A crowd of activists toppled the marble Christopher Columbus statue near Little Italy Saturday night and dumped it into the Inner Harbor amid Fourth of July firework displays across the city.

Two weeks ago, an anti-racist protest group known as Baltimore Bloc publicly warned Baltimore Mayor Bernard C. “Jack” Young that activists planned to take down the city’s Columbus monuments if his administration did not act to remove them.

The most prominent of three city monuments to Columbus, the statue at the eastern edge of the Inner Harbor was unveiled by President Ronald Reagan and Mayor William Donald Schaefer in 1984 and dedicated with the inscription to the “Discoverer of America.” The 14-foot statue was paid for by a citywide fundraising campaign led by the Italian American Organizations United of Maryland.

Two years ago year this summer, 19 months after a city commission recommended two of the city’s four Confederate monuments be taken down and two more receive educational plaques, then-Mayor Catherine Pugh ordered the removal of all four.

Lester Davis, a spokesman for Young, told the Baltimore Sun that the destruction of Columbus statue is part of a “re-examination taking place nationally and globally around some of these monuments and statues that may represent different things to different people.”

City Council President Brandon Scott, who won last month’s Democratic mayoral primary, issued a statement Saturday night saying he supports both the Baltimore’s Italian-American community and Baltimore’s indigenous community. “I cannot, however, support Columbus,” Scott said.

In 2016, Scott introduced a bill that would’ve renamed Columbus Day in the city to Indigenous Peoples Day. Scott said the intention of the legislation, which did not pass, was “to honor the many peoples inhabiting North America before its colonization by European settlers.”

Scott said he suggested to former Mayor Catherine Pugh that she remove the Columbus statue along with the city’s Confederate statues following a violent conflict between white supremacists and anti-racism activists in Charlottesville, Virginia.

Baltimore City Councilman Ryan Dorsey has introduced a bill that would rededicate the Columbus obelisk at Herring Run to the victims of police brutality.

In a statement Sunday, Governor Larry Hogan condemned the destruction of the Columbus statue and said Baltimore leaders had lost “control of the city and their own streets.”

“While we support peaceful protests and constructive dialogue on whether and how to put certain monuments in context or move them to museums or storage through a legal process, lawlessness, vandalism, and destruction of public property are completely unacceptable,” Hogan said. “That is the antithesis of democracy and should be condemned by everyone, regardless of their politics. Baltimore City leaders need to regain control of their own streets and immediately start making them safer.”

Several state delegates representing Baltimore County and Harford County and a group of Italian-American activists demanded Young and Hogan protect the city’s statues and monuments erected to honor Christopher Columbus at a June 29 press conference at the Inner Harbor.

In a tweet Saturday night, Del. Kathy Szeliga called the pulling down of the Columbus memorial on July 4 “shameful,” and asked where the police and Mayor Young were while the statue was being toppled. She suggested citizens, “move out of Baltimore City while you can if you still live there.”

“This is deeply personal and an affront to the Italian American community and all law-abiding Marylanders,” tweeted State Del. Nino Mangione, a Republican from Baltimore County. “The city of Baltimore has been disgraced once again. America weeps at this outrage.”

Baltimore’s annual October Columbus Day Commemoration and Italian Heritage Festival and parade, approaching 130 years, is believed to be the longest-running celebration in honor of Columbus in the country.

In his speech on July 4, President Donald Trump pledged to “defend, protect, and preserve American way of life, which began in 1492 when Columbus discovered America.”

The Italian-born explorer’s legacy has received increased scrutiny in recent decades as his brutal treatment of the native people of the Caribbean islands and Central America—including mass slaughter, forced mining, enslavement, and child rape—has become better known and understood.

Popular myths regarding Columbus, long taught in schools, have also been exposed by scholars, changing public perception of the nature of his voyages. Columbus did not prove the “flat Earth” theory wrong. Nor was Columbus the first European to sail to the continent, as Scandinavians sailors had done so centuries earlier. Those beliefs and others took hold in the United States after acclaimed writer Washington Irving popularized an “Americanized” Columbus in a best-selling fictionalized historical biography in 1828.

With the pulling down of the statue, Baltimore joins a growing list of cities this summer, including Richmond, Montgomery, Boston, and St. Paul, that have witnessed the toppling of Confederate and Columbus memorials. Numerous cities across the country have made plans to remove statues.

After the initial round of ballot tallying last week, 36-year-old City Council President Brandon Scott rallied as mail-in votes were counted over the past several days—pulling out a close victory over former Mayor Sheila Dixon in the Democratic primary for mayor, according to results posted Tuesday night.

In a crowded field with 24 candidates receiving votes, Scott won 29.4 percent of the tally. Dixon claimed 27.7 percent of the ballots cast—a margin of 2,358 votes. The final count remains unofficial and is not expected to be certified before Friday. Roughly 2,000 ballots remain outstanding.

Dixon, 66, also a former city council president, became Baltimore’s first female mayor in 2007 after Martin O’Malley was sworn in as governor. She resigned as part of a plea deal after being charged with multiple felonies and misdemeanors, including theft, perjury, and misconduct in office.

Scott will face Republican Shannon Wright, a nonprofit executive, in this fall’s general election. With a nearly 10-1 Democratic to Republican Party registration advantage in the city, Scott’s victory is all but assured in November.

“Tonight, we celebrate a hard-fought victory for the future of Baltimore,” Scott said in a statement. “From the bottom of my heart, I want to thank my family, my team, our volunteers, those who voted for a new way forward for Baltimore, and everyone who believes change is not just possible, but long overdue. Our city stands at a crossroads. Baltimore will only move forward as a city united, not divided. It will take all of us to build a city that is safe, equitable, and accountable. As a son of Baltimore, I could not be more honored to lead our great city in this critical moment and carry the work forward with you.”

Here are five things to know about Scott:

The City Council Elected Him as President Following Catherine Pugh’s Resignation

The city council elected Scott its president after Bernard C. “Jack” Young ascended to the mayor’s office following former Mayor Catherine Pugh’s resignation in the wake of the Healthy Holly children’s book scandal. Scott prevailed after a weekend-long, behind-closed-doors fight with Young’s chosen successor—Council Vice President Sharon Green Middleton. Initially, it appeared that neither Scott nor Middleton had the votes to prevail, but when the scales tipped in Scott’s favor, council members ultimately supported him 14-0.

He Was One of the Youngest Candidates Elected to Citywide Office

A subject in 2018’s well-received documentary Charm City, Scott was one of the youngest candidates ever elected to citywide office at 27. After growing up in Park Heights, he graduated from Mergenthaler Vocational-Technical High School, where he ran track and cross country, and then studied political science at St. Mary’s College in Southern Maryland. He got his start in politics as a liaison in the office of then-City Council President Stephanie Rawlings-Blake, who later became mayor. Scott will be significantly younger than the age of the average U.S. mayor—which is 56, according to a recent study. But the ambitious Scott would be the same age as Martin O’Malley when O’Malley ran for mayor and with several more years of elected experience. He lives in the city’s Frankford Neighborhood.

He Has a Diverse Coalition of Support

In mid-May, a Baltimore Sun, WYPR, and the University of Baltimore poll showed Scott was the only major mayoral candidate with near equal support among both black (16 percent) and white (17 percent) voters. Scott, who also had a diverse coalition of support, led among voters younger than 35 and also younger than 50. His late voting surge in ballots arriving in the final days before the June 2 postmark deadline indicate that he continued to win support as he marched with protestors in the city following the death of George Floyd. “I can talk young, old; rich, poor; white, black; gay, straight; trap house, board room,” Scott told the Baltimore Fishbowl following that poll. “No one else can do that in this race. No one else has that flexibility in this race.”

He Supports Defunding the Police

Scott was widely viewed as the most progressive of the top-tier candidates in the race. He has pushed for reforms that would curtail some of the power of inherit in Baltimore’s strong mayor even as he ran for the office. As the chair of the Council’s Public Safety Committee from 2016 until he became city council president, Scott advocated a holistic approach to crime reduction and for Baltimore police department reform. He co-founded the anti-violence group 300 Men March and is close to Ceasefire co-founder Erricka Bridgeford. “Baltimore must re-allocate its budget away from the current dependence on the police department,” Scott tweeted this week. “We must diversify our investments into agencies that focus on proactively developing our young people and communities.”

He Passed Groundbreaking Legislation Advocating for Racial Equity

Scott previously served as a member of the Budget and Appropriations and Judiciary and Legislative Investigations committees. In 2018, he introduced and passed groundbreaking legislation that created an equity assessment program in Baltimore that requires all city agency decisions—and their operating budgets, capital budgets, and proposed legislation—to be weighed through an equity lens.

No one has ever described  Jack  Young as an orator. Standing at a podium slapped with the city seal next to a basketball-size crater on North Collington Avenue in February, Young  takes all of 90 seconds to introduce his “Mayor’s 50-Day Pothole Challenge” before handing things over to Department of Transportation director Steve Sharkey.  

“One of my top priorities is to clean up this city . . . I encourage all residents to report potholes  to 3-1-1  so that  together  we can improve city roadways,”  he says,  reading from notes for the television cameras and promising to fill 5,000 potholes  in  just under two months. And that’s it, other than fielding a couple of softballs from the media. Which is not to say the man  who assumed Baltimore’s highest office after Catherine Pugh was  forced to resign over corruption  charges  is an individual of few words.  Grabbing a shovel, the former City Council president immediately starts chatting up the asphalt crew. 

To his credit,  Young later seeks  out the only neighbor on the block who turned out for this photo opp.  She  informed  him, of all things, that the city’s big street sweeping trucks came by  too  often—“four times a week”—often  leaving potholes in their wake.  Young had never heard this complaint before in  Baltimore,  and  he asked the woman if she spoke for her community. She assured him, in fact, she  did. (“I go to meetings.”) “Okay, we’ll move the sanitation trucks,” Young responds with a wry glance toward Sharkey. “I’m sure some other neighborhoods could use them.” 

Young  may not be the most gifted public official in front of a microphone. The  entire city can recite his gaffes—“I’m  not committing the murders, and that’ s what people need to understand”—but  no one can deny he has a sense of humor. Or that he doesn’t love the city and look out for its workaday  people. He  seems to have half of East  Baltimore on  speed-dial. 

“I could use him on my crew,” cracks one of the  Department of Public Works  crew leaders patching North  Collington. “Seriously, the mayor doesn’t put on any front. He’s the same with everyone.” 

The night before the launch of  the  pothole challenge, the University of Baltimore School of Law hosted a symposium:  “The City Charter: Does  It  Work for a 21st Century Baltimore?”  Former mayor  and current UB  president Kurt  Schmoke, Johns Hopkins University professor emeritus Matthew  Crenson, City Council president Brandon Scott, former mayor Sheila Dixon, City  Councilwoman  Mary Pat Clarke, and City Councilman Bill Henry, who is running for comptroller, debated potential structural changes to the City  Charter. It was wonky stuff ranging  from  ranked primary voting to changes in the makeup of the Board of Estimates. Some of the proposals have been introduced before the City Council and could ballot referendums this fall.

Young was not there. Nor was he  really  missed. The panel discussion thing isn’t his strength. If Baltimore voters decide in June they want  Young in office for the next four years, it won’t be because of his  strong debate  performances, bold vision, or  charisma. But because they want someone who will listen  and fill their potholes.    

His ascendance to the mayor’s office has been anything but jackrabbit fast. Or likely.

Bernard C. “Jack”  Young got his nickname because he was as quick as a  jack rabbit  as a kid. It stuck, even if it did eventually get shortened. “I  had to have it legally changed to get ‘Jack’ listed on the ballot because people don’t  know  me by anything else,” he says  with a  smile  at  his campaign headquarters at the corner of North Charles Street and North Avenue. He is 65 years old, married for 40 years, father of two, grandfather to four, and proud product of Old Town.

One of 10 kids born and raised by a blue-collar dad and stay-at-home mom (who is 91 today), he delivered the  News-American  and worked in a  local  supermarket as a teenager. He did not attend college, but  instead went to  work  first for the DPW at the Sisson Street dump—“the smell gets to  you”—and then got jobs  in the cafeteria and mailroom at The Johns Hopkins Hospital.  Eventually, he moved over to radiology, first as a file clerk, later advancing to an administrative post where he oversaw the department’s transition from film to digital imaging.  Not that he was always happy as an East Baltimore employee with the way he was treated by Hopkins’  higher-ups.

His  ascendance to the city’s highest office has been anything but  jackrabbit fast. Or likely.  

The similarities between  Young and  Clarence “Du” Burns,  the last mayor to come out of East  Baltimore, are  remarkable. Like  Young , the self-made “Du”  did not attend college, was  known  by his one-syllable nickname, and rose to office from the City Council president’s chair when William Donald Schaefer won the governor’s race. Constituent service was more than a matter of pride to  Burns;  like  Young,  it was in his  lifeblood. Both  loved the City Council, its craziness, daily battles, and real human contact, without the security detail.  Both  started out slowly as  interim mayor and were initially  homesick for their old job. 

Young, however, seems to have gotten his feet underneath him  quicker  than Burns, and has appeared more intent on utilizing the full potential of the city’s  powerful mayoral system. It’s not a coincidence that Young’s first involvement in city politics was handing out flyers for Burns to earn a few bucks. He knew  him  from Dunbar High School, where he went and where  Burns worked as a locker room attendant.

“Du talked to us about getting things done for people,”  Young says, explaining his inspiration for getting into politics more formally in the late 1980s, when he pulled night and weekend duty on the staff of then-City Council president Clarke. “You  could see not all politicians did that, but  that’s  what I wanted to do.”  Young then ran for a state committee position, which he eventually won.

At  42, he was tapped by the establishment Democratic powers-that-be—the start of so many political careers in Baltimore—to fill a City Council seat vacated by Anthony Ambridge in the spring of 1996. He won the seat in his  own right that fall, before much of  the  current City Council had  finished high school. 

Young hasn’t lost an election since. He has spent decades now showing up at neighborhood association meetings, writing down phone numbers, and keeping his word with constituents. (The  notable exception, of course, is  that he  said he  would not seek election for the mayor’s office after assuming the job on an interim basis.) Even as mayor,  Young is still  plugged in—perhaps too plugged in—to the day-to-day concerns of average Baltimoreans. Among everything else  going on in the city, he remains  a walking 3-1-1 call center. (Over the course of an hour-and-a-half interview, he showed off  a recent photo of an illegal trash dump texted by a voter, a crime tip from a concerned citizen, and a phone call from  a  contractor looking for temporary workers.) 

“He  is basically a  moderate,  politically,”  says  Clarke,  referring to  Young’s general policy  leanings, “but when it comes to people in  pain,  he  is a left-wing progressive.”  

He still has his  Dunbar High School I.D. and has  been the  de facto  Mayor of East Baltimore for years. 

“I paid  Jack  $2,000 a year as a staffer while his ‘real job’ was still as a clerk at Johns Hopkins, and he worked tirelessly for me on going to meetings and doing constituent service,” says Clarke, who has endorsed  Young.  “He’d pass on issues to our office and he followed up, making sure they were being taken care of,”  she  recalls with a chuckle. “If not, he wanted to  know  why.” 

In the end, his focus inevitably comes back to two things: “Crime and grime.”

