We may never get a commuter tax, and the federal government will always play the skinflint over the compensation it should pay for its untaxable real estate. But there is this thing called pork.

D.C. and the Hill were favored in a slew of ways in the 2006 budget under a little-noticed payment to the city’s chief financial officer, and the bounty is expected to continue in 2007 in spite of President Bush’s move to curb spending.

Baseball, wherever it lands or how, got a big boost in the 2007 budget request with a $20 million appropriation to rebuild the Navy Yard Metro Station. The tuition-support program championed by Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton (D-D.C.) that allows D.C. residents to pay in-state tuition at state schools elsewhere got a whopping $35.1 million; libraries got $30 million. The city’s sewer system got $7 million to continue a plan to reduce sewage and street runoff into the Anacostia by 40 percent.

Previous pork:

• Congressional Cemetery got $2 million in 2006.

• The controversial AppleTree Institute got $150,000 (it’s fighting to build a charter school on 12th Street N.E. above Lincoln Park).

• The Earth Conservation Corps, whose young workers are building the Anacostia Trailwalk, got $500,00.

• Fort Dupont Ice Arena in Anacostia got $495,000.

• The Capitol Hill-Georgetown Circulator bus service got $500,000.

A steady recipient of largess from city and federal sources is nonprofit St. Coletta School, which got $1 million in 2006 and is nearing completion of its $35 million campus at 19th Street and Independence Avenue S.E. on 7.1 acres of city land for which the school pays and will continue for 98 more years to pay $1 per year. St. Coletta has been the beneficiary of another $1 million from the Freddie Mac Foundation in 2005, a $1 million 2002 appropriation and various other grants.

The school has many friends in Congress, led by Sen. Ted Kennedy, whose family foundation gave $1 million to it in 1983; his late sister, Rosemary, who was mentally disabled, was a St. Coletta (Wisconsin) resident. The school gains congressional favor because it may help reduce the city’s $73 million special-education program, which absorbs one-quarter of the whole public school budget to serve 11,000 out of 64,000 D.C. Public Schools students. Two hundred sixty disabled and retarded students will be served, each at a cost of from $38,000 to $50,000 per year.

The school is growing in other ways. It has changed from a public school to a charter school and recently announced on its website that it is a private school as well.

The 2007 budget includes $25 million for school vouchers and $40.8 million for school improvements. Meanwhile, the City Council, no doubt influenced by election-year pressure, has voted to lavish money on the schools as well — including a daring public-private plan to tear down plug-ugly Hine Junior High School on 7th Street S.E. and replace it with a new (and hopefully better designed) school, plus privately developed apartment and retail blocks facing Pennsylvania Avenue S.E. and a reopened C Street S.E.

The City Council unanimously approved spending $100 million a year on school buildings to be financed by sales-tax revenue and simultaneously promised to close down 3 million square feet of underused and empty school space. The financial underpinning is the belief that city tax revenue will continue to increase at a rate of over $100 million a year — an election-year forecast. Nor has any reputable authority shown proof that repaired or restored school buildings equate to better student performance.

THE WATERFRONT
Little pressure put behind river project

It was back in 1998, and the Urban Land Institute corralled a group of experts in architecture and planning. The focus was the sterile, road-dominated Southwest Waterfront, a product of the same 1950s “urban renewal” thinking that bulldozed almost all of Southwest Washington.

Many years and plans later, the area remains almost untouched by government action. Change has come through the private sector, with new hotels such as the Mandarin Oriental and office buildings rising. But the overall objectives — to reopen 4th Street S.W., refigure the commuter highways that separate Southwest from the Washington Channel and move the strip of restaurants that visually block the city’s largest boating center, marina and only official Coast Guard anchorage — have gone nowhere.

And with the departure of planning czar Andrew Altman and D.C. Department of Transportation Director Dan Tangherlini, the massive project is hanging on thin air and waiting for policies from this fall’s elections, which will bring a new mayor and council.

