This post is from another voice from Charles Village - by Pamela Wilson

What if there was no Charles Village Community Benefits District (CVCBD)?  And, what is it anyway?

As was discovered in a University of Maryland study a few years ago*, many people in our community do not even know what the Charles Village Community Benefits (CVDBD) is or even that it exists at all.  Many people, even those paying the surtax, do not know what the CVCBD does.  Many people credit the CVCBD with programs that have nothing to do with it.  Many people do not really know how the CVCBD is run.  Many people are dissatisfied with the CVCBD but are uncomfortable in directly opposing it because they are not sure what would happen if it were to cease operations.

Certainly there is much misinformation out there not only for the people who live within the "District" but also people who are not in the District, including academia and the government.  I recently discovered two papers on urban issues which used the CVCBD as their subject, one entitled "The Sub-Districting of Cities", was written by two professors, one from the University of Maryland College Park and one from Indiana University and the other, entitled "Private Governments In Urban Areas Political Contracting and Collective Action", written by professors Susan E. Baer of San Diego State University and Richard C. Feiock of Florida State University.  I found some of the information used in these papers was not entirely correct or was missing important aspects affecting the outcomes described.  In both cases neither paper correctly states the Maryland State law's percentage of required referendum support for passage of the CVCBD's enabling legislation.  Instead the papers give credit to much greater community support for establishing the CVCBD than the actual numbers from the referendum show.  This affects the research and continues the spread of the misinformation about the CVCBD possibly resulting in governmental decisions not beneficial to communities.   

Even among long-time residents and property owners in the area who voted in the sole referendum establishing the CVCBD few know much about it.  So, I will try, as briefly as possible, to explain a few important facts so that people reading our blog can better determine for themselves what this CVCBD really is and how it affects their lives, more than they may suspect.  The information provided here comes from more than a decade of work by community activists, including me and my husband, to research every source of information we could find.  These sources include the enabling State and City laws (before and after amendments to the original bills), early promotional pamphlets, grass-roots efforts to defeat passage of the law, and recounting of meetings and experiences by residents present at that time.  We obtained board meeting minutes and as many notes as possible from the inception of the CVCBD.  Besides our research, we participated in the CVCBD, we worked to make the CVCBD better and we even worked to eliminate it, through legal means via law suits as well as governmental means through our City representatives.  In an effort to more closely understand on a personal level how the CVCBD worked and what it was doing, I and others of our group even became members of the CVCBD's Board of Directors as well as participated in many of their committees.  Here is some of what we discovered from all our work. 

Because there is some complicated information to pass along I feel it better to divide my blog into several smaller ones which will cover the following questions:

I. What is the Charles Village Community Benefits (CVDBD) and where did the CVCBD come from?

II. How the CVCBD is run?

III. What does the CVCBD do?

IV. What would happen if it were to cease operations, if there was no CVCBD?

Each week I will post one of these chapters and will also keep them listed on the right side of the blog's under the list of pages starting with "Home".  This way it will continue to be readily available to readers.  Here is the first chapter on this subject -

I. What is the Charles Village Community Benefits (CVDBD) and where did the CVCBD come from?

"Benefits Districts" or "Special Taxing Districts" have been in existence for many years, established for many reasons such as to temporarily fund, via a special tax on property owners, a particular project in a community, and once that has been accomplished the special taxing district "sunsets" or ends.  These "BDs" have also been established in business areas to fund extra clean-up and safety programs beyond that provided by their municipality in order to address the increased litter and petty crimes to which business areas are often exposed.  In commercial areas these are not only funded by the businesses that benefit from these programs but are also run by those same business owners.

