Worn Thin
Dear Mayor Pugh,
Your editorial, Baltimore mayor: I am impatient, issues a call for relentless commitment. The tone soars with the promise of change — the new police commissioner will deliver this city into a hopeful future so long as citizens stop complaining and start working to solve neighborhood problems.
Your first five paragraphs begin “for too long” as though Baltimore’s violent crime is a historical accident. Look at a decade of homicides: 2007, 2011 — a “good” year when homicides dipped below 200 — and 2017. The pattern holds. It mirrors the “Black Butterfly,” a shorthand coined by Dr. Lawrence Brown (@bmoredoc) for the shape of neighborhoods subject to residential segregation, disinvestment, and simultaneous over (arrest and harassment for petty crime) and under-policing (low closure rates for violent crimes; for more on that might I recommend Jill Leovy’s Ghettoside).
We see the same pattern in lead paint violations, life expectancy, location of vacants, who goes to prison, unemployment and on and on.
These statistics ought not surprise you, Madame Mayor, as you represented the 40th District from 2005–2016. In your former district, 35% of households had an annual family income at or below $20,000 and one-quarter of all residents did not obtain a high school degree.
You decry the tacit acceptance of homelessness but fail to mention it has been eight months since you publicly committed to issuing $40 million in bonds for affordable housing. The June 2017 words of your own mayoral workgroup — here again, citizens working — go ignored: “Safe, affordable housing is the solution to homelessness: We must prioritize housing-focused solutions to homelessness with the supportive services necessary to promote the highest possible level of independence, health, and community integration…. Baltimore City must adopt a comprehensive affordable housing plan that appropriately prioritizes those with the lowest incomes…. Emergency shelter, transitional housing, and supportive service projects should only exist insofar as they are necessary to rapidly and effectively move and sustain people into permanent housing.”
Thus far, the sum total of your affordable housing efforts seem to be (1) an endless, amorphous planning stage, (2) a dream of boat slips and kayak launches in a geographically isolated tax deferred district, (3) the shuttering of artist spaces in gentrifying neighborhoods, and (4) the containment of homeless individuals to a dormitory in the 5000 block of E. Monument St., with a view of Pulaski Highway and the Potts & Callahan yard. Indeed, the site is so far removed from central bus lines, social services, and healthy food options that individuals will need a shuttle bus.
I suppose “immense and abiding pride in this city of neighborhoods and irresistible charm” is incompatible with homeless encampments so close to the highways which ferry tourists and county residents to and from the cultural institutions you list.
I readily agree that we have the “finest medical system in the world.” In May 2017 my 9 year old daughter collapsed — at school aftercare. She spent weeks at Hopkins recovering from an ischemic stroke. When the worst had passed and she was admitted to Kennedy Krieger for intensive rehabilitation, I began digging out of accumulated emails. Amid the well-wishes for her recovery was a link to a WYPR story on your proposal to cut $2.4 million from after-school funding: “What I said to BUILD [Baltimoreans United in Leadership Development] was we don’t have any more money for their particular initiative that they want. We’ve put something like $5 million in schools and after-school programs and sorts, and that there is $12 million dollars in the youth fund.”
This action was in direct opposition to your written campaign promise: “If education is a priority, and it will be, then the contribution from the city must increase. The goal of my administration is to increase the city’s contribution over the next few years to 25% and to reach as high as 30–35% during my first term in office.” Luckily, advocates were able to convince the city council to exercise their limited budgetary authority and the cuts were overturned. I joined them at city hall in May, livid and disbelieving that you would dismiss the very people who kept my child safe, and keep thousands more safe and engaged, as one more program with its hand out.
The reality: The city’s budget is $2.8 billion. We spend $280 million — a mere 10% — of our city budget on schools to support the needs of 80,000 children, nearly one in five of whom lives in extreme poverty. That’s an annual income of about $10,000 for a family of three.
We contribute the third lowest per pupil amount of the state’s 24 jurisdictions despite rising wealth.
By contrast, we spend $471 million on policing for 3000 positions, less than 500 of whom actually live in the city. That $471 million does not include supplemental funding for overtime, such as the $18 million in surplus funds that were directed to the BPD in June 2017.
Worse still, the city has failed to monitor overtime, despite your March 2017 statement, “I need it done as soon as possible.” In 2016, 45 officers doubled their salary with overtime. A quick glance at Open Baltimore shows several officers who more than doubled their salary in FY2017:
William Harris, Jr: Annual salary of $97,309, grossed $244.913.70. Assuming time-and-half for each hour of overtime, that’s 40 hours overtime every week, 52 weeks a year. Others: Mark Walrath: Annual salary of $111,880, grossed $230,143.54. Rafiu Makanjuola: Annual salary of $82,326, grossed $206,320.68. Kimberly Swinton: Annual salary of $95,689, grossed $200,452.50. Eric Green: Annual salary of $81,609, grossed $198,535.74.
Baltimore doesn’t lack funds for schools; you choose not to spend on schools. We don’t lack revenue, we lack political will.
If changing the city requires, as your editorial asserts, “relentless commitment” then what and where are your commitments? I’ve seen residents commit: at meetings on reimagining Greenmount Avenue in Harwood sans vacants, when Shorty serves BBQ, when Not Without Black Women registers voters, when Baltimore Algebra Project testifies before the school board, when parents like Keysha Goodwin spend evenings at another meeting breaking down Title I and fair student funding, when SCLC members Kenneth Gwee and Rob Moore organized Tent City along with Baltimore Bloc, Christopher Ervin’s re-entry work with Lazarus Rite, when Keisha Allen prevents a package store masquerading as a lounge from opening in her neighborhood, when Danielle Sweeney publishes a deep dive on the bus system, when Shaivaughn Crowley reminds us to consider equity in transit planning, when Bikemore holds up Vision Zero, when Carol Ott advocates for renters in discussions of affordable housing, when women work to ensure access to vital services with the Baltimore Abortion Fund, when parents in Southwest Baltimore organize a walking school bus, when Adam Jackson co-chairs the Youth Fund. These are not people with whom I always agree but they are there, doing the work. There are many others, too numerous to name. Pop in to any PTO meeting, any neighborhood association, any workgroup and you’ll see Baltimoreans contributing hours of unpaid labor.
If your “duty and commitment” is “to be relentless in pursuing the policies and initiatives” then do it –now. Honor your campaign promise to increase school funding. Honor your promise to issue affordable housing bonds. Honor your promise to audit police overtime. You cannot call for residents “who have the will and capacity to be part of the solution” while simultaneously drafting a budget that supports wrongheaded policies. Or, I suppose you can; there is a word for that too: disingenuous.
Use your almost unitary budget authority to support community-led efforts. If “intervening in young lives” includes summer jobs, then ask yourself if $18 million is better spent on police overtime or hiring 5,000 young people for 10 weeks/35 hours a week for $10.28 an hour. Which do you think better honors the call to “sustain an honest way of life”? Which do you think would have the greater economic impact? Jobs for young people who reside here in the city or overtime for a force that drives away on I-83 each evening?
The next fiscal year starts July 1. You have six months to shift funds away from what seems like the inevitable and toward something beautiful: the people of this city.
