Entries Tagged 'baltimore' ↓

I’ve been vocal about the 2011 Mayoral Race in Baltimore. It’s an opportunity to break free of the machine and finally put the city first.

But there’s a sorry timidity in Baltimore politics. Everyone agrees we need change. But too many are resigned to the way things have been, and whose “turn” it is. Who owes who favors. But this is a democracy, you say. Every vote counts, right?

That’s not how things have been. In Baltimore, the fix has always been in. However, last year we started to see the machine creak. Upstart young candidate Bill Ferguson unseated 27-year incumbent George Della. Gregg Bernstein defeated long-time incumbent Pat Jessamy. Cynics would point out that Ferguson was adopted by a clique of developers, or that Jessamy ran a horrible, entitled campaign. But still, this wasn’t how it was supposed to be.

There is other evidence of the decline and fall of the system. Ridiculous and incompetent Belinda Conaway filed a $21M suit against a blogger – which backfired. Now her challenger Nick Mosby has a real shot at upending the ludicrous and long-time Conaway “three bears” platform. And her father Frank appears more ridiculous every day.

I want more for Baltimore. That’s why I’ve supported Otis Rolley in his campaign for mayor. I’m simply tired of business-as-usual in Baltimore.

Specifically, I’m tired of developers being offered tax breaks in exchange for campaign contributions. I’m tired of city contractors being given lucrative no-bid contracts in exchange for campaign contributions. I’m tired of the same old tribe of corrupt, cynical power brokers doing what they have always done.

A vote for Otis is a vote for new blood – and for entirely different people. Don’t kid yourself. When you vote, you’re not voting for policies or a platform. You’re voting for a power structure. You’re voting for a group of people.

• Stephanie’s people: out-of-state contractors, developers, city contractors, democratic party operatives, county-based people with interests in the city, friends of her father’s, the Governor, the Governor’s brother, attorneys, KAGRO (the trade group that represents the Korean corner-grocers profiting from Baltimore’s food deserts), casino operators, scrap metal dealers, city employees. These people have either “paid to play” or are actively benefiting from the decline, fall, and eventual ruin of Baltimore – or want to have a finger on exactly how Baltimore is run.
• Otis Rolley’s people: real citizens of Baltimore (rich and poor; more individual donations than any other candidate); tech people, urban farming people, entrepreneurs, designers, patrons of the arts, folks from ALL of Baltimore’s neighborhoods.
• Catherine Pugh’s people: contacts from her work in Annapolis, aerospace contractors (?), some decent and concerned folks throughout Baltimore, a computer repair shop on Fayette street, Scott Donahoo (used car dealer).
• Jody Landers’ people: folks primarily concerned with the property tax issue, strong base in NE Baltimore, realtors, and many individuals associated with real-estate issues and encouraging residency in the city. (Ed. note: this post previously made reference to Live Baltimore, on whose board of directors I serve. There was no intention to associate Live Baltimore with any candidate or agenda.) Not many others.

I like and respect Jody Landers and Catherine Pugh. However, I had hoped that Jody would weigh his chances, drop out of the race, and back Otis. I, and others, asked him to do just that. And I think Catherine Pugh can do more for Baltimore by continuing to serve as a State Senator in Annapolis. She had nothing to lose by running for Mayor.

The conventional wisdom (The Sun, with its one poll and its feeble, lackluster endorsement of Rawlings-Blake) says that the fix is in, and we should just accept our fate.

There is one way that this race can end differently, and that is to turn out votes for Otis Rolley tomorrow.

The same set of jaded old political pundits (Barry Rascovar, Frasier Smith, Matthew Crenson – I’m looking at you) who will tell you that the “race is in the bag” for Stephanie are the same ones who also predict that turnout will be atrociously low on Tuesday.

Wonder why that would be? Maybe folks are tired of being told how to vote, and that races are over before they start.

It’s true. The internet and social media are not the drivers of voting behavior in Baltimore yet. But the Ferguson, Bernstein, Mosby, Ramos, and Rolley candidacies have received a boost from discussion by “networked citizens” that is unprecedented in Baltimore. And that’s something that the Sun’s lone pollster and our 1980′s era political pundits seem incapable of understanding. And the sentiment on Twitter has been overwhelmingly in favor of Otis Rolley (with almost no mention of Sen. Pugh, and few positive comments for the Mayor.)

It’s impossible to predict the outcome of tomorrow’s race. But know this: YOU can change it. You have a voice. Go vote. Get others to vote. Baltimore deserves that.

And beyond tomorrow, there’s another truth: 5th most violent, the 6th dirtiest and the 7th most murderous is no longer good enough for Baltimore.

To all those who say “stay the course,” please get out of the way. Baltimore deserves the best. We’re done waiting.

Check out Tom Loveland’s insider view of this election (and accompanying post). The reality will surprise you.

