A Baltimore County ballot question that prompts residents to vote on expanding the county council from seven to nine members has more to it than just that.

The full bill includes a new map of redrawn council districts and proposed changes to the makeup of the county school board.

Councilmembers say these added elements are only recommendations, subject to change if the ballot measure passes. But some state lawmakers and local advocacy groups worry they’ll be ushered in with no public input.

“What they'll then say is, ‘Well, the voters, they had their opportunity to vote it down, and they didn't,’” said state senator Charles Sydnor. “I don't think that there's a lot of trust that you're going to put a process in place when you could have put it in place and put it in the legislation.”

Sydnor was one of 11 state representatives to sign a letter sent from the Maryland ACLU to the council on August 19 demanding that the map and school board changes be removed from the bill by September 5. Failure to do so, the letter says, “will almost certainly” result in legal action.

Deborah Jeon, legal director of ACLU Maryland, said these added components are “so clearly an inappropriate overreach” of county council power — and that they are going to leave voters “completely confused.”

Both measures also “directly undermine” the purpose of the “citizen-led movement to expand the County Council,” the ACLU letter says, which was to “promote a Council that better reflects the rich diversity of Baltimore County’s population than does the current all male, nearly all-white Council.”

The map attached to the expansion bill divides Baltimore County into nine districts, where only two have a majority of Black voters. Six have over 50% white residents.

Sydnor says that’s an improvement from the current map, which packs most Black county voters into one district. In 2021, the Maryland ACLU and Baltimore County’s chapter of the NAACP sued the county council over that map, which they said violates the Voting Rights Act.

Sydnor says the new version still has issues with “packing” on multiple fronts.

“You have a map that guarantees five democratic council members, and you guarantee four Republican seats,” Sydnor said. “And I don't think that those demographics accurately reflect the makeup of the county, number one. Number two, if you look at the racial composition of the county, it’s just about 50% white and 50% non-white.”

The attached map also didn’t go through the usual county process for redistricting, Sydnor said, which includes public hearings and a separate commission of community members to lead the way.

Council chair Izzy Patoka said the bill requires that full process if it passes in November.

He also said there was “no pathway” to achieving the council votes needed to put the expansion bill on the ballot without including the revised district map.

“We will revisit the map. We will set up a redistricting commission or a similar entity, and then we can review some of the concerns that have been made,” Patoka said. “And so I think it's really just one step at a time. Some folks are jumping to the last step, and we just need to be methodical about this.”

Councilman David Marks said the map “helps preserve balance in Baltimore County.”

“One of my concerns with the whole expansion issue has been that it has been driven by very partisan interests,” he said. “As a Republican, I think we work well when we have political diversity, when we have people of different parties, different ideas, as well as different backgrounds on the county council.”

Marks also spear-headed the decision to put language about the school board into the expansion bill. The legislation states that the council will notify the Maryland General Assembly that the board makeup “is to be amended” to include nine elected members (one from each new district) and only two governor appointees, down from the current four.

“I've always preferred local control,” Marks said. “If we are expanding the county council, and therefore expanding the number of school board members, you would want to delete two members so it doesn't become an unwieldy body.”

But Attorney General Anthony Brown said in a letter on August 14 that the council doesn’t have the authority to make those decisions – only the state legislature does. Therefore, that section of the bill is “non-binding,” he said.

Delegate Eric Ebersole said state lawmakers are already discussing options — and have been for a while.

“There are several possibilities. They've named one of them, but there are others,” he said. “We can talk about that now, but the real thing to do is to wait until after the election to be sure we're not spinning our wheels.”

Ebersole said a key step in the process will also be talking to the Baltimore County school board about what they think will be most effective.

Tiara Booker-Dwyer, chair of the Baltimore County school board, said she was never approached about the proposed changes in the current expansion bill beforehand. And now, she said, that could stunt the bill’s progress.

“It could be a waste of everyone's time trying to move something forward and put all this energy and resources into something that's technically dead on arrival,” she said.

Booker-Dwyer said she knows the school board doesn’t have the authority to weigh in on every council bill.

“We just want to ensure that whatever is happening is informed by research, has the input of the community, and that it's legally sound,” she said. “There was a missed opportunity…to authentically include the voices of those who this will impact the most.”

Sydnor also says the hybrid school board model — with some elected and some appointed — was designed to ensure the diversity in education leaders that didn’t translate from the council districts.

“This was a compromise amongst people who wanted a fully elected school board, and organizations like the NAACP and others,” he said. “The county school board boundaries are reflective of the county council's boundaries. And historically speaking, you've had two Black county council people.”

Sydnor knows that the school board provisions in the bill are null, according to the attorney general.

“But the fact of the matter is, it will still be enshrined in our charter, which is problematic,” he said. And the fate of the council-drawn district map is unknown.

“I believe it goes against the [county] charter, and it will be deemed unconstitutional,” Sydnor said. “However, that would be the issue that the court would have to take up. And I'm fully prepared to be engaged in additional litigation if the county council doesn't change its course.”