Thursday, October 16, 2025
Ward 2 Council member Brooke Pinto met with business owners and residents at the Oct. 9 Georgetown Main Street Coffee & Conversation at 1310 Kitchen & Bar. Pinto offered details on her work on the Council and was wide-ranging in her discussion about local Washington, D.C. Below are selections from Pinto’s talk at the Main Street event.
On Helping Small Businesses
“One of the main reasons I ran for office was to support our small business community here in D.C., because I had met with so many small businesses I was at the D.C. Attorney General’s office who told me how challenging it was to just pursue their dream to get into business, to deal with licensing, to pay all the taxes, deal with the endorsement fees. And I thought that was really wrong. We as a city should be making it as easy as possible to conduct your business so that you can do what you do best. And so one of the very first laws that I wrote was called the BEST Act looked at our entire business licensing licensing system, and rewrote the entire thing. We went from 111 business categories to 10. We got rid of all the endorsement fees. We waived taxes for our smallest businesses, that took over a year to go through the committee process and to solicit input and finally get passed. It then took another year to get funded, and as of last week, it is now the new law of the land of D.C.
“If you’re looking to expand your business or encouraging others to get into business, it should be much easier, much more cost effective. Our whole goal is that you should’t have to hire a lawyer or an expediter or someone who knows how to do this. You should just be able to figure it out very easily online. So, I’m very excited about that, as at the beginning of this fiscal year, which was October 1, last week, the beginning of the fiscal year, also means that all of the budget investments that we worked together to fight for last year now come to fruition. We have expanded a program that I started years ago was to incentivize the conversion of office buildings to housing through tax abatements, and I heard from some Georgetown properties last year — ‘Hey, we’d really like to benefit from this program as well, not just downtown.’ And so we’ve expanded the boundaries of that program. Another fund that worked on to bring family attractions downtown, also expanding to Georgetown, so that if you’re in a business that is engaged in anything that really brings people and families to your your location that should be qualifying for those types of grants. And so we’re really excited about that again, to make sure that the government is as strong a partner as possible, so that you all can do what what you do best.”
On Crime & Public Safety
“As some of you know, I also chair the Council’s committee on judiciary and public safety, and so I’m still laser focused on making sure that every person and business and person who works here or visits here can be safe. I think safety is fundamental to accomplishing anything else we want to do in this city. We’ve made a lot of progress over the last couple of years. I moved forward a bill called Secure DC, the largest public safety package in our city’s history that had 100 different interventions in it. Just this summer, I moved forward another version of a public safety bill that had dozens of additional things that we did for safety grants and improvements, call center getting more officers in the door. Since the passage of those two bills, we’ve seen a reduction in violent crime by 50 percent.
“I also want to note that Georgetown is really the leader when it comes to a program that we worked with Main Street and the BID to start, which is for safety grants. For commercial corridors, [it is] to make sure that we have supplementation to the police department, to have more eyes and ears on the ground, and to tie in video systems that have that are connected with our businesses, to our real-time crime center that we just got up and running about a year and a half ago. And so you all are really the leader when it comes to being able to help solve those crimes quickly and prevent some of the snatch-and-grab break-ins that we were seeing and that are just not acceptable in our community.”
On ICE Activity
“We have had ICE agents who have no accountability to our local government, roaming our streets, many times without any insignia on what they’re wearing, sometimes covering their faces. I know it’s led to a lot of fear and people coming to work or taking their kids to school. We’ve had families be separated and we haven’t been able to find them, even when I have tried to track where people are going. It is a very dystopian situation that we’re seeing when it comes to our immigration enforcement, and it has been very scary. We had a 30-day period where the White House tried to federalize our police department. We won in court to say that our local police department is still run by Chief Pamela Smith and still reports to Mayor Bowser, but the president and the federal government were able to call on services of MPD for that period of 30 days.
