How Baltimore’s fight over ballot questions turned against the city

Baltimore’s November elections are usually a snoozefest – the real action in the Democrat-dominated city comes during the spring primary elections.

But this year was supposed to be different.

The people of Charm City were ready to vote on important issues. There was a proposal to reduce the property tax rate by almost half. Another one to provide cash payments to parents of newborns. Yet another could remake the city skyline along the Inner Harbor.

All of these ambitious, city-changing proposals are ballot questions, meaning voters can personally vote “for” or “against” policies in this city. And this November looked like this was to launch a new political change machine in Baltimore.

Then everything went to hell.

The state challenged the tax cut in court, and the mayor’s office sued over the Baby Bonus. Political rhetoric around electoral referenda became increasingly focused on race and class. It’s possible that the only question for Baltimore residents in November will be whether they want fewer politicians in the next election.

And somewhere along the way, City Hall may have lost the chance to put its most important issue before voters: the Harborplace redevelopment.

City authorities may only have themselves to blame. The same legal argument that city attorneys made before the Maryland Supreme Court, which effectively excluded the property tax cut and baby bonus from the ballot, could undermine the nearly $1 billion Inner Harbor redevelopment plans.

Thiru Vignarajah, a lawyer representing petitioners opposing the redevelopment, said the legal argument only occurred to him while livestreaming Supreme Court hearings on two measures the city wanted to block.

“I was like, what?” Vignarajah said. “Then you start digging into the case law and find that what is good for the goose should be good for the gander.”

In August, city attorneys argued before the Maryland Supreme Court that both the Baby Bonus and the tax cut proposal known as Renew Baltimore had nothing to do with the “form and structure” of government. Citizens, they argued successfully, could not legislate through a ballot initiative – they could only change the way government operated.

Vignarajah’s argument is exactly this. The internal port issue is, at its core, a zoning decision. The only reason the city needs to amend its charter to approve it is because the creation of Inner Harbor Park – the area around the downtown waterfront – was done through a charter amendment in 1978. An Anne Arundel County judge sided with Vignarajah last month and blocked Harborplace question results before certification. The judge also suggested that the 1978 amendment itself might be inappropriate.

It’s possible that without the previous cases, Vignarajah, who has run unsuccessfully for citywide office four times, would not have mounted such a successful challenge against the new Harborplace. He tried to put his own question on the ballot that would have banned development in 20 city parks, but was unable to collect enough signatures.

Scott’s office declined to comment on the matter.

Regardless of the outcome of next week’s Supreme Court hearing — arguments over the continuation of the Harborplace question are scheduled for Monday — the way Baltimore treats ballot questions as a political tool has likely changed forever.

Historically, ballot questions haven’t received much attention or scrutiny in Baltimore because they usually involve mundane bureaucratic functions or merger requests submitted by the City Council, said Andy Ellis, a member of the city’s charter review commission.

That changed two years ago when Baltimore County media mogul David Smith successfully sponsored a measure to impose term limits on City Hall. Smith, executive chairman of Sinclair Inc., returned this year with a proposal to remove six City Council seats, pumping $415,000 into the campaign so far.

His newspaper, The Baltimore Sun, has published a series of articles questioning the effectiveness of individual City Council members, and Sinclair’s flagship station, WBFF Fox45 Baltimore, regularly runs segments suggesting that the council is ineffective at its current size.

Smith, whose business interests in television, cars and more place him well above the fabulously wealthy (but still not on Forbes’ 2024 billionaires list), showed that changing the government via referendum is easy if you have the money, to ask the ballot question, said Ellis, who is leading the opposition campaign to the Smith-backed H issue.

Nate Golden, leader of the Baby Bonus initiative, said the ballot initiative process is something of a last resort. Golden and the rest of his small group, the Maryland Child Alliance, tried to get the Baby Bonus through the legislative process. Much to their frustration, after a few years they realized that lawmakers didn’t take them or their ideas seriously enough.

“We haven’t seen any significant legislation from our government in years,” said Golden, who explained that the ballot process offers another, more direct way to encourage ambitious policy changes.

Under Baltimore’s version of direct democracy, all it takes is for 10,000 registered city voters to sign a petition supporting an issue, and the Baltimore City Board of Elections will, in most cases, put the issue to a vote.

Golden testified that this could be a difficult endeavor for a grassroots group like the Maryland Child Alliance. But if you have money like Smith or wealthy Renew Baltimore supporters, you can pay canvassers and political groups to go door to door.

And it turns out that people will sign almost anything. The Baltimore Banner spoke to dozens of people who signed the petition to shrink the City Council, many of whom did not remember signing it. Most of them had no opinion on whether the council should be smaller.

Take, for example, Rachel Keller, a resident of Brooklyn. “It’s possible,” Keller signed, she said. But reducing the city council? “Like why?” she said. “I don’t know enough about it to take a position. Is it possible that I was placed there fraudulently? I don’t think so.”

Or maybe Nathaniel Clark Davis, a teacher who certainly remembers signing the petition, but not this one.

“I clearly remember signing the Baby Bonus contract. I think it’s possible I signed it twice,” Davis said. “I may have inadvertently signed the latter. If I had to decide, this would be my best guess. Maybe my brain has short-circuited. I don’t know.”

You don’t necessarily have to have a lot of money to put something on the ballot. Baby Bonus organizers managed to collect enough signatures despite being relatively weak compared to other groups. Golden said the petition’s signatories were motivated by the popularity of the proposal among city residents.

That’s why it came as something of a shock when Mayor Brandon Scott ordered the city’s legal department to file a lawsuit to exclude Baby Bonus from the ballot. That these arguments led to the Vignarajah v. Harborplace case, well, that’s downright karmic.

“Obviously all of these (cases) are related,” Golden said. “I think we’ve opened up into really questionable (legal) territory.”

Constitutional law, or in this case statutory law, is mysterious compared to areas such as workers’ compensation. Because there have been relatively few challenges to ballot initiatives or charter changes in Maryland’s history, the amount of case law that judges can draw on when making rulings is relatively small. This also means that relatively few lawyers are qualified in this area of ​​law.

“It’s a bad combination – complex cases that few people know about, except the judges, unfortunately, had to write these opinions,” said Andrew Levy, one of Maryland’s best-known appellate lawyers.

Levy said there is an upside to all these Supreme Court battles: more case law. While the loss may be disappointing, the resulting judicial opinions will make it easier for future petitioners to consider how to present their cases to voters.

So yes, everything will become clearer in the future. Harborplace may or may not be on the ballot. However, Baltimore’s statute will remain complex. At nearly 250 pages, the document is much denser than other Maryland counties, and its structure essentially guarantees a long list of boring questions every election cycle. Ellis, the charter commissioner, said that if it is subjected to the same scrutiny that Harborplace’s zoning currently undergoes, large portions of it could also be invalidated.

If that’s the case, Ellis said, Baltimore could simply start over.

“Get rid of the charter, start over, and then come up with a thinner, better charter that isn’t 200 pages long,” he said.

Baltimore Banner reporter Saul Pink contributed reporting.