Otis Rolley delivers this powerful “closing argument” on why you should choose him as your next Mayor.

Otis shows his deep love for Baltimore, and understanding of cities, at TEDxMidAtlantic 2010.

A public official is said to be corrupt when they place their own personal gain ahead of the people whom they are supposed to serve.

I have come to believe that, based on this simple definition, Baltimore’s interim Mayor is corrupt. Here is why.

In the 2007 Mayoral election, there were just 86,125 votes cast, in a city of 640,000 people. Sheila Dixon won that election with 54,381 votes, a majority and 63% of the vote.

It’s quite likely that turnout in the September 2011 primary will be comparable. Early polls indicate that in the current four-way race between Stephanie Rawlings-Blake, Otis Rolley, Jody Landers, and Catherine Pugh, the winning candidate will need just over 30,000 votes.

Reports indicate that Rawlings-Blake has raised and will spend close to $2 Million in her attempt to capture that pool of about 30,000 votes.

That’s $67 per vote.

Under pressure to compete with her, the other candidates will, combined, likely raise another $1 Million or more. That means that in total, over $3 Million will be spent on this election. Overall, that’s about $37 per vote.

If Ms. Rawlings-Blake has such a knack for fundraising, perhaps she should be out rounding up money to keep rec centers and pools open.

If she had said that she was capping her total fundraising for this election at $500,000, and devoting her time and energy to working for the city she professes to love, that would have been a tremendous gesture. And it would show true magnanimity, and foster a renewal of public trust.

Instead, she has abused the power of her office to aid her campaign fundraising. To me, gift cards or not, that is corrupt behavior. I want a mayor that’s out working for my city, striking imaginative deals that shape our future in a meaningful way, and creating a real dialog with citizens. Instead, we get a Mayor that hides from candidates forums and refuses debates, but finds time to play I-Spy as part of a campaign stunt.

I want a mayor that’s learning from best practices from all over the world instead of mired in local political drama and grooming her enemies-list.

It’s not time to “give her a chance,” it’s time for her to find a new gig. She’s been in office for 17 years. She’s had her chance. If you want someone to preside over decline, she seems to be capable of doing a middling job of that. If you want someone to lead the city into the future, we need someone who can lead, and who thinks about the future.

As Baltimore’s Grand Prix fiasco approaches (brilliantly, comically placed and timed in a tidal basin at the height of hurricane season), ask yourself if it represents meaningful leadership. Ask yourself if it is corrupt leadership.

I believe it’s bread and circuses. I believe it is rule by cronies and developers. And I believe it is political puppetry of the highest form; the Mayor is wired to do the bidding of Governor O’Malley. I don’t want four more years of that. I want out. What’s best for the Governor may or may not be best for Baltimore. That should be self-evident to any thinking person.

You may know that I was an early and vocal supporter of Otis Rolley. And I stand behind Otis today. We can debate the specifics of his plans, but at least he has real plans and ideas, and is open to input and discussion. And he will put Baltimore and its citizens first.

So when you vote on September 13 (YES, September 13 – it’s the primary that will decide this election, not the General) ask yourself whether you’re going to let the Mayor get her money’s-worth.

Will you let your vote be bought for $67?

The biggest problem facing American cities is a lack of imagination, and it is rooted in a clinical diagnosis.

The human brain is well suited to two basic tasks: raw survival and creative problem solving.

Raw survival is mediated by the amygdala, a small almond-shaped segment of the early human brain. The amygdala well suited at playing zero-sum games (ones where there can be only one winner and one loser).

Our frontal cortex, by contrast, is relatively new, and is the center of imaginative and creative thinking.

It turns out that prolonged stress diminishes the function of the frontal cortex and shifts more brain function to the amygdala.

Neuroscientist Bruce McEwen coined the phrase “allostatic load” to characterize the condition of being under continual stress – particularly stress for survival. Being in this state of hyperarousal floods the body with adrenalin and cortisol, and it can be quite energizing.

Unfortunately it has the effect of diminishing the function of our frontal cortex, and enhancing the fight-or-flight impulses mediated by the amygdala.

Many city leaders in the United States have been raised and trained under conditions of allostatic load. This kind of prolonged stress causes people to make defensive, pragmatic choices rather than perform the kind of long-term, imaginative thinking required for good leadership.

“Failure of Imagination”

The 9/11 Commission Report concluded that the reason that the September 11, 2001 attacks were not prevented was because of a “failure of imagination.”

Is it surprising that the government of the United States, embroiled as it was in name-calling and a plethora of stop-the-other-guy tactics, failed to imagine the possibility of a motivated terrorist organization?

How imaginative can the country be when our primary concern is beating out the other party? Our amygdalas have been in charge when our frontal cortexes should be front-and-center.

Baltimore

When I hear government officials, including our current Mayor, talk about how schools, services, and safety are all that people want, I hear allostatic load talking. It favors expedient answers, not the best answers. The best answers would be those that used creative problem solving to realize a new future that few dare envision.

