Baltimore woke up Wednesday morning with something it has not had in two decades: a second term mayor.
Winning the general election, a formality in Democrat-controlled Baltimore, Brandon Scott has effectively been given a mandate to govern. He won the May primary by 14 points against former-Mayor Sheila Dixon, a stark contrast from 2020 when he eked out a win against her.
Baltimore gets four more years of Scott and his progressive, if not incremental, agenda. For years, critics in more moderate Democratic circles have tried to paint Scott as ill-equipped for the job and a poor manager of people. His win has, in large part, taken their oxygen away. It also gives him a chance to cement a legacy as the mayor who put Baltimore back on track after decades of decline.
In Scott’s first term, violent crime, while still high compared to the rest of the country, plummeted. Scott’s administration, faced with an incendiary situation after a squeegee worker fatally shot a baseball bat-wielding motorist in July 2022, was able to clear those downtown corners in a largely non-punitive way. Unemployment hit a record low. Scott’s administration made notable investments in the Recreation and Parks department and generally has sought to disburse money more equitably across neighborhoods.
“We started to make a dent in these problems and push on these issues. But now, I would say we have the opportunity to see it through,” Scott said.
But city services always need improvement (it took four years to fully resume curbside recycling), and Scott’s allies and former administration officials have said economic development, whether it’s Harborplace or a reduction of the city’s property tax rate, needs to take more of a front seat. An ambitious strategy to reduce vacant buildings will present a new challenge that will inevitably draw scrutiny. The city continues to deal with a rampant fatal overdose crisis. The chronic issues remain chronic.
There are reasons for optimism about what Scott can accomplish in his second term. New City Council President Zeke Cohen and Scott have worked together in the past; new city council members are more likely to be aligned with the mayor than their predecessors; Gov. Wes Moore has offered more support to Baltimore in his first two years than former-Gov. Larry Hogan did in his eight years in Annapolis.
The last time Baltimore gave a mayor the chance to see things through, then-Mayor Martin O’Malley had just been reelected on a platform of, among other things, having decreased violent crime and improving the city’s economy. There were development deals in the works and neighborhoods were on the cusp of change. Scott was a sophomore in college. But O’Malley, who is now the Social Security commissioner and declined to be interviewed, didn’t finish his second term — he became governor — and political bedlam followed.
Dixon assumed office, then resigned after being indicted on corruption charges. Stephanie Rawlings-Blake took her spot, then decided not to run for a second term after her handling of the Freddie Gray uprising. Catherine Pugh served about three years before her own corruption charges led to her resignation. The city was then treated, briefly, to Mayor Bernard C. “Jack” Young.
“Really, what it ended up doing was causing us to be distracted by those scandals, distracted by the dysfunction, zigzagging between strategies and approaches, but not doing the work of building lasting change, solving Baltimore’s most intractable problems,” Scott said.
Conversations with current and former members of the Scott administration paint a picture of a mayor who came into power in 2020 right when the bottom fell out at City Hall. The pandemic and constant scandal had fine-tuned residents’ collective sense of cynicism and apathy about Baltimore.
There was “no foundation” for the administration to build upon, Michael Huber, Scott’s first chief of staff, said. And Scott’s desire to look for structural solutions as opposed to quick fixes didn’t help.
“He kind of made it harder on himself,” said Huber, who is now director of government affairs at Johns Hopkins.
For example, Scott’s approach to crime reduction focused less on traditional policing and more on community outreach, which initially sent critics into a frenzy. Some describe Scott as a mayor who likes to be heavily involved in whatever big initiative is underway. For his hallmark Group Violence Reduction Strategy, Huber said Scott was “in the weeds” and “hands-on.”
Scott also tends to stick to his beliefs even if it costs him popularity points — “my job is to do it, to actually make [things] happen, not to have everyone like me,” he said. One time that played out, Huber said, was when some groups wanted cops to clear squeegee workers off corners. Scott did not.
“He accepted there had to be some level of accountability with a law enforcement element,” Huber said, “but he told them [business leaders], ‘You cannot ask me to do the opposite of the thing I was sent here to do.’”
These same officials who laud his accomplishments acknowledge there’s still work to be done. Jim Shea, a former city solicitor under Scott, said the second term should be about expanding the administration’s focus on what’s possible.
“There are huge challenges, you have to be not paying attention to not see that,” Shea, who also ran for governor in 2018 with Scott as his lieutenant governor pick, said. “Can Mayor Scott overcome all of them? Probably not. No one can. But can he make progress on most and solve some of them? I think he can.”
It’s unclear if Scott will run for a third and final term — and four more years may not be long enough to solve some of the city’s chronic issues. But second-term mayors do have an opportunity to shape a city agenda’s long-term, said Sly James, a recent two-term mayor of Kansas City.
“If you’re working on poverty or crime and things of that nature, you’re not going to solve that problem in four or eight years, but you can lay a foundation,” James said.
