Will three new County Executives boost Baltimore's standing in the region?

Nothing makes people yawn faster than mention of the word regionalism. Local politics isn't exciting to everybody anyway, and local policy extrapolated to a larger place even less. Those who at least understand what regionalism means might say, "Yeah, sure, maybe in Portland or Minneapolis, but not here. (Portland has the only elected regional government in the country, Minneapolis-St Paul is widely seen as a success story of regionalism.) Will the results of the recent mid-term elections make a difference in the Baltimore region?

The Baltimore region represented in the Baltimore Metropolitan Council

Baltimore's regional government, the Baltimore Metropolitan Council, has been so much on snooze that its website has been saying "under construction" for month and finding anything there is more miss than hit. More miss than hit is also true for the various initiatives and ongoing policies of the BMC, a body that consists of Baltimore City, the City of Annapolis and Baltimore, Harford, Anne Arundel and Carroll counties.

The Baltimore Metropolitan Council (BMC) is a nonprofit organization that works with the region’s elected executives to identify mutual interests and develop collaborative strategies, plans and programs that will help improve the quality of life and economic vitality. BMC is a resource for the region. (Facebook page)

Needless to say, the interests of those members hardly ever align. The slowest and most reluctant thinker always determines the speed of this train, and when it came to regional collaboration and solving metropolitan issues, deeply conservative Carroll was usually activating the brakes.

The new Howard County Exec Calvin Ball

But lately there has been whispers of hope: Anne Arundel, Howard and Baltimore Counties each elected a  relatively young new face, Steuart Pittman (57), Calvin Ball (43) and John Olszewski (36), all Democrats and all interested in collaboration. Could it be that the region finally is moving closer together? That they truly realize that most local issues expand way beyond the respective jurisdictional boundaries?

Most challenges, after all, span multiple jurisdictions. Carbon emissions don’t stop at city borders. Workers look for housing and jobs, consumers buy groceries and other goods, and parents seek out schools for their children across city, county, and even state lines. Cities and suburbs are deeply interconnected and thus need each other to tackle the major issues of our time. The best local climate change plans will reflect regional commuting patterns and industry activities, just as the most effective economic strategies will connect neighborhoods to broader regional opportunities.(Brookings)

In full realization that urbanization and international competition require a look at metropolitan areas and not arbitrary lines on a map, the United States Office of Management and Budget (OMB) has long created the Baltimore metropolitan statistical area (MSA), an area of a 2,600 square miles slightly under 3 million people. (The MSA includes Queen Anne's County). This puts the Baltimore MSA nationally on rank 28, behind Tampa, Denver and St Louis but ahead of Portland, Pittsburgh, Cincinnati Cleveland and Austin.

Surprise winner: AA County Executive Steuart
Pittman

Water, sewer, traffic, electricity, are all obviously part of a regional system and require regional coordination. But wouldn't this mean that planning, land preservation, transit and affordable housing (to just name a few) also need to be coordinated? Wouldn't that be a particular obligation for Baltimore County and Baltimore City which hold each other in this peculiarly tight embrace that defies all planning logic?

The thing is, that not even water is truly regionally planned these days even though it has a regional distribution, pipe, and reservoir system.  Baltimore County plans, designs and builds its own water lines, the City only maintains them. The City really doesn't have a say about the design, composition, or development of new subdivisions and their pipes. In matters of stormwater the two jurisdictions are entirely uncoordinated, even though stormwater freely flows from Baltimore County into Baltimore City, following the general contours of the watershed. The City had no say when the County abolished its impact fees for run-off. (Which people who don't understand stormwater management called the "rain-tax", a term that completely misunderstands the importance of the issue).

Of course, transportation coordination is already required by federal law which mandates the creation of metropolitan planning organizations. Our's is the Baltimore Regional Transportation Board (BRTB) which sits inside the BMC. (Regional transportation planning has occurred even before it was a federal mandate). But the entire regional alphabet soup didn't prevent the State Secretary from single-handedly cancelling the Red Line and with it the 2002 metro area rail plan.and that he channels all transit money into rural roads or MDOT puts its capital budget together based on their "road show" in which individual local jurisdictions tell them what they want. Maryland where transit is largely managed by the state, desperately needs local government to step up their game, so that they don't need 4 years to recover from a strike like the cancellation of the $2.9 billion Red Line.  To create a stronger counter force the General Assembly last year voted to require the creation of a new regional transit plan which will be juggled between MDOT/MTA and BMC and needs to be completed by Oct 1, 2020. The plan represents an opportunity for the members of BMC to engage in transit and provide meaningful contributions.

BMC put out a pretty good document, when it organized the Regional Opportunity Collaborative in 2015 based on rich regional data mining. Everybody connected it to the unrest in the spring of the same year and vowed that the opportunity document  should not sit on a shelf. Which is, of course, exactly what happened.

Opportunity mapping grows out of the reality that where one lives heavily influences one’s social, economic, and health prospects. This use of non-traditional housing data provides a more holistic understanding of a community’s health. We used a range of indicators related to education, housing and neighborhood quality, employment, public health and safety, and transportation to rank the region’s census tracts in quintiles (each one-fifth of the region) from highest opportunity to lowest opportunity. (Opportunity Collaborative Report)

The true metro area includes two core cities

The opportunity report should be required study for all three new executives so they can glance from it some immediate tasks. They all understand that the region will only be strong through collaboration and coordination with a meaningful division of labor and synergy between the strengths of each jurisdiction and a cooperative approach to addressing the weaknesses.

All three executives and the Mayor of Baltimore understand that the region can't be strong if the core, the largest city and the still largest employment center continuous to ail. Furthermore, the times when the suburbs could thrive on the simple notion that they were not the city (i.e. a place to flee to, a notion in good part driven by racism) are over. The so-called "inner ring suburbs" are no longer places of prosperity and homogeneity and their prospect for the future may be more complicated than those of the City since those suburbs mostly lack the parks and cultural institutions which can make a city attractive.

Opportunity distribution in the region (darker means
more opportunity)

An increasing number of suburban residents now live in poverty, including in neighborhoods with concentrated poverty and racial segregation. (Brookings)

Things become even more complex once one understands that the Baltimore region cannot be understood without the Washington region. Coordination between the two regions is still rare, even though MTA and MDOT manage transportation in a large part of both regions.

Johnny Olszewski has made regional collaboration a big part of his campaign. At several events he stood side by side with Baltimore's Mayor Catherine Pugh. One has to see if the three new Executives and the Mayor will be able to lift the BMC out of its slumber and begin the kind of collaboration that is needed pretty much across the board of everything for which local government is responsible.
Such an awakening would be good for the City but aslo essential for each of the counties.

Klaus Philipsen, FAIA


Brookings: A modern case for regional collaboration