In the first mass airing of views by major candidates in Baltimore’s 60-day-long May- oral campaign, both the insiders and outsiders agreed at a tightly structured forum last night that this is a city that strongly needs to be fixed. Responding to questions by the moderator Marc Steiner of WJHU-FM before a boisterous but supportive capacity crowd at the Wheeler Auditorium, each candidate suggested that he or she was the best person to do it.
In order of appearance – randomly determined – on the third-floor stage at the Enoch Pratt Library, Martin O’Malley, Carl Stokes, Richard Riha, A. Robert Kaufman, Mary Conaway and Lawrence Bell trotted out their best material, greeted with enthusiasm and occasional smiles by the crowd of dignitaries, activists and plain citizens.
This was not a night for determining winners or losers. Instead, it afforded the candidates a rare opportunity for explaining to a mass audience what’s wrong with the city and how they would repair it.
As emcee of the program sponsored by the Baltimore City Coalition of Economic and Community Development, Steiner posed the same four questions to each candidate, allotting 16 uninterrupted minutes for responding. There was no deviation from the format, and no questions were taken from the audience. A replay of the spirited exchanges will be heard this afternoon between 12 and 2 in Steiner’s normal time slot
For openers when Steiner asked O’Malley how he felt about the performances of the Police Department, Planning Department, Department of Public Works, and the Housing and Community Development, the City Councilman said if he were satisfied with the current state of the city agencies, he wouldn’t be running for Mayor.
O’Malley said the police department would have to adopt a zero-tolerance crime enforcement strategy. Regarding the Planning Department, he said the local planning processes needed to be treated with more diligence.
Kaufman found that Baltimore City police spend an “inordinate” amount of their shifts on drug arrests, and chasing down johns and prostitutes. Baltimore should take a cue from Europeans, he said, and install two red-light districts, one for drugusers and one for prostitutes.
Conaway said that while she has decades of experience as an administrator and overseer of huge budgets, as the Register of Wills, she is not part of the inner circle of city government. Therefore, rather than rushing to make a judgment about major city agencies, “I would individually assess each one and then act,” she said. “Since I am not on the City Council,” she said candidly, “I don’t know”
Although Steiner pointed out emphatically in the beginning that the— program was a forum not a debate, each candidate realized he or she would be compared and contrasted to rivals.
The well-organized Stokes expressed disappointment at what he called the lack of coordination and cooperation between and among city agencies, a line of blame that he said leads directly to the Mayor’s office.
“The Mayor is the leader,” said Stokes. “It’s up to him to make cooperation happen.”
Kaufman found that Baltimore City police spend an “inordinate” amount of their shifts on drug arrests, and chasing down johns and prostitutes. Baltimore should take a cue from Europeans, he said, and install two red-light districts, one for drugusers and one for prostitutes.
Conaway said that while she has decades of experience as an administrator and overseer of huge budgets, as the Register of Wills, she is not part of the inner circle of city government. Therefore, rather than rushing to make a judgment about major city agencies, “I would individually assess each one and then act,” she said. “Since I am not on the City Council,” she said candidly, “I don’t know” precise answers to some questions Steiner posed.
But Conaway was clear that she would push to hire more police officers and, after recent conversations with Philadelphia Mayor Ed Rendel, she would seek to put about 90 percent of the force on the street.
Bell, at the closing end of the lineup, accepted the question about evaluating the performance of leading city agencies and tossed it right back by
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saying that since everyone else had given a view, he did not want to be repititious. He indicated he largely agreed with the criticism voiced by his colleagues.
Nearing the end of the two hours, Bell seized the audience’s attention – in case they thought he might be coasting to the finish line – by asking them to write down a special telephone hotline number he will install after he wins the Mayoral
election. Bell said that 410/396-TELL will be a Whistle Blower’s Hotline, a unique one-stop service that will give average citizens access to the city’s chief executive and* create an unprecedented comfort about just plain people dialing City Hall with any complaints they have.
Returning to a theme he has sought to make familiar to the ears of Baltimore voters, Bell said the best way to revitalize the city – One Baltimore, as he likes to say – is to be inclusive. “Wherever I go, I hear people saying they feel locked out,” Bell said.
Riha pretty much summed up his candidacy in his somewhat widely scattered opening response to Steiner by concluding, “I’m no politician. In fact, I’m new at this. But, I think things could be improved.”
Asked how he would slow or reverse the monthly departure of 1,000 residents from the city – fleeing crime, it was unanimously agreed – Riha said that he would lower taxes and seek to reduce insurance rates.
The well-prepared Stokes came with a ready-made agenda, determined to make a case for focusing on cleaning up the public school system, commercial for the way he would upgrade the educational system.
Education, Stokes said, is the greatest .economic engine we have. He decried a what he says is a longstanding attitude in Baltimore that “if it’s not on the water, it’s not important.” Hardly a valid claim, he said, since 89 percent of Baltimore is not on the water.
Stokes said that in the process of marketing spruced-up neighborhoods and taking a “rah-rah” stance for the city, class sizes in public schools should be mandatorily reduced to 15 students, that a strong disciplinary code should be developed and certain problem students should be placed in a different learning environment.
Regarding the saturation of drug- infested crime in most sections of the city, Stokes said that although rehabilitation of the perpetrators is important, “what happens after rehabilitation is even more important. There must be jobs waiting for them” so they won’t slip back into old habits.
Kaufman offered a unique solution to one aspect of the city’s drug headache. People are moving out of the city to escape a drug-drenched environment, he said. The problem is,
of a house, new addicts move in. Kaufman would solve that dilemma by having the city hire housesitters in order to prevent a takeover.
Conaway also sounded an education theme, noting that one of the reasons the city loses thousands of residents every year is because people fear for their lives, and they are moving into county territory becausethey believe county schools are better.
“We have quality teachers here in Baltimore,” Conaway said. “Trouble is, their salaries are not commensurate with their talents and their experience.”
She said that “if we want our children to compete in the next mille-nium, technological facilities need to be promptly installed in public schools, from pre-school level on up.
Unlike some of her rivals, Conaway favors a larger emphasis on treatment programs for drug addicts who roam the neighborhoods and randomly create mean streets.
She feels the police department itself will not be in position to put a noticeable dent in the drug population until “we start a successful drug treatment program.”
To stop the flow of crime and drugs, O’Malley would close down the open air drug markets, one by one. He cited the success of such sweeps in New York, Boston, Pittsburgh and Cleveland, which he said had been in the same ecomomic plight as Baltimore. Harking back to his Zero Tolerance platform, he said the police would have to pay attention to petty crimes. They would also need to have the abliltiy to give citations, rather than go through the entire arresting procedure.