Mayors can take bigger swings at perpetual problems, like vacant housing. Scott’s plan spans 15 years. If these next four years see progress, it would be hard for his successor to deviate.
Mayors are often judged against their predecessors, and while it might be hard to see, there are similarities between Scott and O’Malley. Baltimore knew O’Malley as both a fiery politician who defended his city, rolled his sleeves up for work, and also as a pretty fun guy to hang out with — O’Malley’s March, anyone?
Scott isn’t so different. “I don’t want to win the race, I want to set the record. I don’t want to just win the game, I want to win by 30 points,” the former high school athlete said. Not even his biggest critics can question his love for Baltimore.
Depending on what you’re into, he can be fun to hang out with, too.
He likes Star Wars and comic books and loves the Orioles and Ravens. He has a dog, a wife and two kids, with a third on the way. He lives in a pretty standard bungalow in Northeast Baltimore and is probably more comfortable at a Mervo track meet than a business luncheon. When he’s out and about his childhood neighborhood of Park Heights or his old council district, a lot of people still know him as “Brandon.”
“I’m just a Baltimore boy,” he said. “I just happen to be the mayor.”
Even Scott’s second-term priorities are likely to mirror O’Malley’s: to keep reducing crime, tackle the overdose crisis and to address vacant buildings.
Both were 36 when they first took office, but that’s about where the similarities end.
O’Malley was plastered on the cover of Esquire magazine, which proclaimed him as the “best young mayor in the country” in 2002. That’s not to say Scott hasn’t gotten some national shine — he was almost universally hailed for his leadership during the Key Bridge disaster, his approach to reducing gun violence, is the subject of a documentary and he even appeared in a sneaker ad.
But Scott’s critics have continued to dog him as inexperienced, a guy who wasn’t ready for the city’s top job. A pro-Dixon super PAC ran ads in the primary that went as far to call him a “nice guy, bad mayor.”
Members of Scott’s camp say those critiques are generally rooted in racism.
“No one was having this kind of conversation [when O’Malley was mayor],” State Sen. Cory McCray, one of Scott’s political allies and his friend, said. He added that if Scott were Caucasian “this wouldn’t even be a conversation.”
Also unlike O’Malley, Scott probably won’t run for governor before his term is up — challenging the popular incumbent Wes Moore would be supremely awkward.
There’s a sentiment that whatever Scott accomplishes, his critics, whether it’s former Gov. Larry Hogan, Dixon, former O’Malley officials or perennial candidates like Thiru Vignarajah, will just find something else to latch onto.
“When I first came into office, all those folks wanted to talk to me about was … when are you going to get homicides down? If you handle homicides and squeegeeing, we’ll support you and we’ll be your biggest champions,” Scott said. “And then squeegeeing basically went away. We had a historic reduction in homicides and then they don’t want to talk about it anymore. It’s like, ‘Oh, you know, I saw a dog pooping in the park the other day.’”
Mayors, no matter how good or how bad, are going to be criticized and second-guessed. Especially by the local press. Kurt Schmoke, who served three terms as Baltimore’s mayor and is now president of the University of Baltimore, explained the dynamic using his mother’s move from Chicago to Baltimore during his second term.
When she lived in Chicago, Schmoke said, most of what she read about her son was in magazines or the occasional USA Today story. It tended to be positive. Then she moved back to Baltimore and started reading The Sun.
“She called me up and said, ‘Kurt, you were such a wonderful mayor when I was living in Chicago,’” Schmoke said.
Marc Morial, who was mayor of New Orleans from 1994 to 2002, and was the city’s youngest, said he sparred with the editor and publisher of the Times-Picayune regularly. So much so that he just started focusing his communication strategy on “everyone else.”
While constant, the criticism may not have significant impact with voters — Morial won reelection with 79% of the vote — but it underscores a thing that gets forgotten: Being mayor is tough.
“It’s the hardest job in American politics after being president of the United States,” Morial, now the president of the National Urban League, said. “Every single problem, every single crisis, every single incident that goes on in the city, you get charged with the responsibility to correct.”
Scott deals with that a lot, but his belief in ability to do the job is unshakable. He may have been the youngest mayor elected to city government, but he was not inexperienced.
He’s worked in city government his entire adult life. He’s seen people make mistakes, he said, and learned from them. As a councilman, he chaired the National League of Cities’ Large Cities Council. Now, he’s got a term’s worth of experience and is comfortable in the job.
“Folks were going to try to tear me down, I knew that, I accepted that,” Scott said. “And to be quite honest, I revel in that.”
Still, there will be times in the next four years where Scott will make unpopular decisions. He knows this. He will almost certainly not achieve everything he sets out to do, because no politician ever does. He certainly knows this, too.
But if the first four years were about laying a foundation where there hasn’t been one, the next four years are about owning whatever comes next.
Banner reporter Emily Opilo contributed to this article.
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