With Election Day less than two weeks away, a coalition of Question H opponents — including city leaders, labor unions and progressive groups — has ramped up a campaign to persuade voters to defeat the proposal to shrink the Baltimore City Council. On Wednesday those for and against the measure laid out the main arguments at a virtual forum.

Could shrinking the Baltimore City Council from 15 to nine members help address many of the frustrations that residents have with City Hall, and perhaps even give them a stronger voice?

Yes, according to Jovani Patterson, who chairs the People for Elected Accountability and Civic Engagement, or PEACE. His effort to shrink the City Council is financed almost exclusively by David Smith, the Baltimore County-based media mogul who chairs the Sinclair, Inc. network of TV stations and earlier this year purchased The Baltimore Sun.

But Patterson, a former Republican candidate for City Council president, was outnumbered at the forum by representatives of a progressive coalition working to defeat Question H. They argued that reducing the size of the council would result in a less effective, less democratic city government.

Still, Question H faces good odds of passing on Nov. 5. Baltimore ballot measures almost always sail to victory; only one in the last 25 years has failed.

Here were some of the debate lines of Wednesday night’s forum.

Yeah, City Hall has its problems. But will shrinking the council solve them?

Among the few points of agreement between the two sides at Wednesday’s virtual forum, hosted by the third-party Maryland Forward Party, was the feeling that today’s council doesn’t adequately represent the interests of regular, working-class people who don’t have the money or connections to get their representative’s ear.

It’s one of the main arguments that Patterson has made for shrinking the council. There is a concentration of power in Baltimore city government in the hands of wealthy donors, Patterson said, while council members are propelled to leadership by a relatively small base in Democratic primaries.

At the same time, Patterson has argued that the council needs to be restructured to reflect Baltimore’s declining population. He pointed to the ratio of council members-to-constituents in surrounding Maryland jurisdictions — arguing that those governments offer solid services while spending less with fewer resources on their councils.

Others, like Green Party member Andy Ellis, who served on a city charter review commission that studied this year’s ballot referendums, questioned how eliminating six council seats will do anything to fix the problems Patterson laid out.

“One of the things that I’ve heard not a single person say is, ‘How many council people does Anne Arundel County have?’ They don’t care,” quipped Ellis, who argued that Patterson has inaccurately painted his proposal as a way to root out government inefficiencies and better align it with its modern population.

In reality, Ellis said, “it doesn’t shrink the size of government, and it barely shrinks the budget, and nobody cares what Anne Arundel County’s council size is.”

Will a smaller council save taxpayers money?

Patterson has argued repeatedly that cutting the number of council seats will save taxpayers money, freeing up funds to address critical areas such as crime or education.

That may be true, opponents acknowledged, but the potential savings are so small as to be essentially meaningless.

Patterson conceded that shrinking the number of districts — and thus ballooning the number of constituents in each — would likely require expanding the size of each council member’s staff. But even then the savings would come out to “millions” of dollars, Patterson said. The PEACE chairman was unable to provide a more specific estimate than that.

Zac Blanchard, the Democratic nominee to represent South Baltimore’s District 11, had an answer: $2.5 million, or the aggregate cost allocated for six council districts in the city’s budget.

“I certainly respect a concern for taxpayer dollars,” Blanchard said. But he said a few million dollars amounts to a fraction of a percent of Baltimore’s $4.2 billion budget, hardly a relevant figure in the larger scheme of the city’s financial challenges.

Lawrence Grandpre, director of research for Leaders of a Beautiful Struggle, a progressive group, echoed Blanchard. The Baltimore Police Department, he noted, gets nearly $600 million in the current city budget.

“I don’t understand why we should cut the council for something that wouldn’t even run the Police Department for four days,” Grandpre said.

Patterson makes the case for ‘more eyes’ on council members

Though a smaller City Council might only result in marginal cost savings at first, Patterson argued Wednesday that the new leverage this arrangement would put on elected leaders would be harder to measure.

Take property taxes as an example. Residents tried to get a separate measure on the ballot this year to slash Baltimore’s property tax, but Mayor Brandon Scott’s administration and election administrators successfully removed it from the ballot in court.

Residents are clearly frustrated with Baltimore’s high property taxes, Patterson argued, but under the current dynamic in City Hall, elected leaders have little motivation for undertaking real reform.

Blanchard, in particular, was receptive to Patterson’s argument that the City Council needs incentive to focus on substantial policy changes, not just resolving problems raised by constituents.

“I think that sounds about right,” Blanchard said. “I also don’t see how going from 14 to eight [districts] changes the calculus there.”

Speaking — or not speaking — of David Smith

Patterson has at times tried to steer conversations away from the instrumental role that Smith played in getting Question H on the ballot, arguing that a focus on his chief funder ignores the thousands of residents who signed petitions to qualify the measure.

Some of the coalitions campaigning against Question H — including the “Stop Sinclair” committee that has the backing of Scott — have eagerly painted Smith as a wealthy outsider intent on diminishing the power and representation of Black residents in city government.

But none of the prompts given to panelists on Wednesday mentioned Smith, and the Question H opponents in attendance were content to discuss the merits of shrinking the council without harping on its controversial conservative backer. Over the course of the 90-minute forum, Smith was mentioned only twice, mostly in passing.

Still, critics of Question H took issue with Patterson’s argument that a smaller council would help to empower lower-income and marginalized residents. On this question, the two sides have little common ground.

“He acts as if his proposal that he’s supporting and worked with David Smith’s money to get on the ballot cannot make things worse,” Ellis said. “But it will make things worse. It will make that concentration of power worse, and it will make the donor influence worse.”