In 2007, former Baltimore City Councilmember Keiffer Mitchell had a big ask for the council: reduce the mayor’s power over city spending by cutting the mayor’s two appointees from the spending board.

In the end, politics got in the way, Mitchell said.

“It never came to a vote because I was running against Sheila Dixon” for mayor, he said. Dixon served as interim mayor then, while also running for mayor in the 2007 Democratic primary.

“The City Council members didn’t want to go against the mayor, and most of them were supporting her,” Mitchell said.

Dixon told The Baltimore Sun in a text message that “Keiffer is sometimes not truthful” and that she doesn’t remember why the 2007 measure failed. She also expressed support for restructuring the Board of Estimates, which handles the city’s fiscal policy.

However, 2007 was not the only time politics quelled an effort to reform the Board of Estimates, said Mitchell, who later became a state delegate and chief legislative officer under former Republican Gov. Larry Hogan.

Over the past 30 years, Keiffer and other prominent figures in Baltimore and Maryland politics have proposed a series of charter amendments to restructure the board. None have been implemented.

The current spending board structure allows the mayor and his two appointees, the city solicitor and director of public works, to have a majority vote on the board, outweighing the votes of two other citywide-elected leaders — the City Council president and the comptroller. Advocates for reform say the current structure puts too much power in the mayor’s hands.

Mayor Brandon Scott last week said he would be interested in eliminating the Board of Estimates altogether, but his office didn’t respond to multiple requests for comment on what sort of structure would replace it. City Council President Zeke Cohen said he plans to introduce a bill this term to examine the issue.

Since the early 1990s, there have been at least nine proposals to remove the influence of the mayor’s two appointees from the board.

In 1994, former Councilmembers Carl Stokes and John Cain proposed an amendment to the city’s charter that would have made the public works director and city solicitor nonvoting members. It never took effect.

“Bills that try to take away from some of the power of elected officials usually don’t go very far,” Stokes told The Sun.

In 1996 and 1999, former Councilmember Martin O’Malley, who was later elected mayor of Baltimore and governor of Maryland, co-sponsored similar bills that would have removed the mayor’s two appointees.

In 2002, former Councilmember Paula Johnson Branch and seven others sponsored the same bill. After that came the failed amendment from Mitchell, who ran against Dixon for mayor in 2007. In 2010, the council’s current vice president, Sharon Green Middleton, and seven other councilmembers introduced the same proposal, which also was not brought to a vote.

In 2015, five councilmembers sponsored the amendment again. Those members included Stokes, who had previously sponsored a similar measure, and Council President Bernard “Jack” Young, who later served a brief stint as mayor. The measure was vetoed by then-Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake. A veto override by the City Council — requiring a three-quarters majority vote — failed, with eight out of 15 members voting in favor of the amendment.

In 2020, Mayor Scott proposed the same reform when he was council president, saying the measure would create a government structure “less prone to corruption, more efficient, and more supportive of our local communities.” He later postponed the vote after winning the Democratic primary for mayor, and the vote never occurred.

“When someone changes office, sometimes their perspective changes when it affects their power and influence,” Stokes said.

He added, “I support Scott as mayor, and I’m not saying he’s done anything bad or has any nefarious ideas in terms of this.” But the power inherent in the current spending structure “works better” for accomplishing an agenda, he said.

Asked about his prior advocacy for restructuring the board, Scott told The Sun Wednesday that it’s not “about giving power to anybody” but “modernizing government.”

The most recent proposal came last May. It was introduced by then-City Council President Nick Mosby shortly after his loss in the Democratic primary, but it never came up for a vote. Mosby previously told The Sun he wanted to leave the matter to the incoming council since they would be sending the amendment to voters for approval in 2026.

Mosby declined to speak further on the matter when reached for comment Friday.

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