In the days leading up to the D.C. Council’s Nov. 4 legislative meeting, council committees conducted hearings on: the prospect of an emergency juvenile curfew extension and the post-surge conduct of Metropolitan Police Department (MPD) officers working alongside federal agents.
The feedback collected from those hearings, along with Halloween weekend events in Navy Yard and D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser’s declaration of a limited curfew, informed actions taken by the council during its most recent convening. This edition of The Collins Council Report highlights the conversation around the juvenile curfew extension and the highly coveted child tax credit.
Be on the lookout for future reporting on the Office of the State Superintendent of Education’s Department of Transportation — the subject of a recent council Committee of the Whole hearing.
The Emergency Juvenile Curfew Passes, but Calls Persist for Youth Spaces and Programming
Following Mayor Bowser’s declaration of a “limited juvenile curfew,” and her administration’s introduction of permanent curfew legislation, the council approved the Juvenile Curfew Second Emergency Amendment Act and an accompanying declaration.
D.C. Council members Robert White (D-At large), Brianne Nadeau (D-Ward 1), Janeese Lewis George (D-Ward 4) and Trayon White (D-Ward 8) voted in opposition to both bills. Lewis George warned against extending the emergency curfew amid Metropolitan Police Department’s (MPD) cooperation with federal law enforcement agencies unencumbered by local laws and regulations.
“What I am fearful of is what we have seen on the ground, which is racial profiling that our young people are facing, especially our young Black and brown youth,” Lewis George told her colleagues on Tuesday. “Being targeted while traveling to and from school, on their way from sports practices, coming back from visits to aunts, uncles and grandparents, and I think we owe ourselves in this moment to make a decision on whether we can do what we can do to protect them.”
This temporary legislation would, once again, allow the mayor to extend juvenile curfew hours in the District and the police chief to designate areas of D.C. as extended juvenile curfew zones, all while applying the curfew law to 17-year-olds. In early December, the council’s Committee on Judiciary and Public Safety is scheduled to conduct a hearing around the permanent juvenile curfew legislation.
Since the Oct. 5 expiration of the first juvenile curfew emergency, local authorities have reported not only more violent youth gatherings in the city’s commercial districts and school sporting events, but the promotion of mass youth meet-ups on social media platforms. On Halloween night, during what later compelled Bowser to declare the limited juvenile curfew, local and federal law enforcement detained several young people who converged on, and fought at, Navy Yard.
On the day before Halloween, the council’s Committee on the Judiciary and Public Safety conducted a public hearing about the emergency juvenile curfew. Well before dozens of community members and elected officials testified before D.C. Councilmember Brooke Pinto (D-Ward 2), MPD Chief Pamela Smith and Lindsey Appiah, deputy mayor for public safety and the judiciary, expressed their support for the extension, and permanence, of emergency juvenile curfew powers.
A day later, while speaking with The Informer, Appiah told The Informer that young people, and all D.C. residents for that matter, deserve a law that be applied consistently for youth.
“We had seven juvenile curfew zones throughout the summer, which accounts for maybe one a weekend,” Appiah told The Informer. “Hopefully once the behaviors curve, we don’t have to use them at all, but we don’t want to get behind where it’s like we don’t have the tool because an emergency is gone, and now we’re engaged in a space where we’re being inconsistent with our young people.”
As Appiah recounted, she’s engaged council members in recent weeks about the emergency juvenile curfew extension. Though she agreed that youth need resources and extracurriculars, Appiah pointed out that the curfew is one of several strategies to keep young people out of harm’s way.
She went on to question what, if any, alternatives the council had to suggest.
“Those are ongoing conversations that we’re having with many of the members— the ones who are willing to engage,” Appiah told The Informer. “There are some [for] who this will never be a tool that they believe in. Maybe those conversations are hard[er], but we’d like to hear from them. What do you think needs to be done? Because nothing isn’t a solution.”
Though she voted in support of the emergency juvenile curfew extension, D.C. Councilmember Christina Henderson (I-At large) likened the tool, when used alone, to whack-a-mole. While on the dais, she implored the Executive Office of the Mayor, and especially the Office of the Deputy Mayor for Public Safety and Justice, to utilize its grant funding power in support of community organizations and other entities currently on the ground with youth.
“For the last few budgets, I’ve been asking the mayor to include additional funding to keep [D.C public school] buildings open later and fund more true after-school clubs outside of just relying on sports,” Henderson said. “My challenge to the executive is that when they come back for the permanent…that there needs to be a plan. In fact, don’t wait that long.”
Other council members posited alternatives to a curfew that they said would allow young people to congregate safely. Ward Councilmember White of Ward 8 suggested that the large field in Navy Yard be turned into an outdoor movie theater and activation site. Soon after, At-large D.C. Councilmember White referred to a bevy of legislation, saying that he would vote for a curfew bill that incorporates those elements.
“If it created late-night safe spaces and hot spots, gyms and rec centers with mentors with relatable experience that encouraged teens to engage,” White said. “If it launched a universal mentorship program available to every student, which I’ve been working to get more support for. If it created a joint building trades union apprenticeship program with D.C. public schools so that these students understood that we heard them when they say they want to make money. If it expanded mental health availability to employ the master’s and social work graduates from the UDC tuition-free program I created.”
