Editorial: City Hall—is anybody home?

Posted: 6:59 pm Thu, June 10, 2010
By Daily Record Staff

Matt Gonter is one angry man.

The 34-year-old Baltimore accountant seethes every time he sees a vacant house in the city he loves. That means he spends a lot of time seething because he sees one heckuva lot of vacant houses.

He’s out to do something about that problem but he needs help — help he’s not getting from City Hall. And that needs to change.

“I just got so frustrated with the number of houses that have been vacant for years in a city with 30,000 vacant properties. These owners should be paying more in taxes, not less than everybody else. The current system is a disincentive for them to fix these places,” Gonter recently told local freelance writer Gary Gately, who was on assignment for The Daily Record.

Gonter’s latest idea won support from a number of state and city officials this year but now seems sidetracked. The idea was to tax vacant or uninhabitable property at a much higher rate than occupied houses.

Just as that proposal was gaining some traction in Annapolis, enabling legislation to let the city of Baltimore do just that, it was set aside at the request of the administration of Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake, who, as City Council president, had supported that idea.

A spokesman for the mayor told Gately that she had changed her mind about higher taxes on vacant properties because they could drive away not only potential new residents but also private and nonprofit organizations interested in rehabbing or redeveloping vacant housing.

The spokesman added that Rawlings-Blake is working on a plan to cut red tape involving vacant properties by giving control over virtually all of the properties to the city housing department. Yes, that’s the same city housing department that bore the brunt of scathing criticism from the mayor’s transition team for lacking “a clear and coherent vision” when she took office a few short months ago. That sounds a lot more like a black hole than a solution.

Meanwhile, there is no shortage of other ideas on how to tackle the problem. City Council President Bernard C. “Jack” Young has introduced a bill that would impose $100 registration fees for each vacant house and $250 for commercial buildings.

City Councilman James Kraft wants registration fees of up to $5,000 for each vacant house.

The problem is painfully obvious, as is the need for real action, not just passing the bureaucratic buck to an already dysfunctional housing department. The mayor either needs to take the lead on a comprehensive effort to deal with the city’s vacant housing problem head-on, or she needs to stay out of the way and let someone else do it.