As the budget and performance oversight season geared up, the Bowser administration held its final budget engagement forum of the year and its 39th since taking office in 2015 on Feb. 26 at Dock 5 in Union Market.
The event could be the last budget engagement forum held by Mayor Muriel Bowser, who decided not to run for reelection this year. I was so, so happy to see so many people there. Bowser called the forum “a great discussion among leaders, government leaders, about the priorities of our budget.”
“We will not fully bake the budget until we’ve heard from you,” Bowser said. Bowser’s budget proposal was originally expected on April 1, but has been delayed until mid-April.
In previous years, the mayor’s budget engagement forums featured an interactive activity where attendees had $100 to place into areas or issues they cared about. Then the attendees were asked to repeat the same activity in groups, and report to the room where their $100 landed. This year, Bowser and her team pivoted from this activity to a different one, where each city agency head gave a presentation about their priorities, and then attendees discussed what they would like to see in the budget at their individual tables.
“We’re not going to do that today,” Bowser said about the $100 interactive activity. “We are going to ask you to help us with some policy areas. What we know is the investments we have made have made us a better city.”
Bowser then turned the microphone to the members of her team seated at the table with her to describe the budget process. At the table with the mayor were the director of the Office of Budget and Performance Management, Jenny Reid, and the city administrator, Kevin Donahue.
“I always love these,” Donahue said about the event. “You get to sort of operate and think, we get to share some of the choices and trade-offs that we have to think of in responses and feedback we get every year.”
Donahue broke down the mayor’s budget process. First, the administration spends the first few months determining what it’s going to cost the city next year to do what it’s doing this year. Then the Bowser administration looks at the demand for a particular city service or issue. What makes D.C. unique from other cities and states, come budget time, is that the administration not only has to balance the budget for the year, but it has to show how it will maintain a balanced budget for the next four years.
The presentations then turned to the different deputy mayors to describe their clusters and what priorities they are looking to advance in the next year. First to present was the deputy mayor for health and human services, as well as the director of the Department of Health Care Finance, Wayne Turnage. Turnage shared some of his thoughts about Medicaid in the city and the need to modernize the city’s shelter system.
D.C. provides Medicaid benefits beyond what the federal government allows, and the city pays for that with local money, according to Turnage.
“I tell people all the time, every four out of 10 people that you touch will be on Medicaid,” Turnage said. “We spend over a billion dollars on Medicaid services.”
In terms of shelters and supporting those experiencing homelessness, Turnage said he would guess, “If you looked at our dollars per capita across any jurisdiction in the country, there’s no jurisdiction that invests as much into homeless services as D.C.”
The city spends close to $100 million on operating costs for shelters a year and millions of dollars on homeless services through the Department of Human Services, according to Turnage, including on new non-congregate shelters.
“What we have been doing is buying buildings that were once hotels and converting them to what we call transition housing,” Turnage said. “There are non-congregate facilities that house persons who have special needs, and our staff there can work with them to help move them towards a place where they might can live independently.”
Turnage highlighted priorities Bowser held throughout her tenure as mayor, including that no one should have to live outside in D.C.
“One of the things we do is we modernize our shelter system we have across the system, so that we can guarantee a shelter bed for residents who are experiencing homelessness,” Turnage said.
When the deputy mayor of planning and economic development, Nina Albert, presented, she celebrated the city exceeding the mayor’s goal of delivering 36,000 units of housing, creating 42,000 units. She also said D.C. was a leader in transforming commerical properties, and the city committed, just this year, $1.5 billion of contracting opportunities for small local businesses.
“We don’t wanna be too costly, too onerous, and a place that is too unpredictable to live in,” Albert said. “We want to be in control of our own narrative and our own story. We need to market our city and talk about how great our city is and why we need to be here to live and to invest.”
The event then turned to the attendees speaking with their respective tables. The activity called for the priorities in the city to fit together like a jigsaw puzzle. There were many perspectives in the room. Hopefully, even in an odd budget cycle and with the uncertainty of federal funding, the residents’ voices will be heard and will greatly impact how Bowser will arrange her final budget as mayor.
This article originally appeared in Street Sense’s April 8, 2026 edition.
