November elections in Baltimore are typically snoozers — the real action in the Democrat-dominated city comes during the spring primaries.

But this year was supposed to be different.

Charm City’s denizens were poised to vote on massive issues. There was a proposition to cut the property tax rate by nearly half. Another to give cash payments to the parents of newborns. And yet another could have remade the city’s skyline along the Inner Harbor.

These ambitious, city-changing proposals are all ballot questions, meaning voters could personally say “for” or “against” on policy in this town. And this November looked like it was going to be usher in a new machine to make political change in Baltimore.

Then it all went to hell.

The state challenged the tax cut in court and the mayor’s office sued over the Baby Bonus. The political rhetoric around ballot referendums became increasingly focused on race and class. Now, it’s possible the only consequential question posed to Baltimoreans in November may be whether they want to have fewer politicians the next time one of these elections rolls around.

And, somewhere along the way, City Hall may have fumbled a chance to put its highest-priority issue before voters: the redevelopment of Harborplace.

City leaders might have themselves to blame for that. The same legal argument city attorneys made before the Supreme Court of Maryland that successfully barred the property tax cut and Baby Bonus measures from the ballot could undermine the nearly $1 billion Inner Harbor redevelopment plans.

Thiru Vignarajah, the attorney representing anti-redevelopment petitioners, said the legal argument only occurred to him while livestreaming the high court cases about the two measures the city wanted blocked.

“I was like, huh?” said Vignarajah. “Then you start digging into the case law, and what’s good for the goose ought to be good for the gander.”

City attorneys argued to the Maryland Supreme Court in August that both the Baby Bonus and tax cut proposal, known as Renew Baltimore, did not have anything to do with the “form and structure” of government. Citizens, they argued successfully, cannot legislate through the ballot initiative process — they can only change how government is run.

Vignarajah’s argument is just that. The Inner Harbor question is, at its core, a zoning decision. The only reason the city needs to amend its charter to approve it is because the creation of Inner Harbor Park — the area around the waterfront downtown — was done so via charter amendment in 1978. An Anne Arundel County judge last month took Vignarajah’s side and blocked the results of the Harborplace question from being certified. The judge also suggested that the 1978 amendment itself may be improper.

It’s possible that without the earlier cases, Vignarajah, who has run unsuccessfully for citywide office four times, would not have mounted as effective a challenge against a new Harborplace. He tried to put his own question on the ballot that would have banned development in 20 city parks but could not garner enough signatures.

Scott’s office declined to comment on the case.

Regardless of the outcome of next week’s Supreme Court hearing — arguments over whether to allow the Harborplace question to continue are scheduled for Monday — the way Baltimore deals with ballot questions as a political device have likely changed forever.

Historically, ballot questions haven’t attracted much attention or scrutiny in Baltimore because they have tended to cover mundane bureaucratic functions or bonding requests submitted by the City Council, said Andy Ellis, a member of the city’s charter review commission.

That changed two years ago when the Baltimore County media mogul David Smith successfully financed a measure to impose term limits on City Hall. Smith, the executive chairman of Sinclair Inc., returned this year with a measure to cut six seats from the City Council, sinking $415,000 into the campaign so far.

His newspaper, The Baltimore Sun, has published a series of articles questioning the effectiveness of individual City Council members, and Sinclair’s flagship station, WBFF Fox45 Baltimore, regularly runs segments suggesting the council is inefficient at its current size.

Smith, whose business interests in broadcast TV, automobiles and more put him well above fabulously wealthy (but still not on Forbes’ 2024 billionaire list), showed that reshaping government through the referendum process is easy if you have the money to get a question on the ballot, said Ellis, who is leading an opposition campaign to the Smith-backed Question H.

Nate Golden, the leader of the effort behind the Baby Bonus, said the ballot initiative process was a sort of last resort. Golden and the rest of his small group, Maryland Child Alliance, tried to get the Baby Bonus through the legislative process. To their frustration, they realized after a few years that lawmakers weren’t taking them or their ideas seriously enough.

“We haven’t see any major legislation from our government in years,” said Golden, who explained that the ballot measure process offers another, more direct pathway to push for ambitious policy changes.

Under Baltimore’s version of direct democracy, all one needs is 10,000 registered city voters to sign a petition supporting a cause and then the Baltimore City Board of Elections will, in most cases, place the issue on the ballot.

For a grassroots group like the Maryland Child Alliance, this can be a challenging undertaking, Golden testified. But when you have money like Smith, or the well-heeled backers of Renew Baltimore, you can pay canvassers and political groups to go door to door.

And it turns out, people will sign just about anything. The Baltimore Banner spoke with dozens of of people who signed the petition to shrink the City Council, and many of them could not remember signing it. Most of them had no opinion as to whether the council should be smaller.

Take Brooklyn resident Rachel Keller, for example. “It’s possible,” Keller signed it, she said. But shrinking the city council? “Like why?” she said. “I don’t know enough about it to have a position. Is it possible I was put on there fraudulently? I don’t think so.”

Or maybe Nathaniel Clark Davis, a teacher who definitely remembers signing a petition, just not that one.

“I concretely remember signing the Baby Bonus one, I think it’s possible I signed it twice,” Davis said. “Maybe I signed the other one inadvertently. If I were to go out on a limb, that would be my best guess. Maybe my brain shorted. I don’t know.”

You don’t necessarily need gobs of money to put something on the ballot. The Baby Bonus organizers were able to gather enough signatures despite being relatively poor compared to other groups. Petition signers were motivated because of how popular the proposal was among city residents, Golden said.

Which is why it came as a bit of a shock when Mayor Brandon Scott directed the city’s law department to file a lawsuit to keep the Baby Bonus off the ballot. For those arguments to lead to Vignarajah’s case against Harborplace, well, that’s just karmic.

“Obviously these [cases] are all related,” Golden said. “I think we’ve opened up really questionable [legal] territory.”

Constitutional law, or in this case, charter law, is arcane when compared to areas like workers’ compensation. Because there have been relatively few challenges to ballot initiatives or charter amendments in Maryland history, the amount of case law that judges can draw upon to inform their rulings is relatively small. That also means relatively few attorneys are skilled in this legal area.

“That’s a bad combination — complex things for which not a lot of people know a lot about, except the judges whose misfortune it is to have to write these opinions,” said Andrew Levy, one of Maryland’s most renowned appellate attorneys.

But there is an upside, Levy said, to all these Supreme Court battles: more case law. While it can be disappointing to lose, the resulting court opinions will make it easier for future ballot-petitioners to figure out how to get their issues before voters.

So, yes, things will become more clear in the future. Harborplace may or may not be on the ballot. But Baltimore’s charter will remain complex. At close to 250 pages, it’s a far denser document than what other Maryland counties have and its construction basically guarantees a long list of tedious questions every election cycle. If subjected to the same scrutiny that Harborplace’s zoning now faces, Ellis, the charter commissioner member, said big portions of it could also be rendered invalid.

If that’s the case, Ellis said, Baltimore could just start over.

“Scrap the charter, start from the beginning and then make a slimmer, better charter that is not 200 pages long,” he said.

Baltimore Banner reporter Saul Pink contributed reporting.