Mayor Brandon Scott’s office put out a proposed city council district map on September 18th, ahead of the date he is required to by city charter.
That map aims to make the districts more equal in population– with each district having between 41 and 43,000 people. It does so largely by evening out Districts 1 and 11, which respectively include Fells Point and Federal Hill, that have seen large population growth as population in the rest of the city has declined.
But, that proposed map has council district lines cutting across some of Baltimore’s famously tight-knit neighborhoods.
Sarah Bluher, a resident of the Old Goucher neighborhood, was surprised to see that her neighborhood would be divided and split into different council districts.
“A council person has limited attention, right? And so even if they want us to pay attention to everyone, they're really looking at swaths, I think of continuous neighborhoods with shared concerns,” she said during a city council hearing on Friday morning.
She says her home is part of a few blocks that are dog-legged into District 7; that area is primarily separated from the rest of that district by Route 83.
“It really does a disservice to us directly in that little piece and our surrounding neighbors,” she said, going on to request that the council delay their vote to hear more community input.
Other residents who testified at the hearing also called for more community input. They came from the neighborhoods of Bolton Hill and Morrell Park, which are also proposed to be split between districts, and wondered how neighborhood plans for shared community spaces could be impacted by new districts.
As of Friday’s hearing, the council had not proposed an alternative plan nor did they vote to advance the mayor’s proposed plan. That was in part because they did not get detailed GIS maps of the proposed districts from the mayor’s office until late on Thursday evening.
The time is ticking for the city council to propose an alternative plan and to circumvent a potential mayoral veto.
As per the charter, the council must take action within 60 days of the proposal’s introduction and if they do not, the mayor’s proposal becomes the law.
The council worries that the mayor would use a late veto on any counter proposal that they would suggest. The mayor has three regular meetings of the council to decide to veto a law– in this case that would be November 6. That would give the council a narrow window of time to override the mayor’s veto within the 60 day window.
The council has a scheduled special meeting on Monday and a regular meeting later that same day, it is possible they could introduce an alternative plan and engage that process.
President Nick Mosby has been seeking written assurance from the mayor that he would not wait until the end of the veto window to exercise a veto, effectively ensuring the mayor’s plan becomes law.
He pressed the matter during Friday’s hearing. “The position that the administration has put this council in is literally putting a gun to us… forcing us to put something out, rushing something or just allowing the mayor’s map to go into law,” said Mosby.
Mayor Scott did made that written commitment in a letter to Mosby that was shared with WYPR, late on Friday afternoon. Scott wrote, “We also share your commitment to ensuring that the spirit of our Democracy – namely the checks and balances between the Executive and Legislative branch - is upheld and that the City Council has an opportunity to act on a potential veto of a map proposed by the City Council.”
