The powerful Baltimore City Board of Estimates, the city’s spending arm that’s been divided over a major contract with Baltimore Gas and Electric, may drastically change if legislation proposed by one city council member is approved in the coming months.
The Board of Estimates is tasked to build the city’s annual $4 billion budget but its members, two of which are appointed by Mayor Brandon Scott, regularly approve hundreds of millions of taxpayer money to keep the city running.
The five-member board includes the mayor, the mayor’s two appointees, the Baltimore City council president and the city’s comptroller. As such, the city is considered to have a ‘strong-mayor system’ due to that power structure. The board itself has been meeting since 1900, according to the Maryland State Archives.
“Too often, items that are controversial or that are deserving of real discussion and debate get rushed through because everybody knows that the mayor controls the board,” council member Zeke Cohen told WYPR, calling the system an undemocratic one that "puts too much power in the hands of one person."
Cohen, who represents parts of downtown Baltimore City, filed legislation that would take the first steps in reforming or abolishing the city’s spending board altogether. His bill creates the Baltimore City Fiscal Policy Democratization Task Force: a volunteer group of seven members.
The comptroller and council president are required to each recommend two people, although ultimately the mayor has the final say over six of the task force appointees. The Chair of the Baltimore City Ethics Board would make the final seventh member.
This task force would spend the remainder of the year reviewing fiscal policies and complaints of delayed payments to city employees and small businesses, while also holding interviews with community members who regularly do business with the spending board. It would also study four, as of now undetermined, “peer cities” to understand different potential spending models.
Ultimately the task force would recommend a charter amendment which, if approved by the city council and not vetoed by the mayor, then goes to vote by the general public during the next general election.
Comptroller Bill Henry confirmed that he spoke with Cohen about his proposal. Henry predicts that attempts to abolish the BOE would be “fiendishly complicated”.
“Given the choice, I would reform it and the most straightforward and democratic of the possible reforms would be to remove the Director of Public Works and the City Solicitor," Henry said in a recent email to WYPR.
Cohen defended his choice to propose yet another task force, saying it would put more research and planning in the hands of Baltimoreans.
“While we all love our city, I know of no one who loves the Board of Estimates. It is opaque, it lacks transparency, it is difficult to navigate, and with prior mayors, before this one, it led to corruption,” said Cohen as he introduced the legislation during Monday night’s council meeting.
In 2018, former Mayor Catherine Pugh and the BOE approved a city contract with Commercial Construction. It was later reported by The Baltimore Brew that the company had been doing discounted work on Pugh’s home and that it also had a backer who paid over $100,000 for her Healthy Holly children's books.
In 2020, then-city council president Brandon Scott pledged to reform the city’s spending board and even introduced a charter amendment removing the two mayoral appointees, the city solicitor and department of public works head, from the board. That proposed charter amendment did not move forward.
For his part, Cohen credits Scott for championing the reforms while acknowledging the difficult challenge the mayor has inherited.
WYPR has reached out to Mayor Scott’s office for comment on this legislation.