Competent services efficiently delivered are not enough. We need imagination. We need creativity and the power of a dream state. We need politicians and press that have the ability to look beyond the day-to-day bickering of politics and into what it means to be an effective city on planet Earth in the year 2020.

To do otherwise is to sell our city short. I don’t know about you, but I want my leaders to use their whole brains, not just their flight-or-flight reflexes.

You can read more about allostatic load in this article, “Is the life you’re living worth the price you’re paying to live it?” in Harvard Business Review, as recommended to me by my friend Shuchi Rana.

Newly-elected Maryland State Senator Bill Ferguson was recently named to the Baltimore Business Journal‘s Power 20. This week they asked me, as a friend of Bill’s and member of a previous Power 20 cohort, to comment on Bill’s relationship with and use of power.

“Bill is a curious, humble, and earnest young man, and he represents a true shift in how power is conferred in this town,” I said. “He didn’t work his way up through the ranks and spend a few years as a city council person, or wait his turn. Bill was able to win because of a shift in political power that’s taking place right now. He derives his power from the people, not from the system.”

Political power is now being conferred through the accumulation of weak and strong ties with citizens, and no longer by top-down power structures, power-brokers, and kingmakers. Don’t get me wrong; those folks still have an impact (they did in Bill Ferguson’s race – they got behind him when it was clear he was onto something), but that impact is waning. And things that were previously unthinkable are now possible.

It may seem like hyperbole to compare the situation in Baltimore to what took place over the last three weeks in Egypt. But it’s an apt comparison.

For decades in both places, people have felt marginalized by a top-down, tone-deaf government that was more interested in its own well-being than that of its citizens. In both places, decades of neglect and mismanagement have led to a serious crisis of confidence.

People are fed up. They’re tired of feeling marginalized, the failed programs, the broken promises, the lack of accountability and the inability to implement imaginative solutions. For 60 years, Baltimore’s population has been in decline, and places in decline have not had the benefit of oversight, dollars, or creative leaders. Instead, corruption (explicit or implicit) festers.

The Perfect Storm

Several factors are emerging all at once:

• Young people want to live near their work and are tired of commuting (and they’ll accept a pay cut to do it)
• Our roads are full and can no longer be meaningfully expanded due to lack of space and funds
• Fuel costs are projected to rise as China’s demand grows exponentially
• Online networks are having a meaningful impact on real-world relationships and politics

These factors, combined, have made Baltimore the most important jurisdiction in Maryland – practically overnight. Yet our leadership has not caught up with this reality.

Baltimore’s recent rise to relevance combined with the power of communications networks will create stark shifts in the power structure.

Two Kinds of Leaders

Today we have a choice between two kinds of leaders. We can choose between the leaders that the system hands us, or we can choose to put our faith in new, emerging leaders with whom citizens have a legitimate connection and a voice.

It is sadly telling that Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake’s much-promoted (Orwellian, broadcast-oriented) Safer City social media campaign follows just one person on Twitter: the Mayor herself. And it has just 78 followers. Why? Because it’s all for show, and no one legitimately cares about a program to mitigate a problem – people actually want to solve it at the root. To hell with a Safer City: give me a city where everyone can earn a living, and I can bet you it’ll be safer.

But our politicians don’t know that, because they have not taken the time to benchmark ourselves against other cities or learn from best practices elsewhere. Baltimore has more cops per capita than any other city. Why is that?

Because we need them. Why do we need them? Because we have a lot of crime. Why do we have a lot of crime? Because we have no middle class. Why do we have no middle class? Because we have not seriously focused on enabling small business formation, which is the number one driver of jobs. Instead we have given tax handouts to fatcat developers so they can build big projects and enrich their cronies.

Yes, clearly the cure is more cops. As the Mayor told the Baltimore Sun’s Justin Fenton, “Maybe we could do without as many officers, but that’s not what the public wants. They want more patrolmen on the street. They want more police in the neighborhood.”

No, Madam Mayor. What the public really wants is for these root cause issues to be addressed. It takes true leadership and understanding to go beyond just treating the symptoms.

Accelerating Change

Some have called the recent events in Egypt “the Twitter and Facebook revolution.” A few have scoffed at the idea that these tools could spark a revolution and cite eons of revolutionary precedent as proof. But it’s a mistake to dismiss their role.

Online networks are accelerants. They create connections passively where none might otherwise exist. Critical mass for change comes when the density of connections between people reaches a threshold level. Ideas spread between networks instantly. What might have taken 10 years before now takes 1 year.

The Soviet regime could never have survived in the age of networks. Iraq would have collapsed under its own weight if given time and these tools.

And the same repressive structures will fall in Baltimore, for the same reasons.

To quote Gandhi: “First they ignore you. Then they laugh at you. Then they fight you. Then you win.”