D.C. Councilmember Zachary Parker (D-Ward 5) took matters a bit more broadly when he called for a “youth agenda” that holistically addresses issues affecting D.C.’s youngest residents.
“I think it’s an opportunity for the council to work hand in hand with the executive as the executive is likely preparing for their Fiscal Year 2027 budget,” Parker said on Tuesday. “I would like to see a robust suite of program offerings and outreach to our young people. A curfew cannot be the long-term solution to meet our young people’s needs.”
The Council, Once Again, Secures the Child Tax Credit
On Tuesday, the council unanimously approved the D.C. Income and Franchise Tax Conformity and Revision Emergency Amendment Act of 2025 as part of an effort to decouple the District from more than a dozen federal tax code revisions approved in what President Donald J. Trump refers to as One Big, Beautiful Bill.
The legislative body would carry out this action after overwhelmingly approving an amendment by D.C. Councilmembers Parker and Matt Frumin (D-Ward 3) that, with less than half of the $670 million in anticipated revenue, re-establishes the D.C. child tax credit for the 2026 tax year and the District’s 100% match of federal earned income tax credits for the 2025 tax year.
“Tax credits are the most efficient method of getting relief to residents. There is extremely little overhead, and the earned income tax credit and child tax credit represent cash in neighbors’ pockets, cash that goes right back into the economic activity of the District without any agency or contractor taking a cut,” Parker said. “What’s more, the earned income tax credit match acceleration puts money in the pockets of struggling residents with a near-immediate effect. We can’t miss this opportunity at a time when we are seeing alarming rates of child poverty in the district, including more amongst a third of children in Ward 7 and 8.”
Early on in deliberations, the declaration version of Parker and Frumin’s amendment, co-introduced with seven council members, passed with Mendelson and Independent At-large D.C. Councilmembers Kenyan McDuffie and Henderson voting in opposition.
The Parker-Frumin amendment, as it originally stood, also included a provision protecting District seniors from municipal bond taxation changes. McDuffie questioned the degree to which that version of the amendment would help low-income families, and not the District’s wealthiest residents. With the support of six council members, he would advance an amendment removing that provision from the Parker-Frumin amendment.
“This is a giveaway to some of the wealthiest people in our city,” McDuffie said about the original version of the Parker-Frumin amendment. “It’s not about saving on your average senior money. It’s not about middle-income seniors. It’s money that goes to some of the richest people in our city, and the amendment incentivizes District residents to make retirement investments in Maryland and Virginia on an ongoing basis.”
Earlier in the legislative meeting, Mendelson circulated an amendment striking all portions of Parker and Frumin’s amendment, except for that dealing with earned income tax credit. The council struck down that amendment, with only McDuffie and D.C. Councilmember Wendell Felder (D-Ward 7) voting to advance Mendelson’s amendment.
Mendelson spent much of his time arguing that, given the council’s long list of unfulfilled budget priorities, District residents wouldn’t benefit from an amendment that, according to Mendelson, widens a budget gap that forced the executive to narrow Medicaid eligibility and avoid funding programs throughout the entire four-year plan.
“There were a lot of asks from council members this year that we were not able to fund in housing, in child care, in energy, in the environment, sustainable energy, in an environment, Access to Justice,” Mendelson said. “It’s going to happen with the next budget because it’s happened with every budget that there’s not enough money that we want for housing, for ERAP, for whatever…But then we know as well huge spending pressures, which are probably about $800 million between just a normal growth of 3% in the budget, plus the WMATA, which will be an additional $171 million, plus maintaining the UPSFF funding for schools, which the mayor and the financial plan cuts.”
Earlier this year, Mayor Bowser submitted a Fiscal Year 2026 budget proposal that removed the previously approved child tax credit. The council would later fall short in recouping that loss during budget season deliberations. Around that time, on July 4, Trump signed into law the legislation known as the One Big Beautiful Bill — which includes provisions cancelling out taxes on tips and overtimes, and a full expensing of domestic research and experimental expenditures, all of which, according to Mendelson, wouldn’t bode well for this locality.
Despite what her colleagues saw as a necessary move, Henderson said she had much deeper concerns about the council’s use — or misuse — of the legislative process. On Tuesday, shortly before voting “present” on the D.C. Income and Franchise Tax Conformity and Revision Emergency Amendment Act of 2025, she criticized what she called the council’s penchant for advancing legislation on an emergency basis, rather than scrutinizing a bill through conventional channels.
“It is not to say that any of these policy things are not important, and there is a process that could be had that other state legislatures around the country are currently doing, which is their governor sending them a supplemental budget, them debating the issues, and then them prioritizing that,” Henderson said. “There is nothing in the code or law that says that the mayor has to wait until she sends the FY27 budget in order to send a supplemental budget, and instead of us asking for that so we can address some of these other issues, we’re doing this in a piecemeal fashion where we’re putting one on top of the other.”