When  Martin O’Malley left Baltimore for the  Governor’s Mansion in 2007, his departure set in motion a game of musical chairs at City Hall that shows no end in sight. To recap: then-City Council president Sheila Dixon assumed O’Malley’s job as mayor. Dixon then backed Stephanie Rawlings-Blake for City Council president. (For what it’s worth, Dixon  admits  Young had the backing among fellow members to become council president at the time, but she asked him to step aside so she could fulfill a promise made to Rawlings-Blake’s late father, Howard “Pete” Rawlings, the respected former  chair of the powerful Appropriations Committee in the House of Delegates.) 

Three short years  later,  when Dixon resigned after pleading guilty to stealing gift cards intended for impoverished families, Rawlings-Blake moved up the ladder and became mayor.  But instead of supporting  Young  to replace her as City Council president, she put  forward  her own candidate to take her position.  This time,  knowing he had the backing of the majority of council members, he played his hand.  Young says his relationship with Rawlings-Blake,  who chose not to run for reelection in the wake of Freddie Gray’s death and the subsequent  uprising, was never the same. He’d  made room for her  to skip the line, but didn’t return the favor. “I felt betrayed,” Young says. “I did. I’d been a team player.” 

Pugh, as if anyone needs a reminder,  resigned last May.  She  was recently sentenced to three years over fraud and tax evasion charges related to her  Healthy Holly children’s book  scandal,  and  here we are.  For those counting, that’s four mayors in the past 10 years with a good chance of a fifth new mayor winning the primary election later this month.  We all know Sheila Dixon happens to be running again as well.

For months after Pugh’s resignation,  Young maintained that he was only a placeholder and would not run for a  full  term. He sounded sincere, but it was a shaky promise all the same. Meanwhile, the musical chairs has continued.  Young did everything he could to hand the City Council president’s keys to ally Sharon Green Middleton. But he lost a  hard-fought backroom battle to  35-year-old Brandon Scott, who pulled the  young City Council  his way.

Naturally, Scott  used his new platform to  launch  his own bid for  mayor. It’s a crowded field of, get ready, 24 in the Democratic  primary, with at least a half-dozen viable candidates and several others capable of grabbing votes.  Political appointments to vacant seats may still be handled the old-fashioned way—with a combination of patronage and arm-twisting—but gone are the days when  Young was coming up and the local Democratic clubs decided who could run for office and  who needed to wait their turn. 

Initially, this year’s Democratic primary  looked like it would shape up along similar lines to  the 1987  race when Burns faced a  young, rising star named Kurt  Schmoke.  Young, it was thought early on, would need  all of his nearly $1-million war chest to stave off a challenge from Scott. “There was the perception that  Du  was part of the older establishment and  Schmoke  would make  the  public schools  his priority, which Schaefer had largely ignored,” says  Crenson, the retired Hopkins professor and author of  Baltimore: A Political History. “In many ways, there is the same perception of Jack, now, being part of the older establishment.”

For  Young,  that  means it’s a challenge  to run on experience given the record  of corruption and dysfunction in City Hall, including now the comptroller’s office, the police department,  DPW, DOT,  and  Office  of Information and Technology—all  beset by mismanagement, scandal, and leadership turnover in recent years. 

But then the race splintered in to  pieces. 

In an early March Sun/UB/WYPR poll, four candidates—former Mayor Dixon (16 percent), Scott (10 percent) former state Deputy Attorney General Thiru Vignarajah (10 percent), and former police spokesman T.J. Smith (9 percent) were all grouped close to the five-point margin of error. Well-funded new candidate Mary Miller, a former T. Rowe Price executive and Obama administration treasury official, came in fifth (7 percent), followed by Young (6 percent), and state Sen. Mary Washington (5 percent). Washington, a progressive leader in the General Assembly, has since dropped out of the race, saying she intended to devote her efforts to serving her constituents during the coronavirus pandemic.

Each candidate essentially has  a  narrow  lane.  Vignarajah, the former prosecutor, promises to “stop the bloodshed” in his television ads.  Scott promotes a more holistic agenda, including looking at all city expenditures through  a racial equity lens. Dixon admits to making “a mistake” and says  the city was safer and moving forward under her tenure.  Smith,  personable  and polished on camera,  says he understands how to reform the police department.  

In addition,  a well-funded new candidate,  Mary Miller, a former T. Rowe Price executive and Obama  administration  treasury official, has thrown her hat in the ring.  

Pugh won the  Democratic primary in  2016,  and,  for all intents and purposes, the  mayorship,  with just 36 percent of the vote.  This month, there  is a good  chance that  the  future mayor may win office with less than 25 percent. Whoever  does get voted in, victory will come with more skepticism than mandate. 

For his part,  Young admits  that  he ran himself ragged after Pugh  first took sick leave and then resigned. (Loyal to the end, he still calls her  a  friend.)  He overcompensated, he says, trying to keep up the appearance that the city’s basic functioning, such as it is, wouldn’t come to a halt.  That said,  Young possesses unique and instinctive, if  underrated, political skills. Close observers of City Hall  dynamics  marvel at his ability to reward allies and punish foes. (Recall,  for example,  how  he  removed former City  Council woman  Rikki Spector  from most of her committee assignments after she voted against two of his bills.)

His aforementioned gaffes—he linked climate change to volcanic eruptions, or vice versa, it wasn’t exactly clear, at a   mayoral forum—also tend to overshadow genuine accomplishments.  (More recently, he urged residents to stop shooting each other because the city is going to need all its hospital beds to deal with the corona virus). He  established the city’s Children and  Youth Fund  and opened local  recreation  centers on Saturdays for the first time since the 1970s. He also helped break the logjam of legislation and lawsuits around  Pimlico  and the Preakness Stakes, which now look like they will remain in town. 

Young also  bristles at the contention by some that he doesn’t possess the idea s to move the city forward. That said, in the end, his focus inevitably comes back to two things. 

“Crime and grime,” he says. 

Whether voters, even those who  know  him well, give him four years  in charge to tackle those things is an open question.  With primary date now pushed back to June 2, the spread of Covid-19 virus does provide Young, who has requested the National Guard deploy in the city to provide humanitarian assistance in partnership with local agencies, an opportunity to demonstrate crisis management and leadership ability.

On a recent late afternoon,  the dozen-plus folks waiting outside the  Henderson-Hopkins  elementary  school  for a bus to Annapolis on Baltimore Day—a chance for voters to see their delegation in action—each  said they knew  Young. Almost all had met him more than once  over the years. To a person, they expressed their appreciation for Young  stepping up in wake of Pugh’s resignation. None, however, were  committed to voting for him.  Most said they were undecided. 

“It’s just time for someone  younger,” says  one senior woman, a member of the Berea community association. 

Her friend, also a member of the Berea association, thought  Young hadn’t had enough of  an  opportunity to make an impact yet as mayor. “I’m not saying I’m going to vote for him, though,” she adds. 

If Baltimoreans felt  the city was humming along , Young’s chances of winning a full term would  be better. 

A  Democratic insider, who admires  Young, put it this way: “If  you  need someone to put their finger in a dike,  Jack’s  your guy,” he says. “I’m just afraid  Jack’s going to run out of fingers.” 

Former Baltimore City mayor Catherine Pugh was sentenced to three years in prison and three years probation Thursday as a result of conspiracy and tax evasion charges resulting from the sale of her Healthy Holly children’s books. Prosecutors were seeking a five-year sentence, and Pugh faced a maximum of 30 years in prison. Pugh will also be forced to pay restitution to the University of Maryland Medical Center and Maryland Auto Insurance, two of the organizations she sold books to. All copies of Healthy Holly in government custody will be destroyed.

Much has been speculated upon regarding how much time—if any—Pugh would serve in prison, and if the sentence delivered by U.S. District Judge Deborah Chasnow would send a message intended to prevent further political corruption in Baltimore.

“If you hold yourself up to a higher office, you’ve got to hold yourself up to a higher standard,” says Michael B. Runnels, associate professor of law and social responsibility at Loyola University Maryland. “Mayor Pugh is just the latest in a series of mayors who have run afoul in these types of getting a hand caught in the cookie jar dynamic.”

Pugh’s dealings are the latest in a series of corruption scandals involving local officials. In 2017, Gary Brown, a Pugh aide who has also been implicated in the Healthy Holly scandal, was charged with making illegal campaign contributions. In 2018, former Maryland senator Nathaniel Oaks was sentenced to three and half years in prison on corruption charges. Earlier this year, Tawanna Gaines, a former Maryland state lawmaker, was sentenced to six months in prison for wire fraud. Also earlier this year, Cheryl Glenn, a former Balitmore state delegate, pled guilty to taking bribes for political favors.

“It gets exhausting to see this unrelenting negative press in Baltimore,” Runnels says. “It’s almost like we take one step forward and two steps back.”

When asked his thoughts on Pugh’s sentencing earlier this week, Baltimore mayor Bernard C. “Jack” Young offered no comment. In a statement, City Council President Brandon Scott did not specifically share his thoughts on Pugh’s sentencing, but offered that the occasion marked “an opportunity to move forward” for her and the city.
But in the past several weeks, local politicians including Kweisi Mfume, who recently won the Democratic nomination to succeed Congressman Elijah Cummings, and friends of the mayor, like former Baltimore mayor Kurt Schmoke, have requested leniency for Pugh. On the eve of the sentencing, Pugh’s lawyers released a 13-minute video in which she asks for forgiveness. At the sentencing hearing, they referenced Pugh’s public service to Baltimore and dedication to the city as reasons why she should not receive heavy prison time.

But in issuing her verdict, Chasanow sent a clear message that the extent and depth of Pugh’s crimes warranted multiple years of prison time.

“Public corruption should be treated with great scrutiny and seriousness,” says Roger Hartley, the dean of College of Public Affairs at the University of Baltimore. “Especially in a situation like this where there was some real forethought behind selling books to large donors who might then be in a position for currying favor for contracts later with the city.”

Pugh’s sentencing wraps up an almost year-long saga, as The Sun first reported on the scandal in March of 2019. For Hartley, the conclusion of the former mayor’s trial marks the closing of a chapter, as the city looks forward toward a mayoral election.

“After this decision, so many people in the city want to move forward with a strong new mayor and a strong government that is transparent, legitimate, and trustworthy,” he says. “I think that’s what the voters, businesses, and citizens of this city are looking for right now.”

After former Mayor Catherine Pugh disappeared from public view over the past several months following her resignation from office, she reappeared last week to issue guilty pleas to charges of tax evasion and wire fraud related to the sale of her self-published Healthy Holly children’s books for political and personal gain.

Pugh’s sentencing will be held February 27. With her guilty plea to four federal felonies, the rest of her charges will be dropped by prosecutors. Although a maximum sentence on each charge could conceivably put the 69-year-old former mayor in jail for decades, that isn’t likely, according to local defense attorneys. The guidelines for Pugh’s sentencing, agreed upon by prosecutors and her attorneys as part of her plea deal, will recommend to the judge a length up of no more than five years in prison.

In the lead-up to the February sentencing, Pugh’s defense team and federal prosecutors will continue to work on their arguments to present before U.S. District Judge Deborah K. Chasanow.

Attorney David Irwin of Towson firm Irwin, Green, and Dexter says that it’s important to remember the presiding judge is not bound to the five-year sentencing recommendation that has arisen out of the plea deal. Each side’s preparation will factor into the final sentencing.

“If the guidelines are five years, you’re not fighting for probation,” Irwin says. “You’re fighting to get down to three to four years. It will be quiet from a news perspective until [February]. Unfortunately, it’s another public figure caught with their hand in the cookie jar.”

As far as the prosecution is concerned, they hope that the evidence they have collected related to Pugh’s admitted fraud and tax evasion will speak for itself.

“Assuming the government has evidence and they’ve looked at her tax returns and money versus what Pugh received for the books, it’s a fairly simple case,” says attorney Andrew Jay Graham of Kramon and Graham, a Baltimore law firm. “This is a hard one for her to argue a mistake.”

Pugh’s defense team is likely to make the case that she has been a public servant and worked to improve the city for nearly all of her career. At the same time, prosecutors are likely to highlight she broke the public’s trust as an elected official.

As the hearing nears, it is sure to spark debate throughout the city. Earlier this week, Baltimore City Councilman Ryan Dorsey started a conversation on Twitter, asserting that he believes Pugh should not serve jail time.

Potentially playing against Pugh at sentencing is a scenario in which the presiding judge looks over the facts of the case, and decides it is necessary to send a message that serves as both a warning and a deterrent to other elected officials and public figures to refrain from this type of behavior.

“It’s more bad publicity for the city of Baltimore,” says Joe Murtha, a prominent attorney at Murtha, Psoras & Lanasa, who was lead attorney for William Porter, the first Baltimore police officer charged in relation to the death of Freddie Gray. “Sometimes judges say, ‘There’s been a history of this, and we would hope it would end.’ For politicians who might be paying attention, you would hope that it would send a message.”

Sentencing judges typically take into account the overall character and personal circumstances of an individual who has come forward with a guilty plea. Between now and the hearing, Pugh’s lawyers will get written testimony from character witnesses, as well as determine who will give live testimony on her behalf. Local defense attorneys say that Pugh’s health and age will become factors that are taken into consideration as well.

“She’s a public servant and who had been entrusted with Baltimore City,” Irwin says. “There’s an argument to be made that you have to make an example of her and give her a significant sentence so that politicians won’t feel that they can do stuff like this. It was a violation of public trust.”

In public corruption cases like this, there is almost always part of the agreement that is sealed. The contents of this supplement could amount to nothing of note, but it also contains any details related to the cooperation on behalf of the defendant. It’s unknown whether Pugh has cooperated with the government in providing information that could aid in recouping money or other materials related to the case, but if she were to do so, it could help her.

“If she is cooperating and there are other people who are to be indicted and potentially prosecuted, the normal agreement that a person makes in a cooperation agreement is to fully cooperate—meaning testifying in a grand jury or trial,” Murtha says. “If that is the case, one of the things you would look for is postponement of her sentencing date. That could also be a significant influencing factor on the court’s determination.”

In the meantime, the former mayor’s resignation, guilty plea, and upcoming sentencing will continue to cast a shadow into the new year and over the 2020 race for mayor.

“It appears to be more bad news for the city,” Graham says. “It’s more adverse publicity. There seems to be a run of that for the past few years. I keep hoping that we’ll get some real good news. Right now, the only bright spot is the Ravens.”

Former Baltimore Mayor Catherine Pugh has been charged with 11 counts of wire fraud, tax evasion, and conspiracy by federal prosecutors, who allege in a 34-page indictment released Wednesday morning that the former politician was involved in a long-running, corrupt enterprise involving sales of her self-published children’s book series, Healthy Holly.

After weeks of mounting pressure, Pugh resigned her office in May 2019 following revelations first reported by The Baltimore Sun that she made hundreds of thousands of dollars from sales of her children’s book to the University of Maryland Medical System, where she was a longtime board member. It’s been alleged that $800,000 from book sales to a variety of nonprofits and foundations—including Kaiser Permanente and Associated Black Charities—with business, or potential business, before the city and state was funneled through her Health Holly limited liability company.

Pugh, who initially called the investigation “a witch hunt,” stepped down after the FBI raided her two homes and City Hill office, and the City Council put forth a charter amendment to make it possible to remove a mayor from office.

From November 2011 to March 2019—a time period that includes when Pugh served in the state senate—federal prosecutors allege the 69-year old Baltimore politician, most notably along with legislative aid Gary Brown, Jr., “did knowingly devise” a scheme to defraud purchasers of Health Holly books. The allegations claim that Pugh used the proceeds of sales to promote her political career, fund her mayoral election campaign, and enrich herself—including buying and renovating her house, and paying down $40,000 in credit card and home equity loan debts.

