The Washington Capitals and Wizards, along with D.C. officials, unveiled a monumental reversal last week when they announced the teams wouldn't be leaving for Virginia after all. With that came the promise of $515 million from D.C. to Monumental Sports, the company that owns the teams.
If you're a D.C. taxpayer, that's your money – and a lot of it.
The D.C. Council is set to vote on the deal Tuesday without a public hearing or meeting, although Council Chairman Phil Mendelson has asked residents to email or stop by to share what they think. There’s been no formal way for taxpayers to weigh in on how their money should be spent when it comes to the downtown arena.
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Aside from what we've already reported, the public still doesn't know the finer details of this deal. But D.C.'s elected leaders do, because they heard about them in a meeting the public had no idea about.
Last Wednesday, Mayor Muriel Bowser, Monumental Sports majority owner Ted Leonsis and most members of the D.C. Council packed inside Capital One Arena to announce the teams were staying in the District. This was a big celebration, and maybe that was warranted.
But just hours before, Mendelson told Council members he wanted to see them in his office at 1:30 p.m. that day, the News4 I-Team has learned. There was no public notice of that meeting, or "gathering," as he called it.
A majority of Council members showed up — D.C.'s Open Meetings Act calls that a quorum. Inside Mendelson's office at the Wilson Building, the Council's budget director briefed them on the deal about to be announced, Mendelson told us Monday. At some point, a deputy mayor showed up.
Mendelson said they didn’t vote on the deal but acknowledged they "gathered information and discussed" it.
"Gather information" and "discuss" are words taken right out of the D.C. Open Meetings Act, designed to make sure D.C. residents know "full and complete information regarding the affairs of government and the actions of those who represent them," according to that law's own wording.
On Monday, Mendelson said he saw no issue handling the matter behind closed doors and didn't see it as a violation of open meetings laws.
"These were highly confidential negotiations," Mendelson said. "To have notice for a gathering — a gathering, not a meeting — to discuss something that, to put in other words, is secret, doesn’t work."
While the D.C. Council can meet in private, they have to tell the public before they do so, and they have to vote to close the doors. Virginia lawmakers did that before they privately discussed and voted on their own arena offer.
But the penalty for violating the Open Meetings Act in D.C. is ... nothing.
The Council made the law but didn't put a penalty in it. There is a fine for repeatedly violating it and another prong to overturn votes taken in private, but getting together to discuss how to spend half a billion of your dollars — no penalty there.
We called the District's Office of Open Government, which oversees these rules, but we have not yet heard back.
The Council is expected to vote on the deal Tuesday morning.