When an effort was made in the early 1990's to put in such a program in the Baltimore City neighborhood now called "Old Goucher" (previously "South Charles Village"), few businesses wanted to support it.  A professional political campaign company was employed to assist in promoting support for the new law to establish a "community benefits district".  Funding came from a City grant, from Greater Homewood Community Corporation, a 501(c)3 foundation, via a grant from The United Way and, we are told, from a donation by the engineering firm of Whitman, Requardt.  Community meetings were scheduled and focused on the community's fears of escalating crime based on a murder which took place in the parking lot of a commercial building in the area.* The campaign was to convince the community to support the establishment of a "Community Benefits District" in an extended area of Charles Village, to be funded by property owners both residential and commercial.  This somewhat new type of Benefits District incorporates both business and residential properties.  This concept involved taxation so in order to accomplish this end a State law needed to be passed to create the "District". The law would give Baltimore City a vehicle to establish six such districts, the first of which would be the Charles Village Community Benefits District (CVCBD).  Like other special benefits districts in the State, the Charles Village Community Benefits District would "sun-set" (end) in three years.  Supporters of the law passed out flyers promising the community that the CVCBD would provide them with safety patrols 24/7 and told the community that the "sun-set" provision would allow voters the opportunity in a few years to extend or close down the operation if they did not like it.  In reality, only the State officials would vote on allowing the CVCBD to "sun-set" or to be extended in three-year intervals. Information on how this was later changed will be covered in a later chapter in this blog.

However, for the State law to be adopted, with its requirement of an additional taxation, it had to be put to a referendum by the affected property owners.  The State's Attorney General also determined that renters in the area could be affected by the additional taxation since landlords could pass along the tax by rent increases.  Because of that both "affected property owners" and "registered voters within the area" had voting rights in the referendum.

In addition to those eligible to vote in the referendum, the law set the requirements for passage of the law "only if approved by 58% of the aggregate votes cast in a special election by the affected voters".***  

The State's law enshrined in the City Charter enabled the City to establish the CVCBD and its own legislation in the City Code expanded on details as to how this District was to be run.  However, the City's enabling legislation was mandated not to conflict in any way with the original State legislation.  As officially described in the City Code, the CVCBD was established as "a governmental entity".  It is supported by an additional real estate tax ("surtax") on properties within the general but irregular boundaries of 20th to 33rd Sts., Howard St. to Greenmount Ave.  Non-payment of this surtax results in the property being placed on the City's tax sale list.  The CVCBD is run by an almost entirely unelected Board of Directors which is designated the Management Authority or "MA" in the acronym "CVCBDMA" which appears in the State and City laws that enacted it in 1994.

*"Evaluation Report: Charles Village Community Benefits District", Dr. Cheryl Hyde, University of Maryland, School of Social Work, February 12, 2002.

**Note that there have been a number of murders in the area since the establishment of the CVCBD

***Note that sometime during the legislative process [we hope this was not done retroactively] an amendment to the bill reduced the percentage of supporting referendum votes needed to pass the legislation.  Perhaps community support was not being seen as sufficient to pass the legislation so reducing the numbers required made passage of the legislation easier. This is very important to note since the misinformation spread about the community support for the CVCBD ignores the fact that the passage of the law was based on the total votes cast, not the total percentage of support from the entire community.  The concept that the CVCBD was approved by "an overwhelming majority of the community" is false.  In truth, the State required passage "only if approved by 58% of the aggregate votes cast in a special election by the affected voters".  It was neither 67% nor 58% of "the community".  At that time the community had a population of approximately 10,000; 7,000 ballots were mailed out, approximately 3,500 of which returned and approximately another 1,000 were discarded as ineligible or duplicate. The final tally of supporting votes is either 1,500 or 1,740, with 500 votes against the establishment of the CVCBD.  The varying count of numbers comes from CVCBD data put out at different times and to different publications.

So, while 58% of those voting passed the legislation, this is not an "overwhelming majority" of the votes and certainly not an "overwhelming or super majority" of community support as has been claimed.  It is more like support by only 17.4% of the community itself.  Neither must it be forgotten that many who voted to support it did so on the promise of being able to close it down in a referendum to follow.  Of course, there never was any second referendum legislated.