DISTRICT DELAYS LARGE PART OF ITS RECYCLING PROGRAM

BUSINESSES, LANDLORDS GIVEN GRACE PERIOD

The District delayed a large part of its recycling program yesterday, giving companies and large apartment buildings until December to prepare but requiring single-family homeowners to begin separating their newspapers and yard waste for recycling Oct. 2.

The partial postponement of the new recycling law -- the region's most sweeping recycling measure -- reflected the District government's growing budgetary and management problems. At his monthly news conference, Mayor Marion Barry announced what amounted to a grace period for the business sector, saying that the District had not been given enough time to fully implement the ambitious project.

Barry also signaled the possibility of a second city budget deficit in two years, but said the financial problems are no reflection on his administration's management skill.

"Just because you don't balance the budget doesn't mean you're not managing it properly," Barry said, when asked whether the city would run a deficit for the fiscal year ending Sept. 30. "We're good money managers."

The mayor also used his news conference to apologize for an obscene gesture he made Sunday to a crowd gathered at Adams-Morgan Day festivities. {See story, Page D1.} Barry's announcement on recycling was the most recent indication of the problems the city is having implementing the recycling law. The law was approved in December by the D.C. Council and signed by the mayor in January. It passed congressional review in March.

Barry complained that his administration had been given little more than six months to implement the measure while most governments, he said, have had several years to develop recycling programs.

Barry said he told the council when it passed the measure that his administration would not be able to begin recycling as fast as the legislation required. "The bottom line is that the Department of Public Works is not ready for the entire recycling" program, Barry said yesterday.

Barry said that D.C. residents at about 100,000 single-family houses must begin to separate recyclable newspapers and yard waste next month, as required by the law.

But he said that businesses and apartment buildings, including condominiums and cooperatives, will have until Dec. 1 to comply. Residential units will separate newspapers and yard waste for recycling while businesses and government offices will have to separate all office paper and arrange for its recycling.

Although the law carries penalties -- $25 fines for residents and $400 for businesses -- for failure to separate recyclable trash, the District will not begin levying fines for noncompliance until January, Barry said.

Recycling advocates, long skeptical of the District's willingness or ability to set a recycling program in motion, reacted angrily to the partial postponement. Several organizations, including Greenpeace, said the mayor has failed to exert leadership on the issue and is, instead, going ahead with plans to build an environmentally unsafe trash-burning incinerator.

Federal officials said they will go ahead with plans to recycle at some agencies, starting Oct. 2, but will phase in recycling programs at other agencies during the next two months.

Business groups and apartment and office building owners expressed support for the delay. "We've been telling the District ever since it passed the law that it wouldn't work" without a longer phase-in period, said Don Slatton, executive vice president of the Apartment and Office Building Association.

Meanwhile, Barry and other city officials indicated that the city's financial situation remains grave, though the mayor declined to respond to questions about whether the city would run another deficit this year.

The city is having fiscal troubles because tax revenue has flattened out in recent years, while the costs of prisons, human services programs and a swelling D.C. bureaucracy have escalated. Last year, the city incurred a $14 million deficit, and D.C. Council members have warned that an even larger deficit is likely in this fiscal year.

The city has scrambled to sell excess property, levied new service taxes and refused to permit agencies to replace departing workers in an effort to bring the $3.4 billion budget into balance by Sept. 30.

Barry told reporters that the continuing budget crunch is responsible for staff shortages in the Department of Human Services, which does not have enough social workers to respond to child neglect cases, and the Bureau of Motor Vehicle Services, where staff vacancies have caused four-hour waits for license tags and registrations.

But while he pledged to hire the staff to reduce the waiting period at the motor vehicles agency, he said he was unsure about whether the city would hire more social workers needed to respond to the growing numbers of children born to drug-addicted mothers.

"I really don't know," Barry said. "What I try to do is do the broad policy directions, try to make the tough decisions about budget . . . and then it's up to the departments to try to figure out {how to manage} within those constraints."

When Barry was questioned further, City Administrator Carol B. Thompson took the microphone and said there is a plan to hire the social workers. But she did not indicate when they would come on board.

Barry said he has instructed the Department of Public Works to draw up a plan to reduce the waiting period to about an hour for licenses and registrations. He said the three- to four-hour wait is "unacceptable to Marion Barry."

Barry blasted the D.C. Council in general and Chairman David A. Clarke (D) in particular for what he described as its practice of mandating "across-the-board" spending reductions but refusing to specify which agencies should absorb the cuts. He said that was a "chicken way of getting the budget balanced," and pledged to veto any further across-the-board reductions.

Clarke and John A. Wilson, chairman of the council's Finance and Revenue Committee, lashed back with equal fervor, saying that Barry himself had proposed across-the-board cuts in personnel to help balance the budget in 1989.

"The mayor is the chief financial officer of the city," Clarke said, "and he wants to lay {his problems} off on someone else."

Articles appear as they were originally printed in The Washington Post and may not include subsequent corrections.