The emergency action on Tuesday aimed to reduce the burden on housing providers in crisis due to an influx of unpaid rent and delayed eviction cases.

ERAP is a government program that provides low-income residents with subsidized housing. People earning less than 40% of the area median income receive government assistance for overdue rent, late fees, and court costs for households facing evictions, according to the District of Columbia Department of Human Services.

Tweaks made to the program in 2022 prohibited landlords from evicting tenants who held unpaid rent if they had pending applications for ERAP funds and placed heavy restrictions on judges’ ability to weigh in on eviction appeals from landlords.

Council Chairman Phil Mendelson said this week that, under the ERAP policies, housing providers have run into a wall of financial challenges.

“What we are seeing is, on an aggregate basis, these affordable housing providers are carrying tens of millions of dollars in uncollected rent, and that is not sustainable,” Mendelson said.

With landlords losing millions of dollars in unpaid rent, the council’s emergency legislation reversed eviction policies, empowered courts to process eviction proceedings even if a tenant had a pending ERAP application, and allocated $80 million in Housing Production Trust Fund money as bridge loans to prevent subsidized affordable housing providers from declaring bankruptcy.

The council’s legislative action is a temporary measure. However, the mayor’s office is seeking permanent actions to remedy the housing fiasco.

“Comprehensive, permanent legislation and continued robust investment in the system will be needed to protect our investments and progress,” Mayor Muriel Bowser said Tuesday evening.

The district’s affordable housing market is facing a “looming crisis,” according to a June report published by the Apartment and Office Building Association of Metropolitan Washington. The report found that ERAP policies had put affordable housing providers “on the verge of financial insolvency.”

Earlier this spring, Laura Green Zeilinger, the director of the D.C. Department of Human Services, the agency that oversees ERAP, worried that the program was not a sustainable solution to the housing affordability crisis. She warned that the injection of federal funds into ERAP during the pandemic “created an expectation that [DHS] cannot meet.”

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“ERAP is never going to have a budget of $300 million, and we need to be honest with residents that they need to do everything they can to pay their rent,” Zeilinger said.

The ERAP announced this year that due to its funds being “exhausted,” it is closing the application portal for new beneficiaries for fiscal 2025.

D.C. public schoolteachers would get a raise and more planning time as part of a tentative agreement with the city on a new five-year union contract.

The tentative agreement, which both the Washington Teachers’ Union and Mayor Muriel Bowser announced Monday night, comes after over a year of negotiations. It still has to be ratified by the union’s members.

The union’s last contract took over three years, and the one that preceded it took about five, WTU president Jacqueline Pogue-Lyons said. She called the fact the most recent agreement took only about a year “something to celebrate.”

The contract includes a raise for the union’s members, but Pogue-Lyons didn’t elaborate on the structure, because members haven’t yet had a chance to review the terms of the agreement, she said. But many other protections are tied to working conditions for teachers, which Pogue-Lyons said are essential to attracting and retaining educators.

“There’s so much competition to get great and knowledgeable people,” Pogue Lyons said. “So we want to get them, but we also want to keep them. We don’t want a revolving door, because we feel the longer we keep our teachers, the better they become as educators.”

She added that the deal includes a memorandum of agreement (MOA) on achieving and keeping diversity in schools and an MOA on climate, which is tied to ensuring classrooms have enough ventilation and that air quality is good.

The agreement has details on controlling class size and will enable teachers to keep their vision and dental insurance, which they feared they might lose. It features more planning time, Pogue Lyons said, and the assurance that special education and other teachers won’t be pulled out of their classrooms to perform other duties.

“When those things happen, we’re not able to meet the needs of the students that were tasked to teach, especially our most vulnerable population,” Pogue Lyons said.

In a joint statement, Pogue-Lyons, Bowser and Chancellor Lewis Ferebee said the agreement “shows what can be achieved when we work together with a common goal of putting students first. With this agreement, we are reaffirming our commitment to investing in our young people and making D.C. the number one city for teachers.”

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WASHINGTON – The STEER Act, a D.C. law aimed at road safety passed earlier this year, had components go into effect on October 1. 

Among some of the changes: it’ll create the opportunity to add speed restrictions to vehicles for drivers who violate D.C. traffic laws. It’ll also ensure that if someone has their car stolen and the plate racks up tickets, that victim won’t have to pay the fines.

But the biggest change the STEER Act creates: going after out-of-state drivers who rack up huge fines.

If a traffic camera catches a D.C. resident, that person must pay the fine to renew their registration in the District.

But out-of-state drivers don’t have to pay their D.C. fine to renew wherever they live.

The impact of this: some out-of-state drivers aren’t as cautious driving around D-C.

According to data provided by the Department of Public Works, the overwhelming majority of out-of-state plates getting citations in the District are in Maryland and Virginia.

In Fiscal Year 2022, those plates got 757,268 citations totaling $151,250,000 in unpaid fines. In 2023, 808,933 citations totaling $160,700,000 in unpaid fines.

D.C. resident Katherine Eyster tells FOX 5 she thinks this is a fairness and safety issue: It’s unfair that D.C. residents have to pay, and she sees out-of-state drivers who aren’t careful on D.C. streets.

“It’s certainly tough to say, but when you look at the numbers and that some of these drivers, we’re not talking about folks who are distracted here and there, we’re talking about folks who are dangerous and shouldn’t be on the road. And so, hopefully that makes a difference,” Eyster said.           

This new law now allows the D.C. Attorney General’s Office to sue these out-of-state plate owners in D.C. Court, get a judgment, then try and enforce that judgment in the state where the plate owner is registered.

Council Member Charles Allen heads the Council’s Transportation Committee. He says this bill adds teeth to D.C.’s traffic enforcement.

“It’s important, I think, to send that strong signal that the Attorney General is going to be coming after you, that we are going to make sure we put teeth into that reckless driving and making sure we get those drivers, hold them accountable, and get them off our streets,” Allen said.

FOX 5 has learned the Attorney General’s Office will add two attorneys whose full-time jobs will be filing these suits in D.C. to secure these judgments.

That sounds like a small number given the number of unpaid citations, but Allen thinks this will be a key deterrent and important tool.

“I think we will see a significant impact and I think it will result in safer streets. Let’s not kid ourselves that one law is going to magically change it all, you have to have better engineering, you have to build safer streets and intersections, we have to help educate drivers to make sure they’re learning and driving more safely. But we have to have enforcement, and this legislation, this law, is going to help improve enforcement,” Allen said.