Pugh is scheduled to appear for arraignment in U.S. District Court in Baltimore before U.S. District Judge Deborah K. Chasanow on Nov. 21. She is also expected to turn herself in to the U.S. Marshals prior to the afternoon hearing in federal court.

“Our elected officials must place the interests of the citizens above their own,” United States Attorney Robert K. Hur said in a statement announcing the indictment. “Corrupt public employees rip off the taxpayers and undermine everyone’s faith in government. The U.S. Attorney’s Office and our law enforcement partners will zealously pursue those who abuse the taxpayers’ trust and bring them to justice.”

Guilty pleas from related investigations of Brown, Jr., and Roslyn Wedington, the executive director of a nonprofit training center where Pugh served as board chair, were also unsealed Wednesday. Brown has pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit wire fraud, falsifying a tax return, and two counts of conspiracy to defraud the United States. Wedington has pleaded guilty to conspiracy to defraud the federal government and multiple counts of falsifying tax returns.

Central to the federal investigation, the indictment highlights, is that Pugh’s self-published Healthy Holly books—generally considered amateurish—were sold to nonprofits, foundations, and others with business before the city and state. Also central to the federal investigation are allegations that Pugh “double sold” books and did not provide actual books to entities that had paid for them.

Among other tax evasion charges, federal prosecutors allege Pugh reported her taxable income in 2016 to the IRS as $31,020 when it was, in fact, more than 10 times that figure. Among the related allegations is that Pugh wrote checks to Brown “to create false business expenses for purported outside services performed for Healthy Holly.” She is also charged with tax evasion in 2015.

If convicted, Pugh faces a maximum sentence of 20 years in federal prison for the wire fraud conspiracy and for each of the seven counts of wire fraud; five years in federal prison for conspiracy to defraud the United States; and five years in federal prison for each of the two counts of tax evasion. It is worth noting that actual sentences for federal crimes are typically significantly less than the maximum penalties allowed.

Here’s further background: After Pugh’s mayoral election, Brown was found guilty of violating election laws for using his relatives to channel illegal funds to her campaign. Nonetheless, despite questions, Pugh did not fire Brown from his City Hall position after his conviction.

Pugh launched Healthy Holly, LLC, in 2011 to publish, market, and sell children’s books she authored. Since 1997, she also owned Catherine E. Pugh and Company, Inc., a marketing and public relations consulting firm. The principal address for both companies was Pugh’s residence in Baltimore, according to the federal indictment, which adds that Pugh was also the sole signatory on the Healthy Holly and Pugh Company bank accounts. Pugh did not maintain a personal bank account, according to the indictment, commingling her business bank accounts for personal and business use.

Pugh, of course, became the second recent Baltimore mayor to resign following a criminal investigation. Former Mayor Sheila Dixon, who assumed office in 2007 after former Mayor Martin O’Malley was elected governor, resigned in 2010 after she was found guilty of charges she had misappropriated gift cards intended for low-income families.

Current Mayor Bernard C. “Jack” Young, the City Council president when Pugh stepped down, has assumed the mayoral duties in the interim. He also recently announced he will run for a full term in 2020.

Pugh has not appeared publicly to address questions about the scandal since her resignation, which was read in a short statement by her private lawyer Steve Silverman at a press conference at his downtown office

“In the best interest of the people and the government of the Mayor and City of Baltimore, I am writing to attest that, effective immediately, I hereby resign from the Office of Mayor, to which I was duly elected on November 8, 2016,” read Pugh’s resignation letter. “I am confident that I have left the City in capable hands for the duration of the term to which I was elected.”

City Council President Brandon Scott announced his 2020 bid for mayor Friday in the Park Heights neighborhood where he grew up, making an urgent case for top-to-bottom change in city government.

Scott, who said he was “tired of seeing the tears of young people who’d lost their classmates” to gun violence, was introduced by Cease Fire founder Erricka Bridgeford. “We must stop the bleeding and address the root causes of gun violence,” the 35-year-old Scott told those gathered. “Baltimore needs a mayor invested in the people of this city, not the status quo.”

In his 10-minute address, Scott reiterated recent proposals and pledges to bring professionalism to city government. “Every agency will be held to performance measures,” Scott said. “There will be a focus on resolving 311 issues.”

By declaring his candidacy, Scott became first elected leader to make a formal entry into the race, which many observers predict will eventually come down to a two-person generational battle between the council president and Mayor Bernard C. “Jack” Young, who has given indications he will run, but has not yet declared his intention to seek Baltimore’s highest office next year.

Young, the former council president, became Baltimore’s 51st mayor following former Mayor Catherine Pugh’s resignation earlier this year when she came under fire—and investigation—after receiving more than $800,000 in questionable deals from her Healthy Holly children’s book series. Young had tried to get the council to name Councilwoman Sharon Middleton as his council president successor, but Scott outmaneuvered her for the necessary votes. Young and Scott have been viewed as potential 2020 mayoral rivals ever since with occasional tensions spilling out in public view.

Former Mayor Sheila Dixon, former Baltimore Police Department spokesman T.J. Smith, state Sen. Jill Carter, state Sen. Mary Washington, and state Del. Nick Mosby are said to be considering a bid for mayor as well. Former Democratic candidate for governor, Ben Jealous, recently told the Baltimore Sun he has ruled out a run for mayor, but is considering running for state’s highest office again. Twelve candidates, none currently elected officials, including four Republicans, have declared themselves candidates for mayor with the State Board of Elections.

First elected at 27, Scott, a subject in last year’s well-received documentary Charm City, was one of the youngest candidates ever elected to citywide office. After growing up in Park Heights, he graduated from Mergenthaler Vocational-Technical High School and then studied political science and graduated from St. Mary’s College in Southern Maryland. He got his start in politics as a liaison in the office of then-City Council President Stephanie Rawlings-Blake.

He previously served as chair of the council’s high-profile Public Safety Committee and co-founded the anti-violence group 300 Men March. He has also served as a member of the Budget and Appropriations and Judiciary and Legislative Investigations committees.

Earlier this summer, Scott unveiled a detailed, 29-page legislative and policy proposal highlighting his vision for improving city government, making communities safer, investing in youth, and bringing an equitable framework to governance. He essentially announced his bid with the release of a campaign video earlier this week.

If elected, Scott would be significantly younger than the average U.S. mayor—56, according to a recent study. But the ambitious Scott would be the same age as Martin O’Malley, another ambitious former councilman, when O’Malley ran for mayor and actually possesses several more years of elected experience.

“Brandon is hard-working, there’s no doubt about that, he’s smart, and capable,” former 1st District City Councilman James Kraft, told Baltimore this spring, adding he was not making an endorsement, but expressed confidence in his former colleague’s ability to handle the city’s top job. “He’d also surround himself with smart, good people.”

The upheaval at City Hall following former Mayor Catherine Pugh’s resignation last week continued Monday night, with now former 2nd District Councilman Brandon Scott earning a promotion from his colleagues to City Council president.

As the next in succession, Bernard C. “Jack” Young, the former council president, officially became Baltimore’s 51st mayor following Pugh’s departure. Pugh, who has not made a public appearance in weeks after taking sick leave April 1, came under fire after receiving more than $800,000 in questionable deals from her Healthy Holly children’s book series.

In the first few days following Young’s ascension to mayor, Scott was essentially locked in a 7-7 stalemate among his City Council colleagues with 6th District member Sharon Green Middleton to succeed Young. Scott, however, won over Ed Reisinger, 69, who represents sections of South and Southwest Baltimore, and Mary Pat Clarke, 77, who represents North and Northeast Baltimore, after reaching out several times to the veteran legislators over the weekend, according to reporting by The Baltimore Sun.

Both Reisinger and Clarke have said they will not be running for reelection in 2020.

Fellow Councilman Bill Henry is planning to officially announce his bid for City Comptroller in June. Altogether, it means more council seats will be up for grabs again after a youthful, majority turnover of the council in 2016.

At the same time, Scott, 35, has all but declared he will run for mayor in 2020.

One Democratic leader, who wished to remain anonymous, told Baltimore magazine the Scott has already signed on with top Maryland fundraising consultant Colleen Martin-Lauer, whose previous clients include former mayors Martin O’Malley and Stephanie Rawlings-Blake. “At this point, I don’t know what he’s waiting for,” the Democratic official said.

Most likely, it was the opportunity to assume the mantle of City Council president, add the title and experience to an already solid resume—and bask in the support of fellow Democratic leaders in the City.

Scott, who grew up in Park Heights, graduated from Mergenthaler Vocational-Technical High School, where he ran track. He studied political science and graduated from St. Mary’s College in Southern Maryland and then got his start in politics as a liaison in the office of then-City Council President Stephanie Rawlings-Blake

First elected at 27, one the youngest ever elected to citywide office, Scott serves as chair of the City Council’s high-profile Public Safety Committee and co-founded the anti-violence group 300 Men March. He also is a member of the Budget and Appropriations and Judiciary and Legislative Investigations committees.

Scott would be significantly younger than the average U.S. mayor—56, according to a recent study—should he throw his hat into the ring as expected. But the ambitious Scott would be the same age as Martin O’Malley, another ambitious former councilman, when O’Malley took office and actually possess a few more years of elected office experience.

“Brandon is hard-working, there’s no doubt about that, he’s smart, and capable,” said former 1st District City Councilman James Kraft, who was not making an endorsement, but expressed confidence in his former colleague’s ability to handle the city’s top job. “He’d also surround himself with smart, good people.”

Pugh’s reelection was by no means a done deal before the recent book scandal and FBI and IRS raids. It’s broken wide open now.

Former Deputy Attorney General of Maryland “Thiru” Vignarajah has announced he’s running. Most observers expect former Mayor Sheila Dixon to run again. State Sen. Bill Ferguson and former Baltimore Police Department spokesman T.J. Smith are said to be considering bids. State Sen. Jill Carter, who proposed the legislation that helped launch the Healthy Holly and University of Maryland Medical System investigation, and state Sen. Mary Washington are two more credible potential candidates.

Then there are folks like business leader David Warnock, former Maryland AG Criminal Division head Elizabeth Warnock, and state Del. Nick Mosby, who all ran in 2016 and could conceivably take another crack.

A potential bid by former NAACP chief Ben Jealous, who won the Democratic nomination for governor and recently bought a house in Baltimore, is also garnering a lot of interest in local Democratic circles.

There is always the chance that Young, who has said he’s not interested in running for mayor, could decide he likes the job of mayor and try to win election to the office.

And that’s just the short list.

We’ve learned quite a lot in recent weeks about former Mayor Catherine Pugh, who resigned Thursday afternoon amid a rolling scandal around her Healthy Holly children’s book deals and allegations of self-dealing and corruption. (Certainly more will come to light, too, in the wake of those FBI and IRS raids.) Less familiar, though not to long-time city political observers, is Baltimore’s new mayor, Bernard C. “Jack” Young.

As City Council president, Young assumed office last week as the next in succession. Here are the basics about Baltimore’s 51st mayor:

He is a product of East Baltimore.
Young is a 64-year-old, married, father of two, grandfather to three, product of East Baltimore. He got his start in city politics in the 1980s serving on the staff of fellow council member Mary Pat Clarke. At the time, the ambitious Young, who did not attend a four-year college, worked in clerical administration in the radiology department at Johns Hopkins Hospital.

Young’s nickname came from his speed as a kid.
In a 1996 interview with The Baltimore Sun after being appointed to fill the vacated 2nd District City Council seat of Anthony Ambridge, Young explained he got his nickname because he was as fast as a jackrabbit as a kid. Later, getting older (and slowing down) it was shortened to a more mature “Jack.” He won election in his own right a couple of years later and hasn’t lost since—focusing on old-school people-to-people politics and constituent service.

Will he run for mayor in 2020?
Young has said he’s not interested. But that has not stopped some from suggesting he give it some thought. Note: his campaign committee has $600,000 in the bank, according to most recent statement filed with the Maryland State Board of Elections. Not a bad start should he change his mind.

He is a nuts-and-bolts politician.
Young does not claim the “progressive” mantle like many of his younger, newer City Council colleagues. He’s more of a flexible Democratic centrist. He’s not likely to talk about ideology or a grand vision for the city’s future, but in terms of water bills, DOT funding cuts, recreation centers, clean streets, and crime.

New mayor took action this past month.
Young was not been shy about making decisions while serving as acting mayor (when with the former mayor on sick leave for five weeks). He put several key Pugh aides on leave, got two top staffers to step aside, and fired three more while she was still out with pneumonia prior to her resignation. As City Council president, Young displayed a keen sense of how to utilize power. Now that he has almost full control of the levers at City Hall, it will be revealing to see his first policy moves.

On Thursday afternoon, Mayor Catherine Pugh’s private lawyer Steve Silverman held a press conference at his downtown office announcing the mayor’s resignation, effective immediately.

“In the best interest of the people and the government of the Mayor and City of Baltimore, I am writing to attest that, effective immediately, I hereby resign from the Office of Mayor, to which I was duly elected on November 8, 2016,” read Pugh’s resignation letter. “I am confident that I have left the City in capable hands for the duration of the term to which I was elected.”

Pugh, who has not been seen in public in weeks while on paid sick leave following a bout of pneumonia, did not attend the press conference. A short letter from Pugh accompanying her resignation, which Silverman read, said, “I am sorry for the harm that I have caused to the image of the city of Baltimore and the credibility of the Office of the Mayor. Baltimore deserves a mayor who can move our great city forward.”

Pugh’s resignation in the wake of her Healthy Holly children’s book scandal and surrounding criminal investigations has been anticipated for weeks.

Ex Officio Mayor Bernard C. “Jack” Young will officially serve as Baltimore’s 51st mayor until the general election in November 2020. Young, elevated from his position as president of the City Council, is in Detroit for a conference through this weekend.

Silverman did not take any questions from the media.

Young released a statement which said he had been informed of Pugh’s decision at 3:35 p.m. Thursday.

“Although I understand that this ordeal has caused real pain for many Baltimoreans, I promise that we will emerge from it more committed than ever to building a stronger Baltimore,” Young wrote. “Charm City is wonderful and is full of resilient people who are working hard every day to move our City forward.”

U.S Rep. Elijah Cummings, whose endorsement in 2016 helped key Pugh’s close Democratic primary win, “commended” Pugh “for making this decision to put our City first.” Cummings also expressed support for Young in a statement. “I have every confidence in the leadership of Mayor Young, and I ask that you join me in giving him our full support,” Cummings said. “Over the past month he has demonstrated his strong commitment to Baltimore and his ability to direct the City along the right path.

City Councilman Brandon Scott, who expected to run for mayor in 2020, described resignation as “a day of relief and accountability for Baltimore.”

Pugh, who has been embroiled in scandal since The Sun broke the story that the University of Maryland Medical System, upon whose board she sat, authorized $500,000 in purchases of her self-published Healthy Holly children’s book series.

The mayor’s book deals, made with companies with business before either the city or state of Maryland, began when she was a state senator. To date, it’s been alleged that $800,000 from sales has been funneled through her Health Holly limited liability company.

Following the charges of corruption and self-dealing, the entire 14-member City Council—save for Young—Gov. Larry Hogan, Baltimore City’s contingent of state delegates, Comptroller Peter Franchot, and the Greater Baltimore Committee called for Pugh’s resignation.

Supporters held a prayer vigil for Pugh on Wednesday evening outside of her Ashburton home which, just a week ago, the FBI raided during a federal investigation—along with another home owned by the former mayor, City Hall, and a nonprofit once led by Pugh.