The plan for the waterfront from the 14th Street Bridge to Maine Avenue and M Street is both simple and massive. It’s proposed to make a “Market Square” adjacent to the present fish wharf at the upstream end of the channel and a large public park at the downstream end, where Maine Avenue and M Street meet. Between these two public spaces, Water Street would be eliminated, the present strip of buildings moved inland and apartment and retail blocks built facing a widened riverside promenade.

But there’s no pressure. The pressure instead comes from baseball, from the Reservation 13 National Capital Medical Center,  the Southeast Federal Center,  the mixed-use development of the former Washington Convention Center site downtown.

It looks now as though the Southwest Waterfront plan will have to wait until these other projects prove either that the D.C. investment boom is a permanent force or that a new waterfront like Baltimore’s will remain a wet dream.

THE BUDGET FOG
‘Windfalls can vanish,’ budget guru Rivlin warns

There’s a fog of hysteria hanging over the D.C. City Council these days, a fog floating on two intangibles: coming elections and completely unrealistic hopes that city revenues will continue to grow at a rate of $100 million a year.

In other words, a tree can grow to the sky.

Mayoral candidate and City Council Chairman Linda Cropp (D) made the memorable statement last week: “I don’t believe we can tax our way out.” Her preferred route: sell city buildings, schools and libraries to developers so that they can build condos and shops alongside.

And they had better start selling soon, for so many huge projects are planned that the city’s surplus ($370 million for 2005) is like pocket change.

It’s not only baseball ($661 million), the National Capital Medical Center ($425 million), school rebuilding and repair (at least $100 million per year), current obligations ($960 million), the old Convention Center site (no estimate), the Southwest Waterfront, affordable housing and tax relief. The list is long.

The city’s careful financial godmother, economist Alice Rivlin, repeats, “Windfalls can vanish with a change of season.” She warns that even in the good times “the District’s underlying fiscal structure is unsound.”

But it’s a known that when surpluses occur politicians and planners go a bit crazy. That’s the atmosphere at 1 Judiciary Square.

METRO

• Barry Watch: With amazing bravado, Marion Barry (D), the former mayor and current councilman for Ward 8, faced the baseball thing (by switching his vote) and his sentencing on tax charges (he got a continuance until March 9) sporting a new suit and no repentance. Everything last week — words, actions, dress — said simply: stick it to the man. ...

• D.C. Fiscal Policy Institute guru Ed Lazere warns that higher taxes are coming — in spite of election year rhetoric — because “nearly all of our major taxes — income, sales, commercial property and homeowner property — are lower today than 15 years ago.” ...

• Dennis Bourgault’s former pet store Doolittle’s across 7th Street S.E. from Eastern Market has bloomed anew into a boutique deli run by a familiar face, Tessa Zajac of the Eastern Market’s cheese stand. Zajac is teamed with Phyllis Marriott at Petite Gourmet, where a wide range of imported items plus soups and sandwiches are offered. …

• Jill Lawrence has made a living on the Hill as an organizer (Jill-of-All-Trades) who can straighten out your chaotic rat’s nest of an office. She’s now starting a computer referral group named LINKS to generate small-business development on the Hill. More? See www.champsdc.org. ...

• Residential parking is a good deal for Hill residents, who can leave their cars for weeks on the street if they’ve paid the $15 fee. But Mayor Anthony Williams (D) wants to up the ante — and in effect to fine owners of more than one car. He wants to raise the single-car fee to $25. If you own two, it’s $50 for the second. If you own three, it’s $100 for the third. ...

• Free for lunch? Dr. Frank Faragasso will lecture today from noon to 1 p.m. on the landmark sculptures at Lincoln Park. It’s free at 1300 Pennsylvania Ave. N.W., in the auditorium of the Woodrow Wilson Center, sponsored by the U.S. Capitol Historical Society. ...

• Julie Olson and Ed Peterman get public thanks with an anonymous sign at Garfield Park’s 3rd Street S.E. corner. The two worked tirelessly to get a big, rotting storage shed — belonging to the city, and an attractive nuisance — torn down. Now, if they could just get the chain-link fence torn down too.