When Essex community activist Mary A. Taylor kept calling Baltimore County about a code enforcement issue, the county directed her to Councilman Todd Crandell.

“They keep saying, ‘You really just need to try to get ahold of your councilman,’” Taylor said. “Well, how can you do that when your councilman won’t call you back?”

Crandell used to be an excellent councilman, Taylor said, until he stopped returning her phone calls about 15 months ago.

As the Dundalk Republican faces revelations about an allegedly drunken encounter with Baltimore County Police last year, some constituents say they have concerns about his accessibility as an elected official.

Crandell rarely attends community gatherings and ribbon cuttings anymore, some say, and he’s missed many County Council meetings and work sessions.

“This is an elected official voted in by the people to represent his community. He has been consistently failing to do that for a long time,” said Scarlett Corso, vice president of the Holly Neck Conservation Association in Essex.

First elected in 2014, Crandell declined to be interviewed for this article.

Crandell, 55, publicly acknowledged his battle with alcoholism and has taken multiple leaves of absence from the council to attend rehabilitation. But neither his colleagues nor some constituents say they understood the depths of the councilman’s behavior while drunk.

According to police and court records, Crandell endangered officers while drinking inside his Eastpoint Mall office in a June 2024 incident that only came to light after his wife took out a protective order against him in May.

According to court records, county police restrained the “extremely intoxicated” Crandell after he opened his desk drawer to reveal a fully loaded handgun. When an officer later refused to uncuff him, he allegedly threatened one, stating, “I will shove my Glock up your ass!”

Police did not arrest Crandell, nor did prosecutors charge him with a crime. The police response was handled by the county’s mobile crisis team, assigned to mental health situations.

His wife, Lisa Crandell, cited the incident as one of several reasons why she no longer felt safe around her husband, who subjected her to “severe verbal abuse” while drunk, according to court records.

Corso said Crandell has not acknowledged his absence to his roughly 120,000 constituents in District 7, which includes Dundalk, Edgemere, Essex, Rosedale, and Sparrows Point.

“He has shown ... no indication he’s willing to step down,” she said.

In an interview last week, the councilman expressed regret about the encounter with officers, but said neither the incident nor his years-long struggle with alcoholism has affected his ability to represent his constituents.

“Caring for people hasn’t changed,” Crandell told The Banner.

‘Shouting into the void’

Some in Crandell’s district feel the opposite of cared for — they say they feel ignored, dismissed, and left to fend for themselves.

In late April 2024, Michael Greensfelder lit his family’s Essex home on fire. The subsequent explosion left behind a pile of rubble, which ultimately attracted hundreds of rats.

Despite neighbors filing five separate code enforcement violations, the smoldered remains lay scattered across the property 15 months later.

“IS ANYONE GOING TO REMOVE THE DEBRIS FROM THE FIRE MONTHS AGO?” one resident wrote in a county complaint filed in January.

Last month, Doug Anderson, Crandell’s senior council assistant, wrote in an email to a resident who filed a complaint in October 2024 that it was the property owner’s responsibility to clear the lot. The owner, Greensfelder, is serving a seven-year prison sentence after pleading guilty to arson.

“There is nothing a state elected official, or agency can do to move this along,” Anderson wrote. “I can assure you that the County has never been the holdup here.”

Anderson similarly told Corso that he could not help Holly Neck after the Department of Public Works and Transportation added speed bumps to the road over residents’ objections and, Corso learned, in violation of the county’s policy against placing bumps on dead-end roads.

“I cannot meet with you tomorrow via zoom. There is nothing we can do to affect DPWT internal policy. There is nothing we could discuss that would change any outcome of this project moving forward," Anderson wrote.

Corso, an attorney, said she spent hundreds of hours doing research and eventually got the speed bump project halted. Despite repeatedly asking for a meeting with Crandell, she never got one.

Kevin McDonough, president of the Rockaway Beach Improvement Association in Essex, expressed similar frustrations about seeking Crandell’s help.

“It really leaves us shouting into the void when it comes to asking for help for our communities,” McDonough said.

Anderson did not return a call seeking comment.

A district in need

Over the past year, email alerts from Crandell’s office ceased; so did updates to his County Council Facebook page, which he has not posted on since April 2024. His campaign website — teamcrandell.com — is defunct.

Most other council members have announced their reelection plans, but Crandell has said little about his.

The councilman represents one of the county’s poorest jurisdictions, and the one with the largest infrastructure projects.

The Francis Scott Key Bridge, which collapsed last year and is being rebuilt, is in District 7, as is Tradepoint Atlantic, the sprawling logistics and warehousing park on the site of the former Sparrows Point steel mill. Tradepoint is pursuing a major dredging project to support a planned new port terminal there.

The district also includes the city-owned Back River Wastewater Treatment Plant, which the state has cited for a series of management failures and frequently casts a rotten-egg smell over the region.

The county and the state have coordinated on a multimillion-dollar plan to rid the area of midges — pesky flies that have invaded waterfront communities.

Councilman David Marks took the lead on the midge issue — which affected both his and Crandell’s districts. Councilman Mike Ertel, whose Towson district borders Crandell’s, also has responded to Crandell’s constituents, according to several who said they called him.

Crandell earns about $75,000 a year and a pension. He was a wrestling coach prior to being elected and has no other job.

Past precedent

In recent years, there have only been a few cases in which a council member was in danger of losing his or her job.

In 2005, then-Councilman Stephen G. Samuel Moxley, a Catonsville Democrat, was arrested and charged with drunken driving after he crashed his county-owned car. He won re-election, then got another DUI in 2009. He did not seek re-election in 2010.

Todd Huff, a Republican representing the northern district, was arrested and charged with DUI in 2013. He did not resign, but only served a single term.

Huff failed several sobriety tests and even asked the arresting officer, “Don’t you know who I am?”

In 2011, then-Councilman John Olszewski Sr. pressured his colleague Ken Oliver to resign his state job to keep his elected office, as holding both violated the recently revised county charter. In 2022, the county attorney determined that then-Councilwoman Cathy Bevins violated the charter when she moved out of her district briefly, but Bevins was not forced to resign. She didn’t run for re-election.

All seven councilmen declined to comment on Crandell’s situation.

Crandell legislative aide Ron Metzger — who, according to Baltimore County police reports, showed up at Eastpoint Mall last year but would not use his keys to let officers in — also did not respond to messages and an email.

Cliff O’Connell, chair of the Essex Community Development Corp., said he’s heard that Crandell has been unresponsive, but had not experienced it himself.

O’Connell, who owned an auto shop in Essex for decades, said Crandell was instrumental in bringing Essex and Dundalk together as one community. He taught constituents to advocate at council meetings about the district’s rat problem. He’d walk alleys with the councilman cleaning up trash.

Once, O’Connell said, he was pulling out illegal “We buy houses” signs on Eastern Boulevard. Crandell drove by, asked what he was doing, and began pulling the signs across the street.

O’Connell said he has not needed to call Crandell recently, but if he did, he said, “he would return my call — he always has.”