City state Del. Robbyn Lewis, noting Pugh campaign aide Gary Brown pled guilty to two election law violations, but was nonetheless was awarded a staff position in her administration, called Pugh’s actions and tenure “a betrayal of the citizens of Baltimore.”

Mayor Catherine Pugh’s personal attorney is expected to announce her resignation at a press conference this afternoon.

After visiting Pugh at her Ashburton home Wednesday, Steve Silverman, the mayor’s lawyer, said he intended to hold a press conference Thursday afternoon at his downtown office. “At that time, I will be in a position to tell you her intentions are moving forward,” Silverman told reporters gathered outside Pugh’s home yesterday.

The scandal-plagued mayor, elected to her first term in 2016, has been on paid sick leave since April 1 following a bout of pneumonia.

The Baltimore Sun reported later Wednesday evening that City Solicitor Andre Davis had drafted a resignation letter for Pugh and handed it to Silverman before the lawyer visited with the mayor. Also Wednesday, roughly two dozen people gathered in front of Pugh’s home for a prayer vigil for the 69-year-old mayor.

Pugh, who has been embroiled in scandal since The Sun broke the story that the University of Maryland Medical System, upon whose board she sat, authorized $500,000 in purchases of her self-published Healthy Holly children’s book series.

FBI and criminal-division IRS agents raided Pugh’s Ashburton residence, another home owned by the mayor, City Hall, and a nonprofit once led by Pugh last Thursday morning. The mayor is also under investigation by the state prosecutor’s office.

The mayor’s book deals, made with companies with business before either the city or state of Maryland, began when she was a state senator. To date, it’s been alleged that $800,000 from sales has been funneled through her Health Holly limited liability company. In the wake of the charges of corruption and self-dealing, the entire 14-member City Council—save Council President Jack Young, the acting mayor in Pugh’s absence—Gov. Larry Hogan, Baltimore City’s contingent of state delegates, Comptroller Peter Franchot, and the Greater Baltimore Committee have called for Pugh’s resignation.

Three Pugh aides—Gary Brown Jr., Poetri Deal, and Afra Vance-White —have been fired by Young since Pugh took leave. Two of the mayor’s key staff, Karen Stokes, the city’s top lobbyist, and chief of staff Bruce Williams, are also no longer employed.

Since the revelations of Pugh’s book deals, there has been discussion among the city’s leaders about amending the Baltimore’s charter and the state constitution to enable the removal of a sitting mayor. As it stands, only a criminal conviction can trigger a Baltimore mayor’s removal from office.

A proposed charter amendment sponsored by District 8 Councilman Kristerfer Burnett last week would enable a three-fourths majority vote of the city council—after an investigation—to remove a sitting mayor. If passed by the council, the amendment would go on the ballot in November 2020 and need to be approved by voters.

The city council is also looking at other legislation that would shift some of the balance of power from Baltimore’s strong-mayor system to the council. Fourth District Councilman Bill Henry is sponsoring a charter amendment that would lower the majority of council members necessary to override a mayor’s veto from four-fifths to two-thirds. The council is also considering a third charter amendment that would provide members more authority in the city budget process.

FBI and criminal-division IRS agents raided the Ashburton residence of Mayor Catherine Pugh, another home owned by Pugh, City Hall, her attorney’s office, and a nonprofit once led by Pugh Thursday morning.

The Washington D.C. agents were executing federal search warrants authorized by the U.S. District Court of Maryland in Baltimore, said Baltimore-based FBI public affairs specialist Dave Fitz. The Maryland Office of the State Prosecutor is currently investigating Pugh for sales paid for by the University of Maryland Medical System, where she sat on the board, of her self-published Healthy Holly children’s books.

FBI agents were also on site at the Maryland Center for Adult Training in Liberty Square. The job training program, once led by Pugh, listed former Pugh staffers fired this week by acting Mayor Bernard C. “Jack” Young”—Gary Brown Jr., Poetri Deal, and Afra Vance-White as board members—according to reporting by The Baltimore Sun. (The online page listing its board of directors was not available this morning, the center was closed Monday for spring break.) Brown had been found guilty of making illegal campaign contributions to Pugh during her bid for mayor in 2016, but nonetheless remained on her staff.

Top Pugh advisor, former judge, and Baltimore County Executive Jim Smith, who was cited for an illegal campaign loan before being given a position in her administration, resigned earlier this month.

Arriving at City Hall Thursday morning—where an estimated 20 FBI agents were at work—Pugh spokesman James Bentley II told Baltimore magazine that he’d just learned of the raids and had no previous knowledge the mayor was under investigation by the FBI. City Solicitor Andre Davis told reporters Thursday morning that he learned of FBI/IRS investigation of Pugh from news reports.

The 69-year-old Pugh, who remains on leave from office following a bout of pneumonia, “is still recovering” from her illness, Bentley said. He added that there was no change to announce regarding Pugh’s stated plans to return to office. Pugh said at the start of the month that she was taking an indefinite sick leave on the same day Gov. Larry Hogan called for the investigation into sales of her Healthy Holly books to customers with business with the state and city, including UMMS, Kaiser Permantente, and local developer.

The book deals, first reported by The Sun, earned about $800,000 for the limited liability company Pugh established around her widely derided Healthy Holly series. In the wake of corruption allegations, the entire 14-member City Council—save Young, the City Council president—Baltimore City’s contingent of state delegates in General Assembly, Peter Franchot, the state’s comptroller, and Greater Baltimore Committee have asked for Pugh’s resignation.

Since the revelations of Pugh’s book deals, there has been discussion among the city’s leaders about amending the Baltimore’s charter and the state constitution to enable the removal of a sitting mayor. As it stands, only a criminal conviction can trigger a Baltimore mayor’s removal from office.

Young, formally Baltimore’s Ex Officio Mayor while Pugh is on paid leave, has said he is not interested in running for mayor. His spokesman, Lester Davis, reiterated to Baltimore magazine Thursday Young “is focused on running the city.”

City Councilman Brandon Scott, considered a potential 2020 mayoral candidate, called for Pugh to resign immediately. He described the raids as an “embarrassment” and said the City needs move forward. “Baltimore is a great and resilient city, but we can’t afford to waste anymore time on this issue,” Scott said. “There are many important issues in front of us that require the complete attention of a full-time Mayor.”

In a tweet, Gov. Hogan restated his call for Pugh to step down. “Mayor Pugh has lost the public trust,” Hogan said. “She is clearly not fit to lead. For the good of the city, Mayor Pugh must resign.”

The raid of Pugh’s home, of course, is a reminder of a similar raid in 2008 of then Mayor Sheila Dixon’s home. In 2009, Dixon pled guilty to using more than $500 in retail store gift cards intended for needy families

The Baltimore City Council delivered a short, but strongly worded letter to Mayor Catherine Pugh early Monday morning, urging her resignation.

In a response just before noon Monday, Pugh vowed to return to office. In an emailed statement from spokesman James Bentley II, her office said the Mayor “fully intends to resume the duties of her office and continuing her work on behalf of the people and the City of Baltimore” once she has fully regained her health following a bout of pneumonia.

Signed by the entire membership of the City Council and delivered to the Office of the Mayor, as well as City Council President and Ex-Officio Mayor Bernard C. “Jack” Young, City Solicitor Andre M. Davis, and Bruce Williams, the mayor’s chief of staff, the two-sentence letter urges the mayor “to tender your resignation, effective immediately.”

The call for Pugh’s immediate resignation comes as the first-term mayor remains embroiled in a children’s book scandal that is now under investigation by the state prosecutor. In a story first broken by The Baltimore Sun, Pugh received $500,000 from the University of Maryland Medical Center while she sat on UMMS board for 100,000 copies of her self-published Healthy Holly book series. In addition, The Sun has reported, Pugh received another $300,000 allegedly for copies of her book by companies and organizations with business before the City.

Most of the books, the majority of which were said to have been donated to the Baltimore City Public School System, have yet to be located. Currently, Pugh remains on an official leave absence while recovering from pneumonia. City Council President Young has been assuming the official duties of the mayor in her stead.

“It is beyond thinkable that she should ever return to a role in government,” said 3rd District Councilman Ryan Dorsey in a Facebook post while sharing the council’s letter to the Mayor. “If she has any ability whatsoever to put the welfare of the more than 600,000 residents of Baltimore City ahead of her own self-interest, she will not delay in offering her full resignation.”

‪First District City Councilman Zeke Cohen, who along with Dorsey was among the first elected officials to call for Pugh’s resignation last week, said in a post that in addition to “this unprecedented step,” the City Council “is discussing several structural reforms to our city’s code and charter.”

That said, Cohen told Baltimore magazine, with the General Assembly coming to a close Monday there is no time to make a change to the city code and charter this session that would enable the City Council to remove the mayor from office.

As the City Council and Baltimore residents learned during the criminal investigation of former Mayor Sheila Dixon, removing even a mayor convicted of a crime might not be legally possible. In 2010, Dixon resigned as part of a corruption plea deal after she pled guilty to perjury and embezzlement. As part of that deal, Dixon got to keep her $83,000 pension.

Prior to serving as mayor, Pugh served two terms on the City Council and 10 years in the state senate. The book saga has begun receiving national attention in recent days, including a skewering take from HBO’s John Oliver. Washington Post book critic Carlos Lozada recently “reviewed” Pugh’s Healthy Holly: Exercising Is Fun!

On Friday, the fundraising consulting arm of Pugh’s 2020 reelection organization, TruBlu Politics, cut ties with the mayor over the ongoing book scandal. “In light of recent events, we decided to end the relationship with Mayor Pugh,” David Goodman, a TruBlu partner told Baltimore. TruBlu, which has worked with a roster of politicians in Maryland and beyond, signed on to Pugh’s election campaign in October 2017.

Also on Friday, Jim Smith, a top Pugh advisor and former Baltimore County executive and former judge, who was cited for an illegal loan to Pugh’s 2016 campaign, resigned from his cabinet post as chief of strategic alliances.

Another source close to the Pugh campaign and familiar with TruBlu Politics told Baltimore that the mayor has decided to suspend her 2020 re-election bid even as she plans to fill out her current term. No formal announcement has yet been made, however, regarding her reelection effort.

According to a January filing with the Maryland State Board of Elections, Pugh’s re-election committee has $968,790 in cash reserves. With more recent fundraising events that have yet to be reported, the number could be above $1 million at the moment. In an off-election year, she will not be required to file another financial report until next year.

Campaign chairman Steve Sibel, a partner with Caves Valley Partners, a Baltimore real estate development company, would not comment when reached Friday and asked if the Pugh had decided to suspend her 2020 campaign.

If Pugh does decide not to run for re-election, she will have several options regarding the money in her campaign coffers. She can return funds to donors. She can also donate the funds to charity, as the widow and sons of former Baltimore County Executive Kevin Kamenetz did after he died unexpectedly during his bid for governor.

Pugh may also reimburse herself for any personal loans she gave her campaign. She may also pass funds to other politicians, although who would accept that kind of financial gift from the mayor while she remains under investigation isn’t clear.

“You saw how fast Johnny O [Baltimore County Executive Johnny Olszewski] returned the campaign contribution he’d received once the news broke,” Goucher College political science professor Mileah Kromer notes. “My guess is very few politicians will touch it. It’s tainted money.”

The scandal surrounding Mayor Catherine Pugh and her “Healthy Holly” children’s books gained more national attention last night.

A segment on HBO’s Last Week Tonight with John Oliver devoted almost five minutes to breaking down the events of the past week surrounding the mayor and money she received from the University of Maryland Medical System (UMMS) as part of book deals over the past several years.

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Oliver poked fun at the content of the books and Pugh’s misspelling of one of her main character’s names. He also lampooned a press conference Pugh gave in which she discussed her idea for a Healthy Holly kids’ clothing line.

Watch the segment below, where Oliver calls the scandal “truly remarkable.” (As a warning, there is some explicit language.)

Mayor Catherine Pugh’s most recent $100,000 children’s book contract with the University of Maryland Medical System (UMMS)—a deal made in 2018—has been cancelled and she has returned the money amid a deepening ethics scandal, according to spokesmen for the mayor and the UMMS.

The most recent 2018 UMMS contract for 20,000 more copies from the mayor’s Healthy Holly children’s series had yet been fulfilled because the book’s illustrator had been ill, Pugh spokesman James Bentley told Baltimore magazine.

A member of the UMMS board since 2001 before her recent resignation, Pugh entered into five children’s book contracts with the hospital network since 2011, totaling $500,000. Those contracts were each for a purchase of 20,000 of her self-published Healthy Holly children’s books at a cost of $100,000—in which Pugh netted $20,000 in profit from each deal.

When asked if the mayor has considered returning any or all of the $400,000 from the previous four contracts—or her $80,000 in profits—Bentley said he did not know. UMMS spokesman Michael Schwartzberg declined to answer a question regarding whether there have been discussions between the UMMS board and Pugh about returning money from previous contracts.

Baltimore City state Sen. Bill Ferguson, a Democrat considered a potential mayor challenger in 2020, has called on Pugh to return the money she’s received back to medical system. Baltimore City state Del. Brooke Leirman called the debacle “appalling” in a tweet. “It just keeps getting worse . . . I can’t even decide what the worst part is,” Lierman wrote.

Tuesday, The Sun reported Pugh—through her book company, Healthy Holly LLC—has made $7,040 in state political contributions since 2015, including a $5,000 contribution to her own campaign. Baltimore County Executive Johnny Olszewski’s campaign, which received $1,000, said they planned return the money. Baltimore City state Sen. Jill Carter, who introduced legislation making it illegal for board members to profit from contracts with the hospitals they govern, is looking to donate the money to charity.

Asked Wednesday if she would release her tax returns, or tax documents for her company, Pugh told The Sun she would not “because I did everything right.” She referred to the inquires a “witch hunt.” Pugh did not attend the weekly Board of Estimates meeting at City Hall on Wednesday, nor did she hold her usual post BOE press availability.

Anne Fullerton, spokeswoman for the Baltimore City Public School System, said BCPSS received a shipment of Pugh’s children’s books between 2011 and 2013. Documentation for that shipment hasn’t been located, however. Fullerton told Baltimore that the books had not been sought by the school system, nor were they used as part of any curriculum. She could not say how many books the school system received, but said roughly 8,700 currently sit in a school warehouse and that there were no immediate plans to distribute those books.

In the meantime, Pugh’s top communications consultant said he would not renew his contract with the mayor when it expires at the end of the month.

In an emailed statement to Baltimore, attorney Stephen Burch, chairman of the board of the University of Maryland Medical System, said he takes “very seriously the concerns raised regarding Board members that have business relationships with UMMS.”

Burch said along with accepting Pugh’s resignation, he has accepted the resignations of UMMS board members John Dillon and Robert Pevenstein. The Sun broke the story last week that nine members of UMMS board have business deals with the hospital network, which they oversee. Dillon reported his health care consulting firm received $300,000 from 2017 and 2018 contracts. Pevenstein reported that his technology firms received more than $150,000 through UMMS contracts in 2017. He reported his son made more than $100,000 from UMMS in 2018. In 2014, according to The Sun’s reporting, UMMS provided $25,000 to the Gov. Larry Hogan and Lt. Gov. Boyd Rutherford’s inaugural committee.

Burch also said he has requested three board members—August Chiasera, Francis X. Kelly, James Soltesz and Walter Tilley, Jr.—to take an immediate voluntary leave of absence while the UMMS board reviews their governance and transparency practices.

