City councilwoman pulls 'land bank' bill targeting vacant housing

A proposal that many advocates saw as a pivotal tool for fixing up thousands of vacant properties across Baltimore went down at Monday night's City Council meeting with barely a fizzle.

Councilwoman Odette Ramos has championed legislation to establish a "land bank" in Baltimore for well over a year , arguing that the specialized authority would be better equipped than City Hall to clear complex title issues and move blighted properties into the hands of responsible developers.

But when it came time Monday night for the council to vote on two bills to establish the land bank, Ramos pulled back the legislation, surrendering her effort for now.

Ramos said after the meeting that it became clear to her that she had "more work to do" on the proposal and preferred to come back with a fresh bill in the council's next session, starting in December, than see her legislation voted down.

According to Ramos, though, the lack of council support had more to do with political score-settling than policy specifics.

Ramos said she had asked her colleagues to hold off on a vote when her bills went before a council committee hearing earlier this month. When the committee nevertheless voted 4-0 to recommend the proposal unfavorably to the full council, the councilwoman said she could only assume the decision was about politics, not policy.

The North Baltimore councilwoman pointed in particular to private conversations with Council President Nick Mosby and said she knows he wanted to force a vote before the legislation was ready. She has taken some "tough votes" in the past, Ramos said, including two years ago against a Mosby-backed initiative to combat vacant homes. She suggested that these decisions might have resulted in the unfavorable committee recommendation.

"Sometimes the politics gets in the way," she said. "We'll start over."

In a statement, Mosby denied that he took any steps to sink Ramos' proposal and said he has worked with the councilwoman since she introduced her land bank bills in March to move the legislation through the council process.

"It's unfortunate that Councilwoman Ramos has chosen to respond to her legislative setback by blaming others for her failure," Mosby said. "Instead of assigning blame, Councilwoman Ramos should focus on learning from her failures by finding common ground with her colleagues and the administration to advance her bill in the future."

The council president said Ramos' accusation was reminiscent of the tactics she deployed against Johns Hopkins University this summer, when she sent a $100 million wish list to the university while negotiating zoning provisions around an artificial intelligence center that the school wants to build in her district. Ramos later attempted to "withdraw" her letter from Hopkins.

Ramos has proven a tough negotiator in the past, even inciting fury among some officials last year when she reneged on a deal in the last moments before a much-anticipated affordable housing vote.

The councilwoman's dispute with Mosby over the land bank legislation was first reported by The Baltimore Sun.

Land banks, often quasi-government entities, function as a middleman that acquires large swaths of vacant properties , clears their debts and title issues and then puts them into the hands of responsible developers, often by selling them below market value. In other cases, the properties could be turned into parks or green spaces.

But while land banks have seen successful in places like Detroit and Cleveland, the idea has drawn criticism from housing officials in the administration of Mayor Brandon Scott, who have argued that the authority would duplicate work already handled by the Department of Housing and Community Development, and also lack important constraints.

Housing Commissioner Alice Kennedy raised many of these concerns before the City Council committee earlier this month.

The land bank could face a more favorable environment when it comes back in the next session, which starts in December. The council's membership will be a little different as Mosby, who was not present for the committee meeting, and several members who voted against the land bank legislation are likely to be replaced by younger, more progressive newcomers .

Monday's defeat for the land bank authority came as the Scott administration pushed ahead with a separate, multi-billion-dollar plan to tackle vacant properties . Legislation introduced Monday on behalf of the administration, by Mosby, would authorize Baltimore's first-ever tax increment financing package geared for individual neighborhoods.

The measure would allow the city to sell up to $65 million in bonds to finance the rehabilitation of vacant properties, ideally to be paid back later through property taxes on the renovated land. Eventually, the Scott administration hopes to draw down a total of $150 million in bonds over a 15-year period.

Even if these experimental bonds pay out, Scott's ambitious plan to fight vacancy still relies on large commitments from the state , including $1.5 billion that the city hopes to collect through a share of the local sales tax — a difficult ask when leaders in Annapolis are managing budget cuts.

At a news conference earlier Monday, the mayor and council president each touted the experimental financing as a first-of-its kind step.

Though Ramos said she still has questions about how the mayor's plan will work, she's excited by the vision and hopeful about its potential. The issue, she said, is: "How do we make sure that we've got all the money that we need to attack this problem, and all of the other pieces that we need to make it work?"