DISTRICT OF CALAMITY

When the story of the decline of Washington is written, historians may decide that its beleaguered citizens finally snapped on the day the city decided to seek out and fine homeowners who failed to rake leaves from the public space in front of their houses. The unraked-leaves strike force emerged this month after a winter of discontent, when the city with one of the nation's highest tax rates ran out of money and stopped providing some basic services. The streets are almost never clean (grit and cigarette butts blow up from littered gutters on K Street), only 40 of the 104 garbage trucks function, and during the winter's snowstorms some city buses made up their routes according to which streets were passable. (Only 1 in 3 plows worked.) Now that it's spring, there are so many deep, unrepaired potholes that some neighbors have banded together to patch their own; others have resorted to throwing 25-lb. bags of mulch into them and, in the neighborhood of Kalorama, a mattress.

Signs of breakdown are all around. At one time, 1,500 traffic signals were on the blink because the city had failed to pay its electricity bill. Police officers who wanted their cars to run gassed up and made repairs themselves. Even then, the cops were not investigating anything but the worst crimes. Residents who call 911 sometimes end up with just a file number for insurance purposes. Because the water-treatment plant is inadequate, the District has issued several advisories in the past year cautioning residents to boil water before drinking it. The city has shut down two fire companies in the past 18 months, and three more are targeted to close. Only 12 of the department's 16 ladder trucks are operating.

By April of last year, the city was in such bad condition, with more than $3 billion in long-term debt, that the President signed legislation creating a financial-control board to impose some discipline. Headed by former Federal Reserve Board member Andrew Brimmer, the new board set out to end the city's worst fiscal excesses--noncompetitive bids, deficit budgeting, a bloated work force whose ranks include 40,000, or 1 out of 9 adults in the District--while figuring out how to pay overdue bills and eventually refinance the district's $379 million current deficit. But the board ran into a recalcitrant Mayor Marion Barry, who was initially reluctant to make any significant cuts. In his "State of the City" address last January, Barry blamed "District-bashers" for the city's near bankruptcy. "Negative, biased publicity," he said, "has cost D.C. more jobs and destroyed more economic-development possibilities than any other single force."

Except for the force many residents would name: the mayor himself. For months he snubbed the board, refused to provide it with basic financial data and called allegations of featherbedding a "big lie." He joined a protest by students at the University of the District of Columbia, who tied up traffic on Connecticut Avenue for 14 hours after hearing that their funds might be cut. His standing fell last week when it was disclosed that he had had a $20,000 security fence built around the mayor's residence under a no-bid contract by a former member of his staff.