or senior staff member are directed to an outside firm. A bill introduced by Nadeau which is expected to be voted on this fall would require the entire D.C. government to follow that protocol for any senior officials. Nadeau told DCist/WAMU that a hearing on that bill will be set for November.

At-large councilmembers Kenyan McDuffie and Anita Bonds pledged to hold oversight hearings of workplace culture at the mayor’s office over the recess, but no such hearings were held.

Amanda Michelle Gomez contributed reporting.