This is the continuation of my blog entry "What if there was no Charles Village
Community Benefits District (CVCBD)?
And, what is it anyway?
Part I. What is the Charles Village
Community Benefits (CVDBD) and where did the CVCBD come from?" was
posted on Sunday, May 6th, 2012 and
Part II. How the CVCBD is run?"
was posted on Sunday, May13, 2012
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III. What does the CVCBD do? Here's what it's supposed to do:
The legal description of the Purpose for establishing the CVCBD:
The State's
enabling legislation, City Charter, Art. II, Sec. 63 "Community Benefits
District Authorities" gave the City the power "(2) To establish
community benefits district management authorities to promote and market
districts, provide supplemental security and maintenance services, provide
amenities in public areas, provide park and recreational programs and
functions, and after an authority is established, other services and functions
as requested by the authority and approved through an ordinance by the Mayor
and City Council." This is what the
City's enabling legislation, City Code, Art.14, Sec. 6-3 also designates as its
(b) Purpose."
We'll consider each Purpose:
1) To promote and
market districts.
For years community activists have fought against what the
CVCBD's Board has decided the words "promote" and "market"
mean. To the activists it meant that the
CVCBD would use advertising materials and distribute them to the local real
estate agencies and that the CVCBD would ensure that Charles Village and the
extended neighborhoods the CVCBD covered would be prominently displayed on City
maps, websites and in any information available for the promotion of this
vibrant neighborhood to prospective homebuyers even as far a D.C. and
Pennsylvania. How distressing it was to
us to visit York , PA
and Lancaster , PA
and find brochures from Hampden but not from Charles
Village , to find City maps at Inner Harbor
kiosks and many City websites prominently displaying other neighborhoods but
all missing any notation of a "Charles
Village
What the CVCBD determined "promote and market"
meant was something else. Several years
ago two CVCBD Board members invited several community activists to meet and try
to work out their differences. One
source of contention was the interpretation of "promote and
market". After a few meetings of
the small group a general community meeting was held but the results were
anything but successful in addressing the grievances of the activists. They found out the CVCBD was adamant in its
interpretation of "promote and market" as "economic
development" something the activists felt was not made clear to the
community when the legislation was originally put to a vote, if that was indeed
what the supporters had in mind. The
activists contended that if the law envisioned "promoting and
marketing" as meaning "economic development" the law would have
plainly stated "economic development" so people knew what they would
be voting on. Of course, that might have
raised questions at that time and may have resulted in much more opposition to
the legislation, something which was carefully kept in check. In its interpretation of "economic
development" the CVCBD uses City Ordinances to force property owners to
accomplish such repairs and maintenance as building repairs, painting and
landscaping upkeep. One problem with
this is that property owners are forced to pay a surtax to the CVCBD for
services, not for 'snitching'. Community
associations, of which the CVCBD is not, may have committees to address these
problems. But when a community
association decides to report problem properties, consideration can be taken
for any special circumstances affecting the ability of a property owner to care
for their home. Because of the actions
of a CVCBD committee member a few years ago an older widow was reported to the
City for peeling paint on the side of her property. This widow had always taken the utmost care
of her home and her surroundings as much as her very limited income would
allow. She even cemented broken areas of
the sidewalk around her house but the cost of painting the property was well beyond
her means. She was so utterly distraught
that Peabody Heights Resident Homeowners Alliance found out about the $500. per
day citation she was to receive took up a collection and arranged to have the
side of her house painted to help her.
Again, with the idea of "economic development" and
in utter contempt for the wishes of the majority of the property owners in an
affected area, the CVCBD put through an Urban Renewal Plan (URP) for the City
to pass as an Urban Renewal Ordinance (URO).
The CVCBD's Administrator claimed time and again that a URO had to be
"community supported" and time and time again the activists proved it
was not. URO's have been notorious as a
tool cities use to move out African Americans from a neighborhood by calling the
area "blighted" and taking over those properties by means of "Eminent
Domain" to gentrify the area. The
chosen area in the Charles Village Community District was far from
"blighted" and in response to community complaints about the CVCBD
overstepping its bounds by pushing the URP, the CVCBD's President at that time
called the URO "not your father's Oldsmobile". The CVCBD portrayed it only a way to control
what types of businesses could move into the area and how the historical
designs of the neighborhood could be protected.