M&T Bank executive August Chiasera has reported $7.4 million in revenue for the bank from UMMS contracts over the past two years. Former state Sen. Francis X. Kelley’s insurance company has reported $4.4 million in revenue from UMMS revenue over the past two years.

Following revelations of a $500,000 children’s book deal with the University of Maryland Medical System, Baltimore Mayor Catherine Pugh announced Monday morning that she is resigning her seat as a University of Maryland Medical System (UMMS) board member.

In a statement, Pugh said it “has been an honor to have been associated with the important work of the UMMS Board, but the fact is, I have many other pressing concerns that require my full attention, energy, and efforts.”

Pugh also praised the work of the University of Maryland Medical System. She did not mention her controversial children’s book deal, which has prompted outrage from Baltimore voters and rebuke from Maryland lawmakers in the General Assembly. In recent years, the UMMS system upon whose board she has sat for 18 years, approved the purchase of 100,000 copies of her Healthy Holly children’s book.

Since Sun reporter Luke Broadwater broke the story last week that Pugh and eight other members of the University of Maryland Medical System Board of Directors had business deals with the hospital network, the mayor has been forced to amend seven years of financial disclosure forms with the state ethics commission. State Sen. Bill Ferguson, a Baltimore City Democrat, has called on Pugh to return the money she’s received back to medical system.

Speaker of the House Mike Busch, a Democrat like Pugh, also sits on the UMMS board and said that the board was not aware of the private deals others entered into the with hospital system. “Candidly, I was shocked,” Busch told The Sun, regarding the contracts. “I’m outraged the University of Maryland Medical board had individuals on it who were greasing their whole palms by getting contracts with the medical [system]. It was never, ever brought up in a meeting that there were these contracts.”

Legislation introduced by Baltimore City state Sen. Jill Carter, a Democrat, would make it illegal for board members to profit from contracts with the hospitals they govern. Carter told The Sun her bill intends to bring “renewed commitment” to the “best practices of public and private service to the University of Maryland Medical System.” She added it also would prohibit members from “intentionally using the prestige of office or public position for that member’s or another’s private gain.”

The two University of Maryland Medical System board members with the largest financial relationships with hospital network, according to The Sun, are M&T Bank executive August Chiasera, who reported $7.4 million in revenue for the bank from UMMS contracts, and former state Sen. Francis X. Kelley. Kelley’s insurance company reported $4.4 million in revenue from UMMS revenue over the past two years.

Meanwhile, Maryland legislators from both parties are seeking an audit of the University of Maryland Medical System. Gov. Larry Hogan said in a statement that he planned join Senate President Mike Miller and Busch in demanding answers from the UMMS leadership regarding their financial arrangements with the hospital network.

“Like many Marylanders, I have been a patient in the medical system, and I have great affection and respect for the doctors and nurses who serve there,” Hogan said. “That’s why it is so disconcerting to hear that several members of the system’s board have significant financial dealings with these hospitals. These transactions for personal profit damage the public trust. It is not just unseemly, it is appalling, and I have called for an immediate and full review.”

In a statement emailed to Baltimore magazine, Pugh defended the quality of her children’s books, saying they have been featured at the Baltimore Book Festival and Children’s Book Festival in Philadelphia, her deal with the UMMS board, and disclosures. She noted that the University of Maryland Medical System, several years ago, bought and then donated some 20,000 of her children’s books to Baltimore City school children through her company, Healthy Holly LLC.

Anne Fullerton, spokeswoman for the Baltimore City Public School System, confirmed a donation of Pugh’s children’s books from the University of Maryland Medical System, but was unable to track down the exact number or year they had been given. Fullerton also told Baltimore that the donation had not been sought by the school system, nor were the books used as part of any curriculum.

According to Pugh’s statement, her books cost $4 each to print and ship, and that, by charging $5 per book, she earned $1 of profit on each purchase by the UMMS board, which ultimately ordered 100,000 copies between 2011 and 2018.

“I have fully conformed with all disclosure requirements as a board member of the University of Maryland Medical System,” said Pugh. “If it is the decision of the General Assembly to change those requirements, I will, of course, comply with any and all new regulations. In the meantime, I hope that my books have been inspiring and instructive to our young people who need and deserve every indication that we care for them and their future.”

University of Maryland media relations director Michael Schwartzberg emailed the following statement to Baltimore:

“UMMS is in compliance with all IRS filing requirements and has properly disclosed each transaction as required in statute; the threshold for reporting on Form 990 is business transactions that exceed $100,000 per year. There are no contracts for the purchase of the Healthy Holly books, which is a sole-source purchase given the uniqueness of the book.

According to our financial records, the Medical System has purchased 100,000 books since 2011 at a total cost of $500,000. The Medical System strongly believes in and supports promoting healthy lifestyles for Baltimore’s schoolchildren.”

As reported previously by the Baltimore Brew, Pugh’s financial and political ties to the University of Maryland Medical System go beyond books—three UMMS directors loaned Pugh $200,000 in the run-up to the April 2016 Democratic primary. The infusion of funds allowed Pugh’s “campaign to offer free meals, transportation to early polling sites and money—what opponents decried as ‘walk-around” money’—to precinct workers who brought voters to the polls,” according to the Brew.

Pugh won a narrow victory because of her early-voting margin over former Mayor Sheila Dixon. Pugh legislative aide Gary Brown was found guilty of two counts of making illegal campaign donations in the 2016 campaign.

Dr. Letitia Dzirasa, who earned her bachelor’s degree in biology from UMBC and served as a resident physician at The Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, was announced Wednesday by Mayor Catherine Pugh as the new commissioner of the Baltimore City Health Department. Dzirasa replaces Dr. Leana Wen, who resigned in September after four years at the helm to lead the Planned Parenthood Federation of America.

Dzirasa earned her doctorate of medicine at Meharry Medical College, a historically black institution in Nashville, where she graduated summa cum laude. She served as Fearless Solution’s health innovation officer most recently, overseeing the company’s healthcare information technology efforts and business development team. Following her residency at Hopkins, she worked as a primary care pediatrician before moving into leadership positions at the nonprofit Baltimore Medical System, which serves more than 40,000 mostly low-income clients at five locations in Greater Baltimore and is the largest federally qualified health center in the state.

“We are fortunate to have attracted a candidate of Dr. Dzirasa’s caliber and broad experience to advance our agenda to improve the health prospects of all Baltimore residents,” Pugh said in a statement. “She will bring a commitment to reducing youth violence through evidence-based approaches, as well working to eliminate health disparities that persist, even while building on our progress to address the opioid epidemic and further improve access to critical care.”

Dzirasa was selected after a national search, which attracted dozens of applications from a variety of states, according to the mayor’s office. The vetting process will continue with the City Council, which must approve the appointment. Dzirasa will be formally introduced to the council at a March 11 hearing. Assuming she is confirmed, Dzirasa will oversee nearly 800 employees and a budget of roughly $150 million. She will be the first African-American woman appointed to the led the City Health Department and earn a salary of $185,000.

In her application, which Baltimore magazine reviewed, Dzirasa wrote that her priorities, if hired, would include youth violence prevention, improving access to healthy food and addressing obesity, and tackling the city’s opioid epidemic.

Dzirasa is married to Delali Dzirasa, founder and president of Fearless Solutions, and has a 2-year-old son and 17-year-old stepson. She moved to Baltimore in 2011. “I’m one of those people who knew what they wanted to do since they were five years old,” she told Baltimore. “I have a love for science and a love for health and wellness, which became a love for public health.”

Dzirasa said she realized that the her new position has become a high-profile political job in Baltimore. Over the years, city health commissioners have become outspoken policy leaders, including Wen, who ordered on-demand naxolone prescriptions in Baltimore—as well as former department heads Dr. Peter Beilenson, who pioneered a needle-exchange program to combat the AIDS epidemic and Dr. Joshua Sharfstein, who was a frequent critic of drug industry marketing practices.

“[Political leadership] is not my focus and not my goal, which is to help Baltimore residents achieve better health outcomes, but I will always advocate for the health of all Baltimore residents,” she said.

Reducing youth violence, Dzirasa stressed, is critical because the exposure to violence at a young age is generally traumatic. That exposure is also associated with worsening health outcomes over the life of the individual, including increased risk of addiction, heart disease, and diabetes, among other issues. Addressing the asthma crisis among the city’s youth is also a priority, she said.

“I think the health department has done outstanding work and I want to make sure people at the health department feel empowered,” said Dzirasa, who believes her technology experience as well as her local medical background can be of benefit to the department. “We’ll look at everything and see where we can potentially improve even the programs that are working well. There’s always room for improvement.”

Last night, Mayor Catherine Pugh, City Council president Bernard C. “Jack” Young, interim police commissioner Gary Tuggle, City Councilman Eric Costello, and dozens of South Baltimore residents packed the gazebo at Riverside Park for a community meeting to address gun violence in the city.

During a subsequent Safety Walk down Riverside Avenue toward Digital Harbor High School, residents stopped to take a moment of silence for all of the city’s homicide victims this year. Among them was Timothy Moriconi, a 25-year-old who was fatally shot while walking home from a relative’s house in Riverside around 7:30 p.m. on Thursday, September 27.

The tragedy, which Baltimore City Police Department chief spokesperson T.J. Smith called “a deplorable act of violence,” is part of a recent spike in homicides throughout the city, which has seen more than 200 this year.

In the wake of the shooting, the Federal Hill community has bonded to memorialize Moriconi’s life with candlelight vigils, while also pushing for a higher police presence in the neighborhood.

“A lot of people’s emotions are shifting toward frustration and anger,” says Brian Acquavella, a Federal Hill resident, who owns Blue Agave and One Star Country Club in the neighborhood. “We feel very hopeless. How do you prevent something like this happening at 7:30 on a Thursday evening on a highly populated street? We can’t prevent anything. This is up to our leadership in Baltimore.”

On Tuesday, October 2, Acquavella and the team at One Star are hosting a fundraiser from 4 p.m. to close, donating 100 percent of all food and drink proceeds to the family of Moriconi, who was a regular at the bar.

“He was a great customer and became friends with a lot of the staff,” Acquavella says. “When you see someone a couple days a week, it’s hard to not become friends with them.”

In an attempt to raise as much money as possible, the bar will not be offering any particular food or drink specials.

“It’s not about us,” Acquavella says. “We’re not keeping any of this money or trying to drive business, we’re just trying to make as much as we can for that family. We’re going to open our doors like normal and hopefully we can bring a lot of people in.”

Bartenders have even pledged to donate their tips to the family, and some staff members are coming in on their day off to assist with the crowds. Acquavella says that his team is an example of the resilience of the Federal Hill neighborhood, which has been known to come together in the wake of tragedy.

“That is a shining light in all of this,” he says. “South Baltimore is never going to be a place where everyone gets along and has the same views 100 percent of the time. But when tragedy does happen, this is definitely a neighborhood that will do anything for anybody when needed. That’s what I love about it here.”

Less than two years after its much-anticipated start, Mayor Catherine Pugh and the Department of Transportation announced Wednesday that the city’s theft and vandalism-plagued bike share program will permanently cease operations today. In its place, the Mayor and DOT Director Michelle Pourciau announced the City of Baltimore has entered into an agreement to launch a new, dockless bicycle-share program in partnership with Lime, a bike and electric-scooter start-up company, and Bird, an electric scooter start-up, which began operating in Baltimore this summer.

At center of the switch is a focus on offering rental bikes and scooters in a broader swath of the city neighborhoods. The existing Baltimore Bike Share program stations were largely concentrated downtown.

“Responding to the needs of those in our city who desire efficient, accessible and low-cost modes of transportation is the basis of these new partnerships,” Pugh said in a statement. “We’re confident that these new dockless options will actually expand transportation access for residents and visitors across our city. In the meantime, we’ll continue to assess the demand for these and other innovative options as a 21st-century city determined to serve the varied transportation needs of all who live, work, study and visit here.”

Bikemore, Baltimore’s nonprofit bicycling and advocacy organization, said it supports the city’s plan to introduce the privately operated, dockless bike share and scooter systems. It also praised the city’s mandate that the placement of the new dockless bicycles include neighborhoods where 40 percent or more households earn less than $25,000.

“The existing Baltimore Bike Share system has significant shortcomings, most of all its in ability to expand to serve neighborhoods in Baltimore that need transportation the most,” Bikemore said in a press release. “Baltimore’s pilot program is designed to place more bikes and scooters in more neighborhoods than ever before.”

Baltimore Del. Robbyn Lewis (District 46), a member of state’s Environment and Transportation Committee, also praised city officials for “hitting the reset button” on bike share. “Glad to see [City DOT] shifting away from docked bike share to [a] dockless bike program,” Lewis wrote on Twitter. “Most importantly, placement will be equitable, so that communities most in need of transportation options are prioritized. Really well done.”

In ending their $2.36 million contract with Bewegen Technologies, City Hall said both the Department of Transportation and the Canadian-based bike share company “fully” acknowledge “the unique situation and challenges Baltimore Bike Share has encountered since its launch in 2016.”

Less than a year after its launch, the city was forced to temporarily shutdown the bike-share program because of theft, vandalism, and repair issues, which were contracted out to local Corps Logistics in Westport. Before re-opening last fall, Bewegen paid for additional locking security, but the system continued to struggle to keep its stations stocked with functioning bikes. The DOT said after the re-start that along with the return of the existing bike share bikes and stations, the Phase II portion of the planned bike share expansion—to 500 bikes and 50 station—would be implemented as well, but those efforts never fully materialized.

At the time, Bewegen President Alain Ayotte, the former CEO of the vendor of the Capital Bikeshare system in Washington, D.C., said the company had not faced a similar level of vandalism and theft in other cities.

“We are confident that this new partnership with Lime and Bird will enhance transportation options to a great many more citizens across our city,” said Pourciau. “The Department of Transportation will be evaluating the effectiveness of dockless technology in order to provide the citizens of Baltimore with a dockless program that enables bike and scooter share systems to operate without physical stations. Our ultimate goal is to give the citizens of Baltimore the ability to access a robust dockless program that works for everyone.”

Bird launched in Baltimore in June with more than 60 electronic scooters placed throughout the Inner Harbor, Harbor East, and Fells Point. They can be rented for $1 to start, plus an additional 15-cent per minute using the company’s mobile app. Riders can leave them anywhere when they are finished and a Bird representative will collect the scooter.

“It’s clear there’s an urgent need for additional transit options in Baltimore, and Birds are a great solution for short ‘last mile’ trips,” company spokesperson Rebecca Hahn told Baltimore. “As summer heats up, Bird offers a convenient alternative to sitting in traffic or sweating through a walk or bike ride.”

Lime operates in similar fashion, but offers both bicycles and electric scooters, and has already been rolled out in dozens of U.S. cities in the past year, posting over 6 million rides overall to date. According to the National Association of City Transportation Officials, in the last year, the total bike share bikes doubled in the U.S. last yea to 100,000, with 44 percent of bike share bicycles now dockless bikes, which are unlocked for rides with a smart phone app.

Bewegen is expected to remove the existing bike share inventory by end of this month. Current Baltimore Bike Share members should contact the Department of Transportation at 410-396-6802 by September 30, 2018 for refund information.

Baltimore digital content producer Michelle Harris contributed to this story.

