Baltimore: Nobody Votes, Everybody Pays

This is what ennui looks like:

Judging from the sparse turnout at the Fells Point school, there were probably lots of stickers awaiting voters that may never show up. The same scenario was expected at the city’s other 289 polling places. City election officials were predicting only about 10 percent of the city’s 370,000 registered voters would cast ballots. That would make the Sept. 13 primary election look like it was crowded. About 23 percent voted in that primary despite a contested race between Rawlings-Blake and rivals Otis Rolley and Catherine Pugh.

There's a Republican and a Libertarian voting, and neither party even bothered to make an effort to contest this election. A city in which 10% of the population vote in a general election is a city with votes for the picking. The GOP and Libs should start a Baltimore Protest/Reform Party, and march through the streets until someone pays attention.

Of course, all that requires money and moral courage, neither of which are in abundance here.

I am the Wrecking-Ball Right

There's a good line in the movie L.A. Confidential, after the second-plot-point fight between Sgt. Bud White, played by Russell Crowe, and Guy Pearce's Lt. Edmund Exley. Exley has discovered that the three black men he arrested for a shooting at the Nite Owl restaurant, in which an ex-cop was killed, were innocent. He recieved a promotion for his work on that case, but now he wants it re-opened.

"The Nite Owl made you," says White. "You want to tear that down?"

"With a wrecking ball," replies Exley. "You want to help me swing it?"

And the enemies become allies.

I've thought of nothing else since I looked at Robert Reich's "The Rise of the Wrecking-Ball Right". Most of the article is but strawmen assembled by anecdote, but the closing paragraphs sums up the basic meme that many on the left have been and will be adopting this coming election season:

There's Another Solution....

A crusading Clerk of the Circuit Court (Frank Conaway, who's running for mayor) stands up for a man who's been fighting for 12 years to keep his house from a variety of lawyers who have purchased the tax lien on his house, charged him rent, and filed duplicitous records.

In other words, the property owners rack up hefty interest charges on the debt, while the lawyer who bought it can then bill them for essentially selling the obligation back to them, with some legal fees tacked on. In the end the owner ends up paying thousands of dollars in legal fees and interest for what amounts to a dollar-value several times the original debt.

However wretched this kind of tax-farming is, whatever court case and whatever new ordnance Conaway has in mind, there are a couple of ways this could be prevented:

1. Create a settlement system that allows the city to collect tax liens in a timely manner, as by monthly payments.
2. Charge less in property taxes.

Is the government so incompetent that it can't even collect its own taxes?

Baltimore Sheds Another 30,000 People

Investigative Voice is in full cry-havoc-and-let-slip-the-dogs mode:

And that’s why, ultimately, this city is losing. Not because of crime, or ineffective schools that managed to muster just a three-percent advanced-placement pass rate for students in a state that averaged 25 percent.

Not just because the city can’t raise enough revenue to keep the same bloated payrolls that allowed multiple Department of Public Works employees to not do their jobs for weeks at a time — and at least one to be kept on the public payroll while serving time in jail for molesting a teenage girl — with not a single superior taking notice.

The reason the city failed to keep and attract residents is that the policies that have informed the past are constructed for the benefit of people who don’t live here. For tourists, cops, and small handfuls of politicians and business insiders who trade tax breaks for political donations.

When this process is over, the population of Baltimore will consist of the powerless poor and the grasping government. Read the Whole Thing, as they say.

Who Knew Towing Could Be So Dramatic?

Investigative Voice:

The FBI may be investigating Baltimore's towing business in light of the recent move by the city to privatize its impound lot and do away with the city’s medallion towing business, the fellow councilperson told Kraft, according to the sources.

Are you telling me there's a federal statute on how urban centers can operate towing firms? WHY?

But at least the mayor has the right idea:

“From what I understand the mayor believes there are things we should do and other things we should not,” Nelson told I.V. at the time.

Indeed. Until:

At the meeting she told minority-owned towing firms that a privatization plan would provide them a greater share of the city’s lucrative contract-towing business.

“We’re trying to increase the availability… of minority and women-owned businesses,” she said then. “We certify you as a minority or a woman so you can be named as a subcontractor.”

*sigh* I know this is boilerplate, but dammit, Baltimore is a minority-majority city. Anyone who can get a tow-license should be able to start a tow business. Why do they have to make everything so difficult?

Liquor Board Inspector Works for a Club

Investigative Voice has been on this story from the beginning:

Pigtown residents who gathered to hear plans for a new 5,000-square-foot bar on the 700 block of Washington Boulevard at a community meeting last week said they were a bit confused when the three prospective owners were joined by a liquor board inspector who said he would be working as security consultant to the project.

 And now, Chanel 11 has found it worthy of their time:

A Baltimore liquor inspector has been reassigned amid allegations that he violated the firewall that's supposed to separate the inspectors from the businesses they regulate.

Now, I-V mentioned Fitzgerald's re-assignment, too, but at the end, giving the impression that it was the normal process of investigations, and not the lede of the story. I-V also managed to interview the co-owner of the prospective club, Tiffany Felder, who brought Fitzgerald in as a security consultant. Channel 11 makes do with a "businessman" named Paul Ely who's clearly hostile to the proposed club.

So basically, Stephen Janis scoops the Baltimore Media again, and gives us an actual damn story. Compare the two, and see which one gives you more actual information.

The Baltimore PD Apparently Watched The Wire...

So the WaPo Suggests:

But under Police Commissioner Frederick H. Bealefeld III, officers in one of the nation's most violent cities are no longer being told to beef up arrest statistics. The number of arrests has declined the past two years. Yet homicides and shootings are down, too - to totals not seen since the late 1980s. 

In other words, they're "shifting priorities" to violence intead of drug abuse.

"I'm not trying to win the drug war," Bealefeld said. "I'm out to win the war on violence and deal effectively with violence."

Which is why the California ballot initiative to legalize pot this November is so important.  If it wins, it's going to be a lot harder for local PD's to say that they have a priority in punishing drugs instead of disorder. A corner will finally have been turned.

Waste in Baltimore City Government.

In other news, Generalissimo Francisco Franco is still dead.

Why do I get the feeling that Parks & Rec has been laden with the city's sins?

Especially given that the city government is getting a pay raise? 

Much Ado About Schools

Investigative Voice covers the kabuki about closing one school or another in Baltimore, in which two grown men argue about a term that has no business belonging in an argument about schools. Education is a process, and it will inevitably be a process with unequal outcomes. To treat it as a right is to use it as a political football, when it ought to transcend politics.

"Never saw a rich man go to jail..."

...you've never been to Baltimore, then. They guy who conspired to fix tax liens and ground rents got 18-months in the pokey and an $800,000 fine.

Now, if he'd been a connected man...

Baltimore is Dying.

Last night I was the door man for Investigative Voice's 1-year anniversary party, which featured a six-person panel discussion on the state of the city. Former Mayor Sheila Dixon was on Hand, as well as a scattering of the rest of the commentariat, from police-commissioner-turned-radio-host Ed Norris to the local head of the NAACP. And they said:

Stuff

And the audience asked them keen questions, loaded with

Blah

And after a while it sounded like the same Hot Potato game, like we were looking for someone to blame and drive out of town, loaded with our sins, be it the Police Department, City Hall, or the Media. One gentleman did offer up that the communities really ought to police ourselves, and received applause, but no one picked up the train of thought.

This city is something of a sinking ship, and everyone who can is heading for the lifeboats, and the crew is too busy arguing about who was steering to think of plugging the hole.

Update: One of customers writes of the affair far more thoughtfully than I.