Other members of the community never believed this since "Eminent
Domain" was clearly written into the urban renewal ordinance in
question. They noted that the CVCBD's
President's home in a more depressed area abutting the URP was excluded from
the URP boundaries. This was typical of
the strange, meandering boundaries chosen by the CVCBD for the URP. In some cases it was drawn to exclude ½ of a
block. It also included a local school
and church and well-cared for historic blocks such as "Little Georgetown
Row" and "Pastel Row", the very block in which Grace Darin, who
coined the name "Charles
Village Charles
Village
Time and again the CVCBD's President extolled the virtues of
URO's and the CVCBD took great pains to explain how by way of the URO's
enhanced zoning regulations they would set up a committee to address the type
of businesses that would be allowed in the area or that would require a special
zoning agreement. The committee would
set standards of color, design and greenery allowed in any future façade
changes to buildings in the URO. But the
community activists recognized that the committee had no "teeth" to
enforce these changes and all the committee had power to do was to ask for the
involvement of the City's Planning Dept. when such changes were contemplated. This is very similar to a PUD (Planned Urban
Development) where the community allows developers to be given substantial
considerations under City zoning laws in exchange for promised powers over the
PUD area that turn out to be easily overcome and basically worthless.
The idea that the URO required "community support"
from the District was easily dispelled when a staunch supporter of the CVCBD,
owner of the Anderson Automotive's property which spanned three whole blocks,
had his property excluded from the URP boundaries because, as was explained to
us by the CVCBD's Administrator, he was a very wealthy and influential man and
was being represented by attorneys to have his property removed from the URP.
In the end, the URO passed even though activists submitted a
long list of petitions to the City from the URP's property owners requesting
the same exclusion as was granted to the owner of Anderson Automotive's
property. Even though a greater number
of the affected property owners, those within the boundaries of the URO, signed
up at the City Council's public hearing to protest the URO and fewer property
owners, including many who were excluded from the URO boundaries, signed in as
supporting the URO, the City passed the Ordinance anyway. Shortly thereafter, the CVCBD committee
dissolved and so none of the "not your father's Oldsmobile"
description used to promote the URO as keeping away certain businesses from the
area and to give the community control over new property designs, signage and
the like are ignored but eminent domain remains.
2) To provide
supplemental security and maintenance services
Supplemental security
-
When the promoters of the establishment of the Charles
Village Community Benefits District pushed forth their political campaign for
the community to pass the City's legislation they promised the residents in
their advertising handouts that they would provide security personnel
24/7. This promise dovetailed with the
promoters' use of fear of escalating crime because of the murder of a young
employee of the firm of Whitman, Requardt & Associates during a robbery occurring in the back parking lot of
the building on the 2400 block of St.
Paul St
At the beginning, the CVCBD did use an outside security
firm, Wackenhut, to patrol the District's streets. Then the CVCBD decided to replace this
company with their own employees to patrol the streets by foot and by car. Since the levels of crime never changed
within the District and murders continued to happen, members of the community
on three separate occasions requested that the CVCBD revert to a professional,
outside firm for their security services.
Each time the community members provided a formal proposal from a local Charles Village
Finally, the CVCBD's Administrator proposed to the CVCBD's
Board that they eliminate even their own security services because these proved
ineffective in halting crime. There was
no measurable success in this area.
Again, they reinterpreted the "supplemental security services"
purpose in the law as merely employing an in-house person to basically do what
formerly had been accomplished through the various community associations such
as arranging for Northern District Police security reviews for residents as
requested, posting security suggestions on their website or in their occasional
publication and much the same as this, with none of the promised 24/7 patrols.
After yet another area murder, Steve Gewirtz, one of the
activists who formerly served as a Board member, decided to become a court
watch person to represent the concerns of the community at trials involving
crimes committed in the area. This
valuable service to help keep repeat and dangerous offenders off the streets
was immediately co-opted as a committee of the CVCBD despite the fact that Mr.
Gewirtz has publicly and repeatedly contended that he attends these trials as
an individual and not as a CVCBD committee person.
Maintenance services
–
Year after year community activists have complained to the
CVCBDMA, testified at City hearings and corresponded with their City
representatives about the deplorable conditions involving the abundance of
trash and garbage in the streets of the District. Yet, the CVCBD would respond with outrageous
and clearly unsupported claims of vast amounts of tonnage picked up by their
"clean team". When the
President of the City Council required the CVCBD to have a performance audit to
show proof of their claimed successes, the CVCBD decided that an internal audit
would suffice. So, much time was spent
by the CVCBD in putting together reports of their own hard work while the
streets of Charles
Village
Then, with a new Administrator, they got a bit smarter. Emptying City corner trash baskets gave the
CVCBD provable tonnage of waste removal.
