Nine is not enough.
That was the message the Baltimore County Council received at a Tuesday public hearing on a proposal to expand the body from seven to nine members.
County voters in November may get to choose whether to have nine members, or 11… or they might not get a vote at all.
The current Council is all-male. Six out of seven are white although people of color make up nearly 50% of the county’s population. Supporters of expanding the council say adding more seats could help make it more diverse.
Council Chairman Izzy Patoka, a Democrat, is proposing adding two seats for a nine-member council.
“It would be, I think, much better for Baltimore County if we had council members that better reflected the demographics of Baltimore County and so I think this bill moves the needle in that direction,” Patoka said.
But there are dueling proposals.
“This is clearly a half measure,” attorney Tom Glancy said.
Glancy and others told the council that the county needs four more seats for a total of 11. Glancy pointed out that each council member currently represents 122,000 people, far more than their counterparts in other Maryland jurisdictions.
“As matters now stand, Baltimore County is an outlier in terms of district size and it would remain so even if we add two new districts,” Glancy said.
Nehemiah Bester said 11 members would make for a more diverse council, and he took aim at the current seven member arrangement in which only one council district, the fourth, has a Black majority and it is more than 60% African American.
“Packing Black voters into a single majority district dilutes their power and silences their voices,” Bester said.
Councilman Patoka does not yet have the support he needs on the council to forward to the voters the question of adding two new members.
There is a grassroots movement to gather enough signatures to bypass the council and give the voters the option of adding four seats. Linda Dorsey-Walker, the chair of 4MORE4BALTIMORE COUNTY, told the council that adding four seats would get more people of color elected.
Dorsey-Walker said, “That scenario clearly frightens some of you and it’s found distasteful by many of the current council members that seem to be unwilling to accept that Baltimore County is already half minority and half non-minority.”
Dorsey-Walker criticized the council’s two seat expansion proposal, saying it would do little to make the body more diverse.
“This bill is a last-ditch attempt, in my opinion, by the incumbents, made up of six white males and one African American male to postpone the inevitable,” she said. “We can’t keep pushing back the future.”
In an interview after the hearing, Patoka said Dorsey-Walker made his job harder to convince enough council members to sign on to the two seat expansion.
“We have to find the right pathway to get five votes on this,” Patoka said. “It’s going to be fragile and that’s when I hear testimony like we heard today, it causes me concern because of the fragility of the situation in trying to gain five votes to move this forward.”
It takes at least five votes for the council to put a question on the ballot. The Council is made up of four Democrats and three Republicans, so it will need bipartisan support to pass.
Several members of the County Council remain undecided, including Republican David Marks.
“I’m trying to focus on the legislation at hand and ignore personal insults and attacks directed at the County Council,” Marks said after the hearing.
A workgroup that studied the size of the council in a compromise recommended nine seats. Several members of the workgroup wanted it to stay at seven. Several others wanted 11.
The council will hold one more public hearing on June 25. A final vote is scheduled for July 1.
