The Baltimore City Council has 14 members, each representing a geographic district, with one city council president elected at-large. Ballot Question H asks voters if they think the number of members should be eight.
The Baltimore City Council costs taxpayers about $10.5 million per year out of the city’s $3.4 billion budget. That supports a staff of about 80 people; including people who answer phones, attend community meetings, research and write legislation. Then of course there’s the council people themselves.
Jovani Patterson thinks that by slashing the size of that office, the city can redirect funding elsewhere.
“Streets, quality of life, crime, education, where you know we’re going to need those funds, you know, instead of maintaining the status quo,” he says during an interview from the Easterwood/Sandtown park in West Baltimore.
Patterson is the chairman of P.E.A.C.E., or People for Elected Accountability and Civic Engagement. He says the group has never commissioned a study or collected data to back up their theory.
Still, Patterson, a former Republican candidate for Baltimore City Council President, thinks a smaller council would be pressured to perform better.
“You have more eyes on your job, right? More eyes looking at your position. You know that that kind of ‘Oh, I gotta, I need to do something. I need to perform… deliver results for my community,’” explaining that in his rationale, it’s easiest to have more public scrutiny on a smaller group than a larger one.
Furthermore, he claims it would “right size” the council. Reducing the council makes sense, he thinks, for a city that is losing population.
The Baltimore City Charter Commission, a group tasked with reviewing and studying the city charter, wrote in a report this summer that the council should introduce an amendment to reduce the number of councilmembers from 14 down to 12.
Yet, Question H is entirely funded by over $400,000 from one person: David Smith, the billionaire chairman of Sinclair Broadcast Group. Smith now owns the Baltimore Sun, and Sinclair owns local TV station Fox 45.
Smith, known for his conservative views, no longer lives in Baltimore City. He also heavily financed Question K, the successful ballot question in 2022 that set term limits for Baltimore City’s elected officials. In a meeting with Sun staffers earlier this year he called that a “test” to see if he could influence local government.
Patterson also spearheaded Question K with P.E.A.C.E. He described Smith as “very supportive of what we're doing.”
According to financial disclosures, Smith hasn’t donated since February and the group has done little in advertising or signage. They have barely $5,000 on hand and haven’t spent in months. Fox 45 and the Baltimore Sun have both done series on assessing the “effectiveness” of the council while Patterson himself has done most of the campaigning by appearing on local news shows.
The odds are in P.E.A.C.E. and Patterson’s favor: out of 147 ballot measures since 1999, only one has been rejected.
City councilmembers and Mayor Brandon Scott aren’t pleased about the effort. Opposition has been swift and strong.
“[Smith] and other like minded folks like him, are trying to buy up Baltimore City to the highest bidder and make our city more dysfunctional,” Courtney Jenkins tells a Baltimore resident during a September canvassing event.
Jenkins, president of Baltimore AFL-CIO, is part of Stop Sinclair, an opposition group spearheaded by city council members and labor unions, aggressively campaigning to stop Question H. They think voters should be wary of outside money like Smith’s. Labor unions have thrown $150,000 to the effort.
At that same canvassing event, Stop Sinclair spoke with Tracy Smith, a retiree in Hamilton. Smith sees the benefit of cutting the council to spend less money on council people. But he’s also worried about residents becoming disenfranchised and having less representation.
“It's a city of haves and have nots, and so you know, the nice neighborhoods like Roland Park, they're fine, right?,” said Smith. “But then you get many various neighborhoods in East Baltimore, and they need to be able to get to their council member when shootings occur, public safety issues occur.”
Patterson, who wants to cut the council, acknowledges concerns about corruption and disenfranchisement but he says those are also matters of individual responsibility.
“If we do abandon that level of civic engagement that we should maintain… it's ripe for any type of takeover or corruption. Anybody that's elected on the council, you see similar donors, contributions, especially when you get the endorsements,” says Patterson. “I'd argue that, you know, it's already controlled by special interests.”
Early voting begins October 24th, with Election Day on November 5th.