If there is a government furlough, D.C. residents won't have to worry about trash piling up indefinitely.
After an emergency cabinet meeting Friday evening, Mayor Vincent Gray said that trash pickup would be suspended a maximum of three days in the event of the federal government shutdown, Jackie Bensen reported. If a federal shutdown extended to a fourth day, trash pickup would resume.
Previously, it was to be suspended for seven days.
That would leave plenty of time for the 7,700 (and growing face) people attending the Facebook event "If Boehner shuts down the government I am taking my trash to his house" to take their garbage to the house of Speaker of the House John Boehner.
Gray also said that furloughed local government employees will follow the same restrictions as furloughed federal government employees: They'll be forbidden from using work-related electronics like e-mail and smart phones.
Gray is upset Congress didn't pass Delegate Eleanor Holmes Norton's bill that would allow the city to spend its locally collected funds without an appropriation from Congress.
"It's as if I reach into your pocket and ask you how much money you have there and say, 'Oh, you have $15 in your pocket,'" Gray said. "'Only one caveat: You have to ask me how to spend your money.'"
“The District of Columbia is the only state, city or local government in the entire nation which will not be able to use the tax revenues paid by its own citizens to serve those very citizens during the federal shutdown" Gray wrote in a letter to Boehner and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid requesting relief from Congress.
Other U.S. citizens won't lose access to their libraries, street sanitation, garbage collection, recreation facilities and a public university, Gray said.
Gray's letter to Congress also raised the voting rights issue.
“[D.C.] is also the only jurisdiction in the country which has no representation in the process that led to this state of federal legislative paralysis or that will be needed to avert or minimize such a shutdown.”