Mayor Catherine Pugh and City Solicitor Andre Davis announced today that Baltimore has filed a lawsuit in state Circuit Court in an effort to hold fossil fuel companies accountable for climate change, alleging they knowingly contributed to “potentially catastrophic” consequences of sea-level rise and extreme weather events.

In filing the lawsuit, Baltimore joins a dozen cities to date, including New York and San Francisco, which have launched legal actions against 26 of the most powerful oil and gas corporations in the world—including Exxon Mobil, Shell Oil, Citgo, Chevron, and BP.

With 60 miles of waterfront and an economy built around one of the busiest ports in the world, Baltimore “faces growing costs to protect its residents, businesses, and infrastructure from rising seas and other climate change-related damages,” the mayor’s office said in a press release.

Beyond the potential harm to the Inner Harbor, port neighborhoods and local businesses from sea-level rise, city officials highlighted the potential for harm—and taxpayer burden—from more damaging and more frequent heat waves, droughts and storms.

“These oil and gas companies knew for decades that their products would harm communities like ours, and we’re going to hold them accountable,” said Davis, a formal federal judge hired by Pugh in 2017 to lead the city’s law office. “Baltimore’s residents, workers, and businesses shouldn’t have to pay for the damage knowingly caused by these companies.”

In January of 2015, Baltimore wrote about the already dire consequences of global warming on Maryland’s Eastern Shore, and coming problems facing cities such Annapolis and Baltimore. In the past two years, the Baltimore region—most severely felt in Ellicott City—has been impacted by two “1,000-year” storms.

In making the announcement of the lawsuit, Davis said the litigation was modeled after the legal action that helped states recover Medicaid expenses from the tobacco industry.

“For 50 years, these companies have known their products would cause rising seas and the other climate change-related problems facing Baltimore today,” said Davis. “They could have warned us. They could have taken steps to minimize or avoid the damage. In fact, they had a responsibility to do both, but they didn’t, and that’s why we are taking them to court.

In New York, a federal judge rejected New York State’s lawsuit yesterday that would’ve made fossil fuel companies pay the rising cost of dealing with global warming-related issues. But that decision did not dissuade Davis, who noted that a ruling has not yet been made in an appellate court.

“The founding fathers would approve of this lawsuit,” he said Friday, mentioning federalists Madison, Jefferson, and Hamilton. “They understood that states and localities have a role to play, and state court judges have an important role to play to ensure that justice is delivered to the people.”

The City of Baltimore will be assisted by outside counsel from Sher Edling LLP, a San Francisco-based firm specializing in environmental cases.

According to the Baltimore Office of Sustainability, climate change is already impacting city residents. Their website notes that as global warming continues, the city will face more extreme temperatures, increased demand for energy for cooling power, greater fluctuations between flooding and drought, extended heat waves, and an increase in incidences of asthma and other respiratory ailments.

“Part of what we allege is that their campaign of deception and burying the science they knew—the climate science they knew beginning in the late 1950s—[is that] it forestalled meaning regulation of the industry,” said Suzanne Sangree, senior public safety counsel in the Baltimore City Law Department. “It also prevented the development of alternative energy sources and alternative technology that could be used by the city and so part of what we seek is the cost of adapting, the cost of developing and converting to more sustainable technology.”

“I’ve been coming here for a long time. Since before they closed,” said Shamia Howard, 9, smiling after skated off the freshly laid hardwood—with a gaggle of 15 friends and cousins and aunts—at the grand re-opening of Upton’s legendary Shake and Bake Family Fun Center Friday night. “I like to come every weekend.”

Last August, the iconic West Baltimore roller rink and bowling alley—founded by former Colts star Glenn “Shake & Bake” Doughty” in 1982—closed for major repairs. But without a timetable for a new start, there were fears that the 36-year-old family friendly institution might not make a comeback.

Friday night proved otherwise, with lines stretching down Pennsylvania Avenue before the official 7 p.m. re-opening. During the shutdown, the center received a $300,000 overhaul from the city, including the current skating floor, plus heating, roof, and air conditioning upgrades, as well as a new paint job and flat-screen televisions (turned to CBS and the NCAA March Madness basketball tournament for an appreciative number of non-skating fathers on hand).

“When I shut it down you would have thought I shut down heaven,” Mayor Catherine Pugh said earlier Friday while standing next to Doughty, who sold the Shake & Bake, which has struggled financially over the years, to the city long ago. But “the roof was falling in, the floor was buckled, you were hard-pressed to find matching skates in here.”

Doughty returned for the reopening wearing a vintage, blue Colt warm-up jacket with his No. 35 emblazoned across the front and said that what he liked about Shake & Bake is that it is “an oasis in a neighborhood with some challenges.”

“You’ve got the conscious of America saying, ‘What are you all doing in urban areas?’ Shake & Bake is it,” Doughty told reporters. “This is a model for the country.’”

Doughty brought excitement and fun, on and off the field, to Baltimore when he arrived from the University of Michigan before the 1972 season. One of the game’s most colorful downfield threats during his 8-year career, all in Baltimore, he helped lead the team’s stunning worst-to-first AFC East turnaround in 1975, pacing wide receiver corps in catches, yards, and touchdowns.

The same year he formed The Shake & Bake Band with teammates Ray Chester, Freddie Scott, and Lloyd Mumford.

No. 35 didn’t forget Baltimore after his playing days ended in 1979. Three years later—after 60 months of fundraising efforts—the former Colt brought the $5 million Shake and Bake project to fruition. An emotion-filled Doughty, who grew up in Detroit’s tough lower east side and recognized the lack of investment in Baltimore’s black neighborhoods, donned a white tuxedo for the ribbon-cutting with then Mayor William Donald Schaefer. He called the occasion “ . . . a dream come true.”

According to the Baltimore Afro-American, the 70,000 square foot structure, which also includes 40 bowling lanes, video games, and a snack bar, represented one of the first major black-owned and operated facilities of its kind in the country when it was built. In 1984, Doughty coaxed Muhammad Ali into paying visit, filling not just the roller rink, but quite a bit of Pennsylvania Avenue outside, too. The Shake and Bake is estimated to have served more than a million visitors over its history, including 34-year-old Faunyette Brown.

“I love to dance and I love to skate and I love the combination of the two,” said Brown, a public relations manager at the Maryland Jockey Club, at the re-opening Friday evening.

“I wanted to be an ice skater, a figure skater, when I was 5 years old, but there was nowhere to close by to go and so my babysitter started to bring me here,” added the Upton-native. “I’ve been coming to the Shake and Bake since 1988. I’ll be back Sunday, too.” 

Attorney General Jeff Sessions came to Baltimore Tuesday promising to speed up the deportation of immigrants and implement broad Trump administration polices aimed at curbing overall immigration into the United States.

Sessions also said the Department of Justice was refocusing on its partnership with Department of Homeland Security and other federal agencies to crack down on MS-13, an El Salvador-based gang. 

From Trump’s inauguration in late January to early September, nearly 54,000 immigrants had been deported from the interior U.S., a 34 percent jump over the same period last year, according to reporting by The Washington Post. 

“Under President Trump, our immigration judges completed 20,000 more cases this last fiscal year than the previous one,” Sessions said. “We have hired 50 immigration judges since January, and we plan to hire another 60 over the next six months.”

Sessions added that he supports the president’s proposals to end chain migration—the opportunity for U.S. citizens to sponsor close members for permanent resident status—and prioritize the applications of immigrants who speak English or are highly skilled.

Later, when asked by a local reporter if the FBI planned to pick up the investigation into the death of Baltimore police detective Sean Suiter—as requested by city police chief Kevin Davis—Sessions said the move was likely. Suiter was shot in November while investigating a triple homicide from 2016. He was scheduled to testify before a grand jury the following day in an ongoing federal investigation of the Baltimore Police Department’s gun task force.

What wasn’t made clear was why Sessions, who was accompanied by recently confirmed Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen, chose Baltimore for the backdrop of his immigration remarks.

The attorney general recounted two grisly murders, which were attributed to MS-13, but that did not take place in the city or surrounding counties. The El Salvadoran-based gang is not prominent in the city, according to Baltimore police officials. Earlier in his remarks, Sessions highlighted Baltimore’s violent crime and murder rates—among the highest in the country—before pivoting to MS-13, which he called “one of the most dangerous gangs in America.”

“The people of this community have seen it firsthand,” Sessions said of MS-13 violence, conflating Baltimore’s crime problems with Central American immigration.

When asked how targeting MS-13 would impact Baltimore’s homicide rate, Sessions said, “I don’t know that the city itself has a high MS-13 murder rate. But this region—Northern Virginia, Islip, New York, Houston, Los Angeles—are the centerpieces of the most MS-13 violence.”

Sessions also appeared to deem Baltimore a “sanctuary” city, a description not legally defined, but which could have adverse consequences for Baltimore, in terms of crime fighting resources and grant opportunities under the Trump administration.

“City officials have declared it so,” Sessions said in a response to a Baltimore magazine query about Baltimore’s status in his view.

“We’re reviewing things to make sure of the details of each city,” Sessions continued. “I see no justification whatsoever for any city, any jurisdiction, any state to take the view that someone who enters the country illegally and then commits some other crime should be protected from the federal law to be deported.”

Police Commissioner Davis has said that tying local law enforcement to federal immigration policy “sends the wrong message” to immigrant communities and can damage local law enforcement efforts.

In February, the Department of Homeland Security named Baltimore to its list of sanctuary cities, which in large part is made up of jurisdictions that do not cooperate with DHS requests to notify them when immigrants are being detained and hold them until its officers can be present. That same month, a number of immigrants in Baltimore, including some without criminal backgrounds after arriving in the U.S., were picked up in the city, leading to a pro-immigrant march in Highlandtown.

Baltimore does not control immigrant detention policy at its jail, as Mayor Catherine Pugh noted in an interview Tuesday after Sessions’ remarks—the state of Maryland does. Currently, the Hogan administration does not detain immigrants beyond their scheduled release when requested by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officials. The state does, however, provide advance information to ICE officers about the pending release of immigrant detainees so they can be on hand for their re-arrest.

Pugh described Baltimore not as a sanctuary city, but as a “welcoming city.”

“We can’t be a sanctuary city because we don’t control our jails or prison system,” Pugh said when asked about Sessions’ characterization. “But we are a welcoming city. We support all those who are in our city, who are working and adding to our city’s economy everyday.”

In November, Pugh announced that the city would become one of 11 jurisdictions around the country that are a part of the SAFE (Safety and Fairness for Everyone) Cities Network, a group devoted to protecting immigrants and funded by the Vera Institute of Justice. That initiative came on top of the establishment of a $500,000 legal defense fund—Safe City Baltimore—that was made in partnership with several local nonprofits, including the Open Society Institute.

Mayor Catherine Pugh, Under Armour CEO Kevin Plank, and Baltimore County Executive Kevin Kamenetz joined a host of national dignitaries by signing the “We Are Still In” pledge to reduce greenhouse gas emission in Maryland as detailed in the Paris climate change agreement.

The coalition, led by philanthropist Michael Bloomberg, is an “open letter to the international community” from local and national leaders declaring to continue the fight against global warming. This comes on the heels of President Donald Trump’s June 1 announcement to remove the United States from the agreement of 194 nations to work to hold the warming to below 2 degrees Celsius.

President Trump argues that the deal, as is, “hamstrings” the U.S. and said he plans to pursue renegotiation in an effort to make things “fair” for the country.

“In order to fulfill my solemn duty to the United States and its citizens, the U.S. will withdraw from the Paris climate accord, but begin negotiations to re-enter either the Paris accords or a really entirely new transaction, on terms that are fair to the United States,” Trump said at a press conference.

As of June 9, there are 178 cities and counties, 272 colleges and universities, and more than 1,300 private companies that have committed to “working together to take forceful action and to ensure that the U.S. remains a global leader in reducing emissions.”

The U.S. is the second largest greenhouse gas emitter in the world, and now joins Syria and Nicaragua as the only countries refusing to commit to the agreement. Although there is no penalty for withdrawing, the details of the agreement signed in 2015 by President Barack Obama, says that the earliest any country is eligible to withdraw is November 2020.

Among the list of private companies joining the “We Are Still In” pledge is Under Armour. One day after Trump’s announcement, CEO Kevin Plank released a statement asserting his disappointment with the decision.

“Climate change is real and must be taken seriously by our business community, our customers, our neighbors, and our elected officials,” he said. “Sustainability has always been part of our DNA: it’s integral to how we live and work and is essential to our environment. As a business leader concerned with creating American jobs, I disagree with the decision to exit the Paris accord.”

The impact on local jobs is also something that concerns Carl Simon, the interim executive director at environmental nonprofit Blue Water Baltimore. 

“The economic future of Baltimore is supported, strengthened, and enhanced by focusing on the rapidly growing renewable energy sector,” he explained. “There are thousands of jobs that could be, and are being, created due to strong environmental policies.”

He also added that climate change is an especially oppressing issue for a coastal city like Baltimore.

“Factually, the rate of flooding here is increased due to climate change,” he said. “Science shows the Inner Harbor, Dundalk, and other coastal parts of Baltimore flood more than they used to due to manmade climate change.”

Mayor Pugh said that Baltimore City would adopt a Climate Action Plan and Disaster Preparedness Plan that will focus on lowering the city’s impact on the environment.

“Our diverse natural ecosystems, including the Chesapeake Bay, are in serious jeopardy, yet remain the lifeblood of our region and the viability of our communities,” she said in a statement. “My endorsement of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, including goal thirteen, which specifically addresses climate action related to greenhouse gas reduction, recognizes the complexity of these challenges. As a city we cannot ignore the urgency of these issues.”

Kamenetz said he has been proactively taking steps to conserve energy in Baltimore County, converting traffic signals to LED bulbs, and using GPS routing programs for county fleet vehicles to reduce carbon emissions. He’d like to see the powers that be follow suit.

“I’m disturbed by Trump, but even more disturbed that Governor Hogan continues to remain silent,” he said. “I appreciate that he has accepted the general assembly initiatives to reduce energy, but by supporting the alliance, it would strengthen the commitment.”

Five months after the U.S. Department of Justice released a scathing report on the Baltimore Police Department, the city and federal agency reached an agreement on police reforms Thursday morning.

The binding, 227-page consent decree mandates changes to policing policies and practices in regards to stops and searches; the use of force; interactions with youth, protestors, and those with mental health issues; the handling of sexual assault complaints; and the transportation of detainees.

The agreement, which is projected to cost the city tens of millions of dollars to implement, was approved by the Board of Estimates in a special meeting earlier this morning. The decree also requires that the Baltimore Police Department introduce greater oversight of its officers, improve methods for tracking complaints of misconduct, expand training, and make significant investments in new technology, including upgraded computers in patrol vehicles to enhance data collection, analysis, and reporting.

The police department has already begun making some changes following the death of 25-year-old Freddie Gray while in police custody in April of 2015 and the ensuing unrest and broad public demonstrations. City police are now deploying body cameras and have added cameras inside police transport vehicles. Starting this year, Commission Kevin Davis doubled the hours of required in-service training for officers from 40 hours—the Maryland minimum requirement—to 80.

Notably, the agreement calls for the creation of a community oversight task force of the Baltimore Police Department. It describes the community oversight task force as “essential to rebuilding trust between the BPD and the communities it serves and ensuring that BPD’s enforcement activities reflect community values and are consistent with the Constitution and federal, state, and local laws.”

Mayor Catherine Pugh, as well as Davis, reiterated in recent days that they support putting civilians on oversight review boards. However, Pugh acknowledged at a press conference Wednesday that despite the consent decree, placement of citizens on disciplinary trial boards can’t happen until that is negotiated with the police union.

