Mosby’s beefed-up staff: A compromise is possible
Baltimore’s incoming City Council president and mayor have a roughly $700,000 difference of opinion, and the arguments each offers have merit. Council President-elect Nick Mosby wants to spend that money to hire nine researchers and budget analysts. Mayor-elect Brandon Scott does not. And given how the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic has already forced the city to tap into precious reserve funds and lay off city personnel, as the economy struggles and tax revenues fall short, Mr. Scott’s point-of-view is the more compelling.
But not so fast.
What Baltimoreans should know is that beneath this modest disagreement over a fairly paltry sum in the context of a $3 billion operating budget is a more important concern about how much authority — and expertise — the City Council should have. If Baltimore works best with a strong mayor who runs roughshod over the City Council as many have done in the past, it would seem an unnecessary expense. But it’s clear that times are changing. Mayor-elect Scott is among those who are uncomfortable with the unbridled authority mayors have wielded in the past and is seeking to restructure government including giving the council greater budget authority, a move that begs the staffing issue. Council President-elect Mosby frequently cites the General Assembly as a model, with its Department of Legislative Services and independent analysts available to dig into legislation and budgets, not simply regurgitate whatever the executive branch has to say.
Voters have recently made their view known as well, approving charter amendments last month to, among other things, create a city administrator position, to make it easier to override a mayoral veto and to give the City Council greater authority to move money around the budget. The Baltimore Sun Editorial Board opposed that last measure, Question F, for the very reason that has put Mr. Scott and Mr. Mosby at loggerheads: The City Council’s long-standing lack of budgetary expertise made it a matter of putting the cart before the horse. As Mr. Mosby himself now points out, the City Council is going to be lobbied heavily by everyone and their hired guns to put tax dollars into this or that cause. How can members know if they should shift limited resources around without either relying on the city’s finance department, which is controlled by the mayor, or bringing in independent experts? (And please spare us the notion that council members themselves should possess accountancy superpowers: It doesn’t happen with their equivalents in Congress or the State House either).
Voters approved Question F by a 3-to-1 margin so the budget genie can’t be stuffed back into a bottle. And while the City Council new authority doesn’t become relevant until the Fiscal 2022 budget that goes into effect next summer, the presidentelect has a point. If this shift in power away from the mayor and toward the City Council is going to work, however, the latter is going to have to developer a deeper understanding of the highly technical details of local government. And it’s going to have to
happen in the first six months of 2021.
That’s why we would encourage Mr. Scott and Mr. Mosby to reach a compromise and find a way to pay for a handful of budget experts (beefed up legislative analysis can likely wait a while longer) in the current budget so that they can start their work as soon as possible. City Council President Scott was correct in October when he opposed Mayor Bernard C. “Jack” Young over creation of these posts, but that is water under the bridge. Accommodations need to be made. Perhaps filling just three or four of the nine slots? Given that the County Council-controlled auditor in neighboring Baltimore County staffs 17 and has a budget of $1.6 million, this would be a bargain.
It’s easy to dismiss these white collar jobs as number crunchers and policy wonks, bureaucrats less vital than teachers or first-responders. But given how useful DLS has been in Annapolis — simply by recommending budget trims that customarily eliminate millions in wasteful spending each year — that is extremely shortsighted. Nor is there any harm in Baltimore’s incoming mayor and president striking a bargain on this potentially touchy issue right off the bat. The City Council has a new role to play, let members have at least some of the resources needed to perform that function properly, but not so much that some may wrongly perceive it as a shameful political indulgence in the midst of a pandemic.