Hey. Roughly a quarter of the city’s population – round numbers, more than 150,000 parents and their children and a good number of older folks too – are in families making less than the official poverty level. If that isn’t the city’s highest priority, we don’t know what is.
On behalf of these families, we have a suggestion that will help the new Mayor and City Council provide much more effective city government in Baltimore. If we were charging for it, it would come with a money back guaranty. We’re that sure of ourselves. Here’s what we recommend…
As you may have heard, the state and city will be spending substantial millions of dollars over the next few years to demolish vacant houses in the sections of the city that suffer from urban blight.
A hundred thousand dollars here, a hundred thousand dollars there. Pretty soon, you’re talking serious money.
Ask yourself… Are you willing to bet the future of your family and your city on a candidate who is a convicted criminal, who pled guilty to perjury, who betrayed the trust of her constituents and was then forced out of the Mayor’s office? Is that really your image of a Mayor who can reach out around the country to attract employers to Baltimore?
Our city’s disadvantaged neighborhoods need thousands of jobs for the unemployed.
As if you needed hard evidence of the failure of Baltimore’s public schools, here it is.
As part of our ongoing review of candidates for Mayor – and City Council too – we noticed some issues with the campaign finance reports filed by Friends of Sheila Dixon. At it turns out, in February and March of 2015, Ms. Dixon’s committee revised 17 of these reports covering the period January 14, 2015 going all the way back to November 22, 2006. That’s just before Sheila Dixon became Mayor when her predecessor, Martin O’Malley, left to start his first term as Governor.
There was an article by Erica Green published in the Saturday, January 30 edition of the Sun, entitled “Baltimore schools lose hundreds of students, millions in funding.” The gist of this article is that it has been discovered that the city’s schools have been over counting the collective student body by roughly 1900 students. By setting the record straight, our public schools will now lose approximately $25 million in state subsidies and $4 million from the city.