Gene Ryan, president of Baltimore City Fraternal Order of Police, has stated strong opposition to putting civilians on police oversight boards. He also issued a statement Thursday that said “despite continued assurances” his organization was not included in the consent decree negotiations.

U.S. Attorney General Loretta Lynch joined Davis and Pugh in announcing the signing of decree at City Hall. Lynch is scheduled to make an address at the University of Baltimore School of Law Thursday afternoon and discuss community policing, and efforts around the country designed to build trust and collaboration between citizens and police.

Pugh called the signing of the consent decree “a great day for Baltimore . . . This is about fairness and understanding,” she said, adding that while the cost of the mandates and funding mechanisms remain uncertain at this point, she is committed to pursuing the necessary resources for full implementation.

Davis said the reforms, additional training, transparency, and oversight can only benefit the Baltimore Police Department in the long run. “I have no doubt we will emerge from this as better crime fighters,” he said. “And with better relations with the community. This is a path forward.”

The next step in the consent process will be getting the agreement approved in the U.S. District Court for Maryland, where it has been assigned to Judge James K. Bredar, according to The Baltimore Sun. It will be up to Bredar to appoint an independent monitor to oversee the implementation of the decree mandates and measure the Baltimore Police Department’s progress.

City officials and the Department of Justice said they have worked around the clock in recent weeks to get an agreement in place before the presidential administration of Donald J. Trump assumes office on Jan. 20. His nominee to replace Lynch, Alabama Sen. Jeff Sessions, has said in the past and in recent confirmation testimony that he is generally skeptical of such consent decrees.

The most positive takeaway from the press conference, said University of Maryland law professor Douglas Colbert, who followed the police trials related to Gray’s death closely, was the cooperation of the Baltimore Police Department. “I find it very promising that the police department didn’t resist this process,” Colbert said. “We’ve seen in other jurisdictions where police don’t engage in the process [of a Department of Justice investigation and consent decree], drag their feet, and even obstruct.”

Colbert added that the selection of the independent monitor remains a lynchpin to any reform. “It needs to be someone who knows Baltimore,” Colbert said. “It can’t be just someone who graduated from the best law school.

Attorney Billy Murphy, who has represented the Gray family, Colbert, and City Councilman Brandon Scott described the Department of Justice’s intervention into Baltimore police practices and polices as an historic occasion. “Today is a revolution in policing in Baltimore,” said Murphy, adding criminal justice activists in the city have been waiting decades for such action. “It will be remembered. It is a sea change.”

In its 164-page August report, the Department of Justice investigation concluded that there was “reasonable cause to believe” that the Baltimore Police Department “engages in a pattern or practice of conduct that violates the Constitution or federal law.”

Those systemic violations included:

• Making unconstitutional stops, searches, and arrests;
• Using enforcement strategies that produce severe and unjustified disparities in the rates of stops, searches and arrests of African Americans;
• Using excessive force; and
• Retaliating against people engaging in constitutionally protected expression.

Some of the statistics produced by the DOJ investigation were startling:

“BPD’s pedestrian stops are concentrated on a small portion of Baltimore residents. BPD made roughly 44 percent of its stops in two small, predominantly African-American districts that contain only 11 percent of the City’s population. Consequently, hundreds of individuals—nearly all of them African American—were stopped on at least 10 separate occasions from 2010– 2015. Indeed, seven African-American men were stopped more than 30 times during this period. [However] only 3.7 percent of pedestrian stops resulted in officers issuing a citation or making an arrest. Arrests without probable cause: from 2010–2015, supervisors at Baltimore’s Central Booking and local prosecutors rejected over 11,000 charges made by BPD officers because they lacked probable cause or otherwise did not merit prosecution.”

The DOJ report also highlighted the Baltimore Police Department’s “unreasonable force against people who present little or no threat to officers or others,” and “ineffective oversight of its use of force.”

Someone, it seems, is always stealing Catherine Pugh’s thunder. Tonight, that someone is inveterate thunder-stealer Donald Trump. It is Nov. 8 and, inside a plushly carpeted ballroom at the Radisson in downtown Baltimore, Maryland Democrats have gathered to celebrate what the pundits and pollsters have predicted will be a decisive victory for the blue team, culminating in the election of the nation’s first female president.

And at first, all seems to be going according to plan. Maryland’s statewide and citywide races shake out as expected: Sen. Ben Cardin isn’t up for re-election until 2018, so he’s safe. Chris Van Hollen nabs retiring Sen. Barbara Mikulski’s seat, and seven of Maryland’s eight congressional seats remain in Democratic hands. In Baltimore City—where registered Dems outnumber Republicans 10 to 1—the results are even more of a foregone conclusion: All 15 members of the City Council will be Democrats (though eight are newcomers). And last but not least, Pugh, at age 66, secures her self-described “dream job” as mayor with 57.6 percent of the vote.

But, as the national results come in, things seem far less certain. Several states that Hillary Clinton needs for an electoral college victory—including Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin—seem to be slipping away, and that drama, unfolding on the room’s two giant flat-screen TVs, threatens to eclipse Pugh’s accomplishment.

But it’s not like Pugh hasn’t been in this position before. She has often been overshadowed during her political career, losing elections to candidates with more fiery charisma (Sheila Dixon for City Council president in 2003) and more establishment support (Stephanie Rawlings-Blake for mayor in 2011). But Pugh—moderate, disciplined, and gracious by nature—just put her head down and went back to work.

So, in a way, it’s fitting that Pugh’s moment of triumph is preempted by Trump’s stunning upset. Still, in politics as in show biz, the show must go on, and Pugh is nothing if not professional. Just before 10:30 p.m.—with Stevie Wonder’s “Signed, Sealed, Delivered I’m Yours” blaring over the sound system—Pugh takes the stage to give her victory speech. Surrounded by Congressman Elijah Cummings, Baltimore County Executive Kevin Kamenetz, and all 15 members of the incoming City Council, she strikes an optimistic but rallying tone.

“We’ve got, I believe, a great road ahead of us,” she says, looking characteristically chic in a blush-colored shift dress and her customary three-inch stiletto heels. “[But] we have neighborhoods that need to be focused on. . . . We have 76,000 people who are unemployed. . . . And we’ve got 3,000 people sleeping on the streets. . . . We’ve got to create a more diverse and inclusive government that allows opportunity to spread throughout our communities because we recognize that when you lift the least, you lift all of us.”

It’s an effective speech, and the crowd seems temporarily buoyed, but it also serves as a reminder of the many problems facing the city and the effort it will take to make even a small dent in them. It does make you wonder: What kind of a person even wants a job like that?

Catherine Pugh was born on March 10, 1950, in the Philadelphia suburb of Norristown, Pennsylvania, the second of seven children born to James and Addie Crump.

Her father, a union laborer in a rubber factory, and her mother, a homemaker, ran a house full of love, but also full of discipline.

“They were pretty strict,” Pugh remembers now. “We ate breakfast together every morning. We ate dinner together every night.”

They also emphasized education, with her mother running a makeshift at-home preschool for the brood.

“My father said it was her job to teach us to read and write, and so he went down to the local school and bought each of us desks,” she says.

Because of this, Pugh says she was literate by the time she was 3 years old. This precociousness was reinforced by weekly trips to the library and regular consultation with the family’s set of World Book Encyclopedias, which she calls the 1950s version of Google.

“I thought my parents were, like, the smartest people in the world because if I said, ‘Hey, dad, where’s the Antarctic Ocean?’ he would say, ‘Go get A, the World Book Encyclopedia!’ And if I asked my mother, ‘Hey mom, where’s Bolivia?’ she would say, ‘Go get B!’ So, as a 3-year-old, I would be sitting there reading, thinking that everything I’m reading, they already know. But I do know today that they prepared us to be whatever we wanted to be.”

But it wasn’t all work and no play. Her mother, especially, provided some fun and glamour.

“I had a mother who dressed like nobody else,” Pugh recalls. “[She] used to take us downtown for what she called window-shopping. And she would window-shop in some of the most expensive windows that I’d ever seen.”

And though the family couldn’t afford to dress seven children in the department store fashions of the day, Pugh’s mother found a way to keep her style-conscious daughter sartorially satisfied.

“There was a dressmaker who lived around the corner from us,” Pugh explains. “And if I saw something on TV I liked, she would say, ‘If you sketch it out, take it around to the dressmaker and see if she can make it.’”

Not that Pugh got free rein. There were standards to be upheld.

“There were absolutely parameters. We were churchgoing!” she says with a laugh. “I remember when wrap-and-buckle skirts came out and my mother had skirts made for my sister and me. One morning, I was looking for my skirt and my mother said, ‘It’s gone.’ I’m like, ‘What happened?’ And she was like, ‘I was watching you walk down the street and that skirt just kept flipping, and it just didn’t look good.’ I was like, ‘Okaaaay. All right. So much for that!’”

It’s a lesson Pugh has taken to heart: Appearances matter, but for reasons beyond vanity.

“When I was in junior high school, my mother used to always say, ‘I don’t care what job you go to, go like you’re in charge,’” Pugh told The Baltimore Sun in 2014. “Appearance . . . gets you in many doors. Brains keep you in.”

Pugh possessed both. So after working several jobs to help pay her own way, she set off for Morgan State University, where she earned both a bachelor’s and a master’s in business.

“I’m a numerical person,” she notes.

After graduation, she interviewed for 11 jobs at major banks and got eight of them. Five of those eight jobs were in Baltimore. She chose Equitable Trust Bank, where she started as a branch manager trainee, graduated to branch manager, and then worked as a credit analyst.

From there, her career only diversified. At one time or another, she has been a print journalist, a talk show host, the dean of Strayer Business College (now Strayer University) in Baltimore, and director of citizens involvement under Mayor William Donald Schaefer. She’s still president and CEO of her own public relations firm and a co-owner of a high-end consignment shop in Pigtown called 2 Chic Boutique. In addition, she is the author of three children’s books and a book of poetry. She sits on the boards of numerous institutions and nonprofits, including the Baltimore Design School, which she co-founded.

A workaholic who is divorced and has no children, Pugh often describes herself as “married to the city.” She lives in Ashburton and, for fun, likes to run, play golf, and go for long, solo drives in her Jeep Cherokee, something her staff is reluctant to let her do now that she’s the city’s chief executive.

“I’ll figure out a way though,” Pugh says with a laugh.

Pugh began her career as an elected official in 1999 on the City Council. That’s when she came to realize the power, both direct and indirect, a mayor wields.

She recalls, early on, going to then-Mayor Martin O’Malley with two ideas—one for a public art project in which artist-decorated fish sculptures would be placed around the city, and another for what became the Baltimore Running Festival. O’Malley okayed both, then left the planning up to her.

“When I thought about it, I said, ‘Oh, this is a problem, because he didn’t say, ‘Well, go to so-and-so and they’ll give you money.’ So I’m thinking about the fish sculptures: How much is that going to cost? The artists: Who’s going to pay them? Who’s going to mount [the sculptures]? The first thing I did was write a letter to [Abell Foundation President] Bob Embry, and what I said was, ‘The mayor wants to do this project. I can get you a letter!’ And the letter got me $100,000 from the Abell Foundation to jump-start that project. . . . That’s when I recognized that the word of the mayor could go a long way in getting things done.”

Similarly, Pugh drafted the initial request for proposal for the Baltimore Running Festival, and chose its first sponsor, Corrigan Sports. Sixteen years later, the festival remains one of Baltimore’s marquee events and provides the city with an estimated $40 million economic impact.

But after this string of early successes, Pugh encountered a rare professional setback in 2003 when she challenged Sheila Dixon’s re-election as City Council president. Pugh lost by more than 21,000 votes to Dixon, who then ascended to the mayor’s office in 2007 after O’Malley left to become governor. Dixon resigned three years later amid a corruption probe.

When Pugh’s term ended in 2004, she left the City Council with seemingly few political options. But just six months later, she was appointed to a vacant seat in the House of Delegates by then-Gov. Robert Ehrlich. She represented the 40th District—which stretches from lower Park Heights across to portions of Hampden and Remington, and then all the way down to Violetville in the southwest corner of the city. In 2006, she ran for state Senate in the same district and won handily. And though her goal remained the mayorship, she flourished in the state legislature, eventually rising to the rank of Senate majority leader.

Indeed, some think her time in Annapolis was the best thing that could’ve happened to her.

“I’ve known her since she was on the City Council and then she went to the state. I think that’s where she did her best work because it allowed her to accomplish the goals that she set for the community,” says Edna Manns-Lake, the president and founder of Fayette Street Outreach Organization, a neighborhood improvement group in West Baltimore.

For Baltimoreans, Pugh’s highest-profile success in the legislature was the Baltimore Design School, a public middle and high school in Greenmount West that offers specialized curricula for aspiring architects, graphic designers, and fashion designers.

But there’s much more where that came from. During her 11 years in the General Assembly, Pugh passed more than 150 pieces of legislation. In 2016 alone, she passed 18 bills, including one that provides up to $2,500 in property tax relief to public safety officers who work and own a home in Baltimore City.

“She lives and breathes this stuff,” says Bri Ujimma Ward, who was a legislative aide to Pugh from 2008 to 2010. “When you work for her, the work is going to get done. To me, the general public doesn’t know enough about the work she’s done.”

Ward might have a point. Because for all her accomplishments, Pugh was not able to ignite the kind of groundswell needed to unseat Rawlings-Blake in the 2011 mayoral primary. And she faced a similar battle this time around, struggling to break away from a pack of her fellow Democratic mayoral hopefuls, especially Dixon. Then, when the general election came, Dixon, tenacious as ever, mounted a write-in campaign that garnered a not negligible 22 percent of the vote.

It is virtually impossible to know all the conscious and unconscious factors that inform a person’s vote. But looking at the results can give some insight into Pugh’s strengths and weaknesses as a candidate.

In the primary, Dixon won 170 of the about 200 precincts in the city with majority African-American populations. Pugh, meanwhile, won 69 of the 96 or so precincts with predominantly white populations. Pugh’s 2,408-vote victory likely resulted because while Pugh was able to place second in many African-American districts, Dixon garnered only meager support in white enclaves.

Though it might be tempting to infer from this that Pugh’s support isn’t rock solid in African-American communities, Mileah Kromer, the director of the Sarah T. Hughes Field Politics Center at Goucher College, cautions against such pat conclusions.

“The question becomes . . . whether there was a preference for Dixon, which is one thing, or actually a disliking of Pugh, which is a completely other thing,” says Kromer. “I don’t know about any polling that was done, or any serious focus groups, to be able to conclude which one of those two realities was happening.”

If eyewitness testimony is anything to go by, Pugh seems to connect with African-American voters just fine. On a campaign stop at Northeast Market in early November, Pugh was treated like some combination of rock star and long-lost relative, doling out hugs and snapping photos with excited vendors and shoppers, most of them African American. On the other hand, Sen. Ben Cardin and then-Senate hopeful Chris Van Hollen, who were also there that day, were greeted with a certain arm’s-length politeness.

Oddly enough, what hurt Pugh might not have been a lack of support, but rather the wrong kind of support. In a year when voter frustration with the status quo precipitated unexpected outcomes, Pugh’s endorsements from just about every major establishment figure may have dogged her, making her seem like just another politician. Dixon, on the other hand, may have endeared herself to the disenfranchised by casting herself in the role of insurgent outsider.

