BY BRIAN WILLIAMS
WASHINGTON, D.C. - Stepping up the bipartisan attacks on the rights and living standards of working people in this city, U.S. president Bill Clinton signed a bill April 17 creating a powerful financial control board to oversee the D.C. government.

The board is empowered to run D.C. affairs into the next century. It is charged with ensuring that the city comes up with a balanced budget by 1999. Towards this end, the board will have the power to slash thousands of city jobs and cut hundreds of millions of dollars of spending on various social programs and services.

The five members of the control board, who will be appointed by Clinton within the next few weeks, can reject city budgets and impose their own spending plans. The board also has the power to overrule new labor agreements and other contracts, reject local legislation, and change almost any decision made by the mayor and city council.

While the board appointees - likely to be wealthy businessmen - will not be paid, they will have at their disposal a full-time staff headed by an executive director who is to receive about $115,000 a year.

According to the Washington Post, the control board "would be the strongest such panel ever created to oversee a U.S. city." It would remain in existence at least until the city balanced four budgets in a row and repaid all money borrowed in doing so. It is modeled after a similar financial board imposed on New York City some 20 years ago.

The board's power "is absolute and it is absolutely necessary," stated Republican representative James Walsh, chairman of the House subcommittee on the District of Columbia. "This authority needs to have control."

"I think the board started out as bad news but has become good news," stated D.C. mayor Marion Barry, who after some initial hesitation threw his wholehearted support behind this appointed body.

The law also directs the mayor to appoint a chief financial officer to handle the city's money on a day-to-day basis. This person, who must be approved by the board, will have more responsibility than the mayor, according to Barry.

Republican representative Thomas Davis from Virginia, the chief architect of the control board law, claimed the board would give Barry the "political shield" to make unpopular decisions about cuts. Davis said the existence of this board would help facilitate the freeing up of city tax money for a new downtown sports arena. "It is the one note of hope in this whole process," he stated.

The idea for such a financial control board was first publicly raised by Democrat Eleanor Holmes Norton, the district's nonvoting delegate to the House of Representatives. She praised the new law as maintaining the integrity of self-rule.

In an April 11 editorial entitled "Home Rule Isn't Dead," the Washington Post presented a similar point of view. "Nothing in the new law prevents either the mayor or the council from seizing the fiscal initiative and exercising the financial self-discipline necessary for recovery," the Post wrote. "`Home rule' has been limited all along.-Nothing in that creation of an elected local government allowed the mayor or council control over the city's finances. Or anything else, for that matter."

In 1973, Congress granted the city what was called "home rule." It allowed district residents to elect a mayor and city council. Congress, however, retained ultimate power to overrule their decisions. For the previous 99 years, three appointed commissioners ran Washington.

The granting of a home rule charter was an attempt by the ruling powers to divert a growing protest movement - fueled by the civil rights struggle - demanding statehood for Washington, D.C., and for the right of this majority-Black city to have the right to vote for its representatives.

Brian Williams is a member of United Food and Commercial Workers Local 27 in Cheverly, Maryland.  
 
 
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