Should Baltimore's Next Mayor be weaker?

With the latest Baltimore quagmire the phrase "moving the city forward", a favorite cliche for decades, has received new currency. It conjures up shoulders to a wagon stuck in the mud on the way  towards freedom, exploration and riches. In that image forward is clearly defined. It had one direction: West.

Shoulder to the wheel: Baltimore moving forward

Unfortunately, neither the country as a whole nor the city of Baltimore have this type of consensus about where "forward" should take us.  The articles on this blog have tried for a long time to sort out what "forward" could mean, from , planning, urban design to transportation, governance and "smartness".

Example: Should the Baltimore mayor have less power? Be paired with a City Administrator? Be subjected to recalls by the City Council? All ideas floated by council members in various bills submitted for debate. Instead of offering my own assessment, I will reprint here with his permission a
little essay by Dan Sparaco which I found in my inbox yesterday.  Dan Sparaco was a Deputy Mayor under Stephanie Rawlings Blake, so he knows the Office of Mayor from the inside.

I put his arguments against curtailing mayoral power up here as a guest contribution and for discussion. It is one of a series of essays Dan wrote under the title B'more Now:

Bmore Now: Who's in charge here?

By Dan Sparaco

Dan Sparaco

Can you imagine Martin O’Malley or Sheila Dixon not wanting responsibility for “day-to-day operations of the City?”
I can’t.
Say what you will about either one of them, but when they were mayor, we knew who was in charge.
Yet days ago, a City Council bill was introduced that would: 
delete the language that says the mayor “shall have general supervision over all municipal officers and agencies,”take away the mayor’s power “to remove at pleasure all municipal officers,” andgive executive power to a City Administrator who would control the budget, get paid more money than the mayor, and who the mayor couldn’t remove without a majority vote from the City Council.
A less accountable mayor is not the answer to our problems.
In fact, this sounds like we’ve given up on having a good mayor ever again.
With a mayor on the verge of resignation it’s hard not to feel that way.
But adding another box to the org chart does not create a better government, or answer the question of leadership.
We have a Board of Estimates that approved the Healthy Holly contracts. We have a Comptroller who is supposed to be responsible for fiscal audits who forced out the city auditor. We have a part-time City Council. And we have an Office of the Council President designed mostly for someone to inherit the top job – as three of the last four mayors have done.
Sure, other counties have a Chief Administrative Officer, but there’s a big difference – they don’t have any filler:

In Montgomery and Prince George’s, there’s no doubt who’s in charge – the CAO works at the pleasure of the County Executive, who doesn’t need Council permission to replace them.
Meanwhile, Baltimore County shows the downside to a “non-political” administrative officer. Their new County Executive created a commission that just released a report, finding that their budget process is “highly centralized and has traditionally vested disproportionate power in the hands of the County’s administrative officer and a small staff in the budget office,” creating a system that “lacks transparency, stifles innovation, and discourages accountability.”
Baltimore City once had similar problems, when its own budget process was driven by finance directors like Charles Benton or Ed Gallagher, who drafted the city’s budget like the man behind the curtain in Oz.
The problem the city has today isn’t an all-powerful mayor, but a system that begins and ends with a Board of Estimates created in the 19th Century. All of our peers seem capable of running a government without one.
Real change starts with looking to places like PG and MoCo, and looking to the reforms already made by cities like Detroit and Seattle and New York.
Adding a “city administrator” to a broken system isn’t real change, and tinkering with the budget process within that broken system isn’t either.
There’s nothing wrong with giving our City Council more say in the budget process, as is the case in MoCo or Prince George’s.
But there’s no point in making the changes introduced this week to our City Council while leaving the rest of the dysfunction in place. Those changes give our City Council more power over the budget than other County Councils have, but then take away the mayor’s line item veto, for no good reason. 
There’s no need to get even deeper into the weeds. What we need to do is stop tinkering with something that needs a total overhaul.
Sure, “Baltimore is the only jurisdiction in the region that does not have a chief administrator.” But look around. Is that the real difference?
The real difference between the city and its peer jurisdictions is a pointless Office of the Comptroller, an unaccountable Office of the Council President, and a Board of Estimates that encourages corruption.
And there’s one more difference. Some of our peers have a full time Council that not only picks its own chairperson or speaker, but has at-large members:

What we need is a fresh start. A reset.
--Dan

The reprint here isn't an endorsement of the person (whatever his plans are) nor of his assessment of all aspects of Baltimore. For example,  "the fresh start" and "the reset" are cliches as much as "moving forward". Baltimore has been in "reset" mode for pretty much the entire time I have been here. On my iphone "reset" means that all customization, would be lost and the phone would be like fresh from the factory. We can't afford this for an entire city, whatever it means. 

Catherine Pugh talking about the removal of the Confederate monuments

Too many good things are happening, including

• significant investments in the neighborhoods, including the disinvested communities of the Black Butterfly. 
• The consent decree with the Justice Department regarding the police department  is in its third year, a promising Commissioner is in place, 
• Baltimore's monumental school construction program is in its seventh year. (9 schools have been completed, six are under construction and another 13 are in various stages of design). 
• We have a reinvestment fund, an affordable housing funds, a complete streets bill 
•  the Vacants to Value program that other cities cite for its innovative approaches. 
• The City Council came rejuvenated and re-energized out of the last election and has passed many progressive bills.  

This is only a partial list. Still, clearly the City hasn't accomplished its main goals:
Less crime and more residents. Crime remains sky-high and residents continue to flee. The reasons are less the absence of good initiatives but a lack of coordination and synergy. City agencies frequently trip themselves or each other. The actions on Baltimore's traffic signals or its bike-lanes are just two small examples. 

I will continue to use this space to promote ideas on how to pay attention to the details and still keep the big picture in mind. Weakening the next Baltimore mayor because of what happened is a response which doesn't take in account how much Baltimore's past successes depended on strong mayors in the past. Don't forget, Mayor Pugh's best moment was when she was strong and took the monuments down. 

Klaus Philipsen, FAIA