Councilman Cohen enters council president race
Baltimore City Councilman Zeke Cohen will run for council president, setting up the first competitive matchup for a top city office in 2024.
“Fundamentally, I believe Baltimore deserves better,” Cohen said last week during an interview at The Baltimore Sun. “We can have equity and effective delivery of basic city services. For too long, we’ve been asked to choose.”
Cohen, who has been open about his interest in the council presidency and formed an exploratory committee earlier this year, made his bid official Sunday afternoon at an event with supporters and family at Baltimore Center Stage.
Cohen joins incumbent Council President Nick Mosby in the Democratic primary in April 2024.
Speaking before supporters Sunday at the Mount Vernon theater, Cohen touted his record on the council and spoke optimistically of turning Baltimore into the “next great American comeback city.”
“We need to reject mediocracy,” Cohen said, joined onstage by family, fellow politicians and partners. “We are more than a TV show. We are better than a slogan on a bench.”
A Massachusetts native, the sophomore councilman has represented the 1st District, which includes Canton, Fells Point and Highlandtown, since 2016.
Cohen has been a liberal voice on the all-Democrat body, championing legislation to strengthen lobbyist disclosures, to create an abortion fund and to mandate gender-inclusive restrooms. His hallmark legislation, the Healing City Act, required training in trauma-informed care for city employees — teaching them practices that reduce, rather than exacerbate, harm — to serve a population that has suffered trauma due to violence, poverty and other societal forces.
Cohen said the political climate in Baltimore and across Maryland represents an enormous opportunity for the city. The state’s top offices are filled with city residents and Baltimore has yet to spend all of the $641 million in American Rescue Plan funds it received from the federal government during the coronavirus pandemic.
“If we can’t get it right in this moment, we have only have ourselves to blame,” Cohen said. “What I fear in so many of our communities is that our leadership has become [an] impediment to our success.”
Cohen’s bid for office comes at a moment when the incumbent is potentially vulnerable. Mosby, who has served in the position since December 2020, has been dogged by several investigations during the first half of his term.
A federal probe into the financial dealings of Mosby and his wife, former State’s Attorney Marilyn Mosby, was revealed within the council president’s first few months in office. Nick Mosby has not been charged with anything, but Marilyn Mosby is charged with perjury and making false statements related to early withdrawals from her city retirement account and the purchase of two Florida houses. Her trial is set for Nov. 2 in Baltimore.
Last year, the Baltimore Board of Ethics found Nick Mosby violated city ethics law in connection with a legal-defense fund set up on behalf of the political power couple. The board found and a Baltimore Circuit Court judge upheld that Mosby indirectly solicited donations to the fund and failed to disclose its existence on his annual ethics filing.
Also, the council president has failed to raise any campaign money since taking
office, a potential signal of political weakness. A January report showed his campaign had $14,539 in the bank.
Cohen did not mention his opponent by name during his Sunday remarks. He jabbed at “repeated ethics investigations” on the council, stating that the city is too often “asked to settle for less,” and adding that the council needed a president who would be focused on improvement rather than “causing chaos and picking pointless fights.”
Mosby has announced his intention to seek a second four-year term. He told reporters about his plans Wednesday as Cohen’s scheduled announcement neared.
No one else has announced a bid for the citywide post, and no candidates have formally filed. The filing deadline is Jan. 19.
The council president’s annual salary is $135,093. Council members earn $78,577 a year.
Mosby’s campaign acknowledged Cohen’s plans in a statement, saying the council president “looks forward to a campaign season where the two will focus on the issues impacting the people of Baltimore and sharing their visions of moving the city of Baltimore forward.”
Under Mosby’s leadership, the City Council has had an increasingly contentious relationship with Democratic Mayor Brandon Scott, a point of criticism for Cohen. The two branches of government sparred recently over Scott’s push to give management responsibilities for the city’s conduit system to utility giant Baltimore Gas and Electric Co. A council committee responded by rejecting Faith Leach, Scott’s selection for city administrator — although the committee reversed its decision several days later.
Cohen said a “healthy tension” should exist between the legislative and executive branches so the mayor is held accountable. But the councilman was critical of what he said have been personal attacks on agency heads during Mosby’s tenure and of the need for a revote on the city administrator nomination.
“It is one thing to feel frustration with the Brandon Scott administration, but to take it out on Faith Leach, the city administrator, just seemed inappropriate to me,” he said. “I thought it was an example of a needless fight the council and the administration got into.”
Cohen also was critical of what he called “rhetoric” by the council president, particularly over the mayor’s veto of a security deposit alternative bill. Nick Mosby called the veto “modern-day redlining,” a term that refers to a practice of companies that outlined in red on maps areas where they wouldn’t issue mortgage loans or insurance Black people needed to buy homes.
Cohen called the statement “deeply inappropriate.”
Still, Cohen said, he wouldn’t pull punches against the administration if he’s elected. He said he would activate the legislative investigations committee, recently launched in response to the conduit dispute, on a fulltime basis.
“It shouldn’t take a crisis, like the BGE deal, for us to be effectively investigating city agencies,” Cohen said. “It shouldn’t be a gotcha tool. But it is a way to say that communities in Baltimore expect their legislators, their City Council members to really be holding city agencies accountable.”
“He is so dedicated to his community, I always see him talking to people in the community, addressing their concerns,” Judy Daley, a Highlandtown resident who worked with Cohen’s office on concerns regarding a neighbor, said at the Sunday campaign event. “God only knows we need people like that in office these days, the way things are.”