Photo by PoPville flickr user angela n.
“Text as Prepared for Delivery of Mayor Vincent C. Gray’s Address to Residents on Effects of Federal Shutdown
Calls on Residents to Demand Congress Release District from Crisis
Address to District Residents on Effects of Federal Shutdown
October 10, 2013
Good evening. Tonight, once again, the 632,000 residents of the District of Columbia find ourselves trapped in a terrible and unprecedented predicament.
What’s worse and, frankly, more galling, is that this predicament is one we had no hand in making, and one from which we can be rescued only by a legislature in which we have no voting voice. That legislature is, of course, the United States Congress, which right now seems hopelessly stalemated over a number of partisan issues.
Unfortunately, the District’s own money is caught in the middle of this tug-of-war.
Yesterday, I stood with our non-voting Congresswoman, Eleanor Holmes Norton, on the lawn of the U.S. Capitol building to demand that Congress and President Obama take action to free the District’s local budget from this manufactured crisis and let us spend our own locally-raised funds to provide critical services.
Services – like reimbursing Medicaid providers who care for people who are poor and disabled, or paying our public charter schools, or collecting our garbage – services that the residents of every other city and state in America take for granted, because they are services that will continue for every other city and state in our country during a federal shutdown.
Tonight, I want to talk to you about why we are in this crisis, what I have done to mitigate the harm it has caused, what the current status of the shutdown’s impact on the District of Columbia is, and what our 632,000 residents can do to help. (more…)