Never mind that the City already provided this service with unionized
City employees emptying the corner baskets.
The CVCBD decided to replace the free City trash baskets with $600.
CVCBD trash baskets that their own workers could empty and claim as
"maintenance services". This
is not a "supplemental" service since the City provides this service
to all Baltimore
And, year after year the CVCBD boasts that it performs such
maintenance services as caring for tree wells, keeping sewer outlets clean of
debris, removing grass growing in-between cracks in the sidewalks and year
after year they perform little if any of these services, at least not in most
areas of Charles Village where tree wells abound in weeds growing almost as
high as the trees and grass in the sidewalks and gutters keep pace with the
tree well weeds.
3) To provide
amenities in public areas, provide park and recreational programs and functions.
Community people and others in the City often mistake
programs provided by other groups as services to be provided by the CVCBD and
activists cannot identify any "amenities in public areas, provide park and
recreational programs and functions" run by the Charles Village Community
Benefits District itself. There are few
ways that good work performed by ordinary citizens or grassroots organizations
to be publicly known and these are easily co-opted by those with the funds from
surtaxes and donations to claim. So here again are other "Purposes"
for the establishment of the CVCBD that are not provided to the community that
is obligated to fund the CVCBD for those very purposes.
4) Other services and
functions as requested by the authority and approved through an ordinance by
the Mayor and City Council.
Unfortunately, the power given to the CVCBDMA through this
last description of the purpose for establishing the CBD's is at the expense of
the rights and powers of the affected communities. What the one and only referendum on the
establishment of the CVCBD offered in the way of specific services can now be
extended to cover services and functions never considered by the voters. With an almost totally unelected Board the
CVCBDMA can request whatever service or function the City would like that Board
to handle and the citizenry have no control over it. The Board has been given the power to replace
the community and this political prize is cherished by those using the
undemocratic method in which the CVCBD is run.
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So, we finally get the question: "What does the CVCBD do?"
1. It spends a lot of
money on self-promotion, with time and money spent to establish and run a
website that doesn't just give information relevant to the community but every
bell and whistle of a corporate website.
I wonder who in the community is so enamored with the CVCBD to actually
follow them on Twitter or to Tweet them and for what purpose? They all have cell phones for contact with
the CVCBD office and these are frequently used.
Must the employees cleaning the streets now check tweets in
addition? All this uses up our surtax
money for the CVCBD's own aggrandizement, money that should be going to keep us
safer which is the reason people voted for its establishment.
2. It provides a
Board of Directors with reasons to acquiesce to any decision made by the
Executive Committee, whether it is good or bad for the community, If Board members don't, they may very well
face the new bylaw threat of expulsion without reason. Actually, though the new
bylaws just gave them this power about a year ago, the Board used this
expulsion before, even removing a non-voting board member who dared speak in
support of his community. Yet when as a
Board member I requested that the President of the Board be removed since he
sat on the Board claiming to represent what was in reality a non-operational
and non-constituent organization I was told by the Vice President that there
was no way to remove anyone from the Board.
I guess she wasn't aware that Roberts Rules would have given the Board
this power since this was a serious violation.
How can a board member represent the best interests of his/her association when faced with the threat
of expulsion for no reason but when a most grievous reason for removal is
ignored?
3. It has trouble
filling board seats. Many people who
have joined the Board trying to make a positive impact on the running of the
CVCBD gave up and left. See also reason
number 2 above.
4. It has grown into
a bloated, non-democratic bureaucracy run by like-minded individuals for
purposes unknown.
5. It uses up
volunteer time that community associations in Charles Village
6. Its Executive
Director (its fancy name change for the Administrator's position as provided in
the legislation) attends meetings of the Central Baltimore Committee but does
not report in either their infrequent newsletter or in the "Charles
Villager" anything about this involvement of the CVCBD in these large,
less publicly-known plans the universities, certain non-profits and the City
have for the area? All we know is that
he claims to be the representative, the "voice" of our community,
when he is in fact just an employee paid for by our surtaxes to provide
services to us. This is what can happen
when you don't have a democratically elected Board of Directors running such an
entity as the CVCBD.
I could probably continue in this vein but this is a long
article and I think you all get the picture of what the Charles Village
Community Benefits District does.
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My blog next time will answer –
IV. What would happen if it were to
cease operations, if there was no CVCBD?
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