“That period is now over. One of our biggest goals during that period was to get to day 31 without Congress extending that emergency. And so that’s why I spent pretty much every day of those 30 days working with Congress members to articulate to them what we do that we’re serious when it comes to public safety, but those options are not going to help us, and so we’re glad that we got through that period. There are still federal agents who, before this administration, are a part of our public safety ecosystem. So, these are like ATF who help with gun enforcement, our FBI, and they, too, have had staffing challenges like our local police department has, and so if you see federal agents with our local police department, that is still happening, and that was happening before this administration. So, it’s something I’m paying a close eye to because, of course, we want to solve crime. We want to make sure that federal partners are pursuing warrants and they have people out for arrest, but we want to make sure that we’re doing it in accordance with our local laws, protecting people’s rights, that everything is captured on body-worn camera, and that we’re not participating in the immigration enforcement done in a way that that we really can’t track where people are going. So, that’s that’s some of the complicated balance going on right now that you may see in our communities.
On a Prosperous D.C.
“I’m working now on a legislative package that’s really all aimed at economic prosperity, prosperity for our residents and prosperity for our businesses. We’re looking at a lot of different avenues, whether that’s jobs pipeline, to get people trained in certain different fields and then go work for D.C. businesses. We’re working on a youth jobs app so that our young people can sign up for several hours a week to get paying jobs in our city. And so I hope that as our local small business community, you all can be great partners in that effort to think about how we can support your businesses and how you can be a part of our solutions to help provide D.C. residents more economic opportunities. I think there’s a real chance for win-wins here, and so we’d love to partner with you all on that mission.”
On Police Staffing
“Our [Metropolitan Police] Department is at a 50-year staffing low. I think we need to be at at least 4,000 officers. Right now, we have 3,187 officers, and that creates a humongous strain on the department. We have so much overtime for our department that it amounts to 500 positions in the money that we’re spending on overtime, and it also, of course, makes our officers exhausted … Part of what we did with Secure DC is look at the policy environment of being a police officer, making it attractive to be a police officer, making sure that we are setting them up for success in all that we do. …
“So, that we did dozens of things … to make being a police officer more attractive. Then, we looked at the front end of how to get more officers in the door. And so in the budget, I added bonuses for officers, tuition assistance, housing assistance. We’re working now with the mayor to provide or take home cars to our officers. That’s a big thing that many of our officers had asked for.
“Two weeks ago, I passed a law to increase officer pay by 13 percent. The starting salary was $63,000 a year. It’s now $75,000 a year, which makes us much more competitive in the region. There’s a new class of 17 officers starting next week who are going to benefit from that raise, and they’re very excited. And so we’re going to keep getting more officers in the door on the front end.
“And now what I’m looking at is that is the tail end, which is, how can we make sure that we retain our officers and that they don’t leave the force? And so I have several bills that are doing this that I’m hoping get passed this fall. We’ve already introduced them and have had hearings on them. One of them is called DROP [Deferred Retirement Option Program] … which is for our police department and our firefighters, and it says that if you’re at retirement age, you can earn your retirement benefits but still stay on the force for three years. And it’s one of those great things that cost the city almost no money, because we would have to backfill for those positions anyways. But we’re saying we recognize the value of your contribution, of your public service and of your seniority, and we want you to stay on the force. And so we’re really excited about that, to hopefully have several 100 of our officers and firefighters be able to stay on the force. The other thing that I moved on Tuesday, but it had to be delayed for two more weeks because of a CFO problem, was getting rid of the mandatory retirement age. I believer that right now the mandatory retirement age for fire and police is 60 years old. That’s pretty young, in my view. But, more importantly than that, we should be giving discretion to the chiefs to figure out their own staffing if somebody does get to a point in their lives where they might have less physical dexterity.”
On Georgetown
“I’ll end with a really positive note that Georgetown last year had 12 million visitors, more than any other neighborhood in all of D.C. by far, not even a close second. And so you all should be really proud of that, and we’re going to keep it going this year. We’ve got America’s 250 next summer, and I just want to flag that now, because I think this is an opportunity for us as a city to lean in that this is our country, too. We’re proud of this country, and there’s a lot that we can showcase for Georgetown and for D.C. that should be celebrated as a part of that milestone for our country. So, I just want everyone to start thinking about that now, how we can be a part of that with your business and supporting our visitors to demonstrate what D.C. is really all about in this moment when there are a lot of eyes on us.
“So, thank you for all you do. It’s my privilege to get to work with you all, and I hope you have a great first official fall day.”