As late as mid-October, WEAA First Edition host Sean Yoes was asking Del. Jill Carter—also perceived as an outsider—to justify her support of Pugh.

“Given the fact that you are considered the ultimate outsider, and Catherine Pugh is definitely an insider as far as the political game is concerned, a lot of people were probably surprised that you went ahead and endorsed her,” Yoes said.

“I can see how it could look that way from the outside,” replied Carter, who represents much of Northwest Baltimore in the 41st District. “But in terms of my experience with the Democratic establishment in Annapolis, Catherine Pugh, while perceived as establishment herself, has always been fair-minded and intelligent. She’s also been welcoming to me, unlike many, many others.”

This equanimity and warmth aren’t always apparent with Pugh, who can come across as uncannily poised and prim. But last year, during the Freddie Gray unrest, Pugh made worldwide headlines when she defended a group of protestors to Fox News correspondent Geraldo Rivera. She was also captured hugging a teary protestor in an image that went viral. Predictably, Pugh’s actions angered some and gratified others. But, more than most, she seemed able to straddle the divide between the powers that be and the passion on the streets.

Ultimately, Kromer thinks this is Pugh’s great strength. “You could take the one approach to say that Pugh does not have the inroads among African Americans that Dixon has,” she says. “But I also think there’s a different way to look at it, to say that Pugh is a coalition-builder. Pugh is able to appeal to different areas of the city and cobble together enough support to actually win.”

Naturally, many have high hopes that she will use this bridge-building capacity to advance her agenda, which, for the record, includes restoring to the city full control of the public school system, decreasing crime and improving community-police relations, and restructuring the city’s housing department and replacing its commissioner, Paul Graziano, who has been accused of letting the department become a hotbed of corruption and ineptitude. She also wants to further progress made by Rawlings-Blake in decreasing property tax rates and eliminating vacant buildings. Mostly, however, Pugh wants community development that goes beyond the waterfront neighborhoods.

“We want to bring businesses to our city,” she has said. “We want to create retail corridors where people can get the services that they need in their neighborhood.

“When I look at what’s happening in Hampden, and Canton, and Federal Hill, we ought to be able to make that happen in Pigtown or Ashburton or other neighborhoods.”

If Catherine Pugh is indeed “married to the city,” her inauguration is her wedding day—and just like any other bride, she has to contend with the weather.

The inauguration is generally held in War Memorial Plaza between City Hall and the War Memorial building. But because Tuesday, Dec. 6, is cold and rainy, Pugh decides to move the ceremony inside the War Memorial. Barbara Mikulski, one of the many state and local politicians on hand for the ceremony, thinks the decision provides Pugh’s administration with an auspicious beginning.

“I know she will be a fantastic mayor,” Mikulski tells the crowd. “She already made her first executive decision, which was to move this inside. That in and of itself shows that she will provide common sense leadership . . . so three cheers!”

The crowd laughs and Pugh, wearing a red-and-white Carolina Herrera that she snagged on sale, looks positively giddy.

After several more speeches and a performance by the Morgan State University choir that moves state Senate President Thomas V. Mike Miller Jr. to tears, Pugh comes forward to recite her vows.

Flanked by two of her brothers, Pugh faces Maryland Court of Appeals Judge Shirley M. Watts, raises her right hand, and begins the oath of office. When she gets to the word “mayor,” she hits it hard, breaking into a huge grin as the audience whoops and her brothers beam proudly. She is now the 50th mayor of Baltimore.

In her prepared remarks, she describes herself as “excited” and “blessed” to become the city’s “servant-leader.”

“I believe that everything that I’ve done to this moment has prepared me for this particular point in time,” she says.

She then launches into a litany of thank you’s, mentioning everyone from Gov. Larry Hogan (with whom she vows to work closely) to her old Morgan State cheerleading buddies sitting in the front row. The normally controlled Pugh actually seems slightly overwhelmed by the moment.

But after a few minutes, she catches herself, and, referencing planned inauguration events throughout the city, says, “I don’t want to stand before you all long. . . . I’ve got four communities that are waiting for me.”

Of all people, Pugh knows what it’s like to be kept waiting.

London calling.
It’s only a seven-hour direct flight.

The NFL formally announced this week that the Ravens will be one of eight NFL teams to play a game in London next year. Overseas games are big business for the league, which has staged 17 games in the United Kingdom since 2007, most in front at least 83,000 fans at Wembley Stadium, where soccer is typically played.

Joe Flacco and friends will be there either Sept. 24 or Oct. 1, 2017 against the Jacksonville Jaguars. Whatever happens, hopefully no one makes like Paul Rudd in Forgetting Sarah Marshall, and leaves a bad impression across the pond.

As for this year, after losing to the Patriots on Monday night and releasing veteran returner Devin Hester, the Ravens can still make the playoffs. They just need to win their last three regular-season games (vs. Philadelphia on Sunday, at Pittsburgh on Christmas Day and at Cincinnati on New Year’s Day), or even lose one and get some help from other teams losing. That would avoid a dubious first: missing the playoffs in two straight years for the first time in coach John Harbaugh’s nine seasons.

Get your tea and crumpets ready, #RavensFlock.

Next season, we will play a road game vs. Jacksonville at London’s Wembley Stadium. pic.twitter.com/SqYDeaWk7L
— Baltimore Ravens (@Ravens) December 13, 2016

Pugh, Trump meet at Army-Navy game.
Baltimore Mayor Catherine Pugh met face-to-(hair?) with President-elect Donald Trump in the bowels of M&T Bank Stadium last Saturday at the 117th Army-Navy football game.

Pugh shared details of the brief exchange with reporters on Wednesday at City Hall. She greeted Trump as he got out of his car and she hand-delivered a letter that details what she hopes are common interests: improving parts of the city’s infrastructure.

Pugh offered Baltimore as “the perfect place to target” federal money for the type of upgrades Trump has touted he will make happen during his presidency. The meat of the letter focused on transportation around a redeveloped Port Covington and a proposed expansion of the Howard Street rail tunnel, upgrading aging water and sewer systems—please, not another sinkhole!—and strengthening citywide internet capabilities.

In typical lightning-rod fashion, when he arrived inside the home of the Ravens during the first quarter, Trump drew some cheers while protesters outside voiced their opinions and officials boosted security for the visit. On air with CBS television during the game, which Army won 21-17 to snap Navy’s 14-game win streak in the series, Trump said of the play on the field: “I don’t know if it’s necessarily the best football—but it’s very good—but, boy, do they have spirit.”

So there’s that. But at least sports brought a Democrat and a Republican together for a few minutes, and gave the city an audience.

With @realDonaldTrump in Baltimore I delivered a letter noting importance of our infrastructure needs & need for investment of federal funds pic.twitter.com/61OsajKvtQ
— Catherine Pugh (@MayorPugh50) December 10, 2016

O’s, kids have fun at holiday party.
The Oriole Bird slipped into his Santa suit and hat—where does he get these things?—and joined Orioles players Chris Davis, Darren O’Day, Caleb Joseph and Tyler Wilson, and 80 outpatients from the University of Maryland Children’s Hospital, at the team’s 38th annual charity holiday party on Tuesday.

The kids and adults (well, baseball players are really kids, too) hit the arcade games and shared lunch at Dave & Buster’s at Arundel Mills Mall. Chicken nuggets, pizza and fries were on the menu. Davis even poured a few drinks at the bar: punch and lemonade. And he later joked about how fun it was to get “dominated in games by kids that are half your age.”

Davis and his wife, Jill, a former nurse who worked in a children’s hospital in Texas, have partnered this year with UMCH and they will serve as an ambassadors for the hospital. The Davis’ plan to raise awareness of the hospital’s programs (last year it cared for 40,000 children) and childhood illnesses, in addition to donations that Baltimore’s $161 million dollar man and spouse have already made to the hospital’s NICU unit.

A holiday cheers to that. Now, Santa Bird, we love you and your outfit, but how about that starting pitcher or two we’ve been waiting on the last few years?

1st District: Zeke Cohen
A 30-year-old educator with a master’s degree in public policy from Johns Hopkins University, Cohen founded The Intersection, a nonprofit “dedicated to shifting expectations for Baltimore’s young people,” with two other city social studies teachers in 2011. Cohen is married and lives in Canton.

3rd District: Ryan Dorsey
A 34-year-old arts and community activist, and lifelong resident of the 3rd District resident, Dorsey earned a degree in music composition from the Peabody Conservatory. A Mayfield resident, he has worked full-time as a project manager at Soundscape, a local, third-generation, family-run audio and visual business.

8th District: Kristerfer Burnett
An social justice advocate with community, labor, and affordable housing organizing experience, Burnett is a lifelong Baltimorean with master’s degree in public policy from UMBC. Burnett is married and Edmondson Village resident.

12th District: Robert Stokes Jr.
A 58-year-old with six years of experience as an assistant to former 12th District City Councilman Carl Stokes (no relation), Stokes Jr. received his boss’s endorsement and won a wide-open primary. Stokes has a long history in local politics, working as community representative under former Mayor Kurt Schmoke and assistant to former City Councilman president Lawrence Bell. He studied at Morgan State University and is an Oliver resident.

5th District: Isaac Schleifer
A 27-year-old software entrepreneur, Schleifer won an upset victory in a contentious primary to become the first Orthodox Jewish City Councilman in decades. Schleifer, who goes by “Yitzi,” is a graduate of the University of Baltimore Merrick School for Business and a married father and Cheswolde resident.

7th District: Leon Pinkett III
An assistant pastor and project manager for the City of Baltimore, Pinkett has significant political experience, serving as chief of staff for former City Councilman Keiffer Mitchell Jr., with a background in economic and neighborhood development. He is a married father of two and resident of Reservoir Hill.

9th District: John Bullock
A political science professor at Towson University, Bullock also recently served as executive director of the Downtown Baltimore Family Alliance. Previously, he worked as planner in District of Columbia’s city government. A married father of two young sons, Bullock lives in Union Square.

13th District: Shannon Sneed
A recruitment specialist for a mentoring agency, Sneed, who lost a 2011 bid for her district’s City Council seat by 43 votes in 2011, has served as a board member of two local nonprofits, Belair Edison Neighborhoods and Banner Neighborhoods. She is a graduate of Morgan State University and the University of Maryland Eastern Shore, a new mother, and lives in Ellwood Park with her husband.

Returning City Council Members

President: Bernard “Jack” Young

2nd District: Brandon Scott

4th District: Bill Henry

6th District: Sharon Green Middleton

10th District: Edward Reisinger

11th District: Eric Costello

Pugh bested Republican Alan Walden and Green Party candidate Joshua Harris, who received 9 percent and 10 percent of the vote, respectively. Former mayor Sheila Dixon also mounted a challenge as a write-in candidate after narrowly losing the April democratic primary to Pugh and received 23 percent of the vote.

“To all of my opponents out there . . . there’s room under this tent for all of us,” Pugh said. “So let’s work together. Let’s move our city forward, not backward. Let’s become more inclusive, more diverse. Let’s create businesses, expand business, and create opportunity. Let’s get people working in Baltimore. I look forward to working for all of you.”

Overall, turnout was up from the last mayoral election, in 2011, when Stephanie Rawlings-Blake was elected to her first full term, reaping 84 percent of 45,000 votes cast. (Rawlings-Blake assumed the mayor’s seat in 2010 after Dixon was forced to resign amidst a scandal in which she was found to have misappropriated gift cards meant for the needy.) After that election, the city moved mayoral elections to coincide with the presidential election cycle—and Pugh’s margin of victory surely benefitted from an engaged electorate. Many polling places throughout the city reported long lines, several even experienced technical problems, and many residents were still waiting to vote until 9 p.m. tonight.

Though Pugh’s victory is not surprising in a city where registered Democrats outnumber Republicans 10 to 1, some wondered about the strength of her winning coalition, especially after her slim margin of victory in the April primary. But today’s results indicate widespread, if not necessarily enthusiastic, support.

Also in attendance at the Radisson Hotel was Locust Point resident Sophia Silbergeld, who supported Pugh in both the primary and general elections.

“She has had a ton of experience,” Silbergeld said. “She has the city’s best interest at heart. She said this is the job she has always dreamed of and that’s the kind of mayor we want to have.”

In Northeast Baltimore, restaurateur Shawn Lagergren cast his ballot for Pugh. Though he supported Pugh in the primary, he also said his preference was solidified by a dearth of other viable candidates.

“I wasn’t going to vote for Sheila Dixon,” he explained. “It just didn’t look good for her with the scandals that had happened prior to this. I don’t think she should be back in.”

Cassandra Bridgeforth of Lauraville was even more frustrated with the options.

“I voted for Catherine Pugh. I hated it,” she said. “They gave me choices of the same old crap, or the same old crap, or the same old crap. At least show me new crap. [But] the other [candidates] just didn’t look like they had the power to be it. So I just held my nose and voted for Pugh.”

Pugh, a resident of Ashburton, is a former journalist, talk show host, and dean and director of Strayer Business College. She earned a BS and MBA from Morgan State University and runs CEPugh and Company, a marketing and public relations firm. She also co-owns a consignment shop in Pigtown called 2 Chic Boutique. Look for more on Pugh in the January issue of Baltimore magazine, on newsstands December 21.

If elected, Pugh has vowed to strengthen penalties for possession of a loaded handgun; enhance crime prevention programs like Citizens on Patrols, Neighborhood Watch, and Safe Streets; and establish an Office of Returning Citizens to help ex-offenders re-enter society.

She also has voiced support for increased funding for after-school and youth job programs, a return of Baltimore’s public school system to city control, and firing controversial Baltimore City Housing Chief Paul Graziano.

In addition to the mayor’s race, all 15 seats on the City Council were on the ballot this year. Many longtime incumbents chose not to seek reelection, providing opportunities for new faces on the council, which usually sees very limited turnover. Below is a list of all official entrants in City Council races. Bold type denotes the winner and an asterisk indicates a new council member.

President

Sharon Black – Unaffiliated

Susan Gaztanaga – Libertarian

Connor Meek – Green

Shannon Wright – Republican

Bernard C. “Jack” Young – Democrat (incumbent)

District 1

Zeke Cohen – Democrat*

Matthew McDaniel – Republican

District 2

Brandon M. Scott – Democrat (incumbent)

Gregory Yarberough – Republican

District 3

Ryan Dorsey – Democrat*

G. Andreas “Spilly” Spiliadis – Green

District 4

William “Sam” Broaddus III – Republican

Bill Henry – Democrat (incumbent)

District 5

Isaac “Yitzy” Schleifer – Democrat *

District 6

Sharon Green Middleton – Democrat (incumbent)

Richard Thomas White Jr. – Green

District 7

Leon F. Pinkett III – Democrat*

Tamara Purnell – Republican

Nnamdi Scott – unaffiliated

District 8

Joseph Brown Jr. – Republican

Kristerfer Burnett – Democrat*

District 9

John T. Bullock – Democrat*

Kenneth Earl Ebron Jr. – Republican

Jamie Latear Frierson – Green

District 10

Christine Digman – Republican

Amanda E. Maminski – Green

Edward L. Reisinger – Democrat (incumbent)

District 11

Eric Costello – Democrat (incumbent)

District 12

Frank W. Richardson – Unaffiliated

Ian Schlakman – Green

Dan Sparaco – Unaffiliated

Robert Stokes Sr. – Democrat*

District 13

George Johnson – Republican

Shannon Sneed – Democrat*

District 14

Thomas T. Boyce – Republican

Mary Pat Clarke – Democrat (incumbent)

David Harding – Unaffiliated