D.C.--DISTRICT OF CALAMITIES

By TAMMERLIN DRUMMOND.

At a time when most state governments are clamoring for more local control, the District of Columbia wants just the opposite--less. In an extraordinary press conference last week, Mayor Marion Barry asked the Federal Government to take over many of the city's most important services. Acknowledging for the first time publicly that the city is on the verge of bankruptcy, Barry said the District could no longer run itself and asked for $267 million in federal aid to pay off a staggering Medicaid bill.

Barry ordered deep cuts in social programs affecting everyone from pregnant women to the homeless. He plans to eliminate 4,000 jobs from the bloated, 42,000-worker bureaucracy. ``This is a small price to pay for the solvency and noncollapse of the District of Columbia,'' Barry said. ``We should have never taken on all these functions in the first place.''

Carrying out those functions used to be a point of pride. Since 1974, Washington, D.C., has enjoyed limited self-government under a system known as home rule. Congress, which gives the the District $650 million a year, allows it to function almost like a state. Washington oversees its own Medicaid programs, issues its own license plates and runs prisons. Many residents are fiercely supportive of home rule and suspicious of the Federal Government's involvement in District affairs.

Now, however, Congress may be called in to help right a fiscal and bureaucratic mess. Representative James T. Walsh of New York, chairman of the congressional subcommittee that oversees the District's financial affairs, said he has already contacted White House officials to hash out bailout scenarios, including the establishment of a board to take control of city finances. Walsh told that his congressional colleagues are leery of Barry's proposal because the District has failed to make good on promised cuts in the past. ``The Mayor has basically said we should give him $267 million and he'll get the books balanced, but Congress isn't going to do that. They did it four years ago, and it didn't work.''

According to consultants who have studied the D.C. government, Barry increased his base of supporters in the 1980s by expanding government jobs by the thousands and awarding contracts on a no-bid basis. By the time his third term ended with an arrest for cocaine possession, the city was barreling toward financial disaster. When Sharon Pratt Kelly took over in 1991, she inherited a $300 million deficit, and the city had a higher per-capita expenditure than any other American city--$9,516. She did little to improve the situation.

The District has also suffered from demographic factors. In the past 35 years, its population has declined 25%, to its current 570,000. Middle-class families have moved to suburbs in Maryland and Virginia, depriving the city of millions of dollars in property-tax revenues. For the past several months, the District has been so broke that officials have refused to pay hundreds of contractors for work they have already done. ``It's devastating,'' says Lori Kaplan, executive director of a Latino youth center to which the city has owed $275,000 since last October. ``We're their support system, and we are being wiped out.''

--By Tammerlin Drummond. Reported by Ann Blackman/Washington

With reporting by Ann Blackman/Washington