Pugh says she’s determined to make one Baltimore  

Listen to this article

Mayor Catherine Pugh is trying to leave her mark on the state’s largest city at a critical point in Baltimore’s history.

Pugh takes over a city still reeling in many ways from the riots following Freddie Gray’s death in police custody nearly two years ago, the trials of four police officers involved in Gray’s arrest and the often vitriolic conversations about wealth disparity in the city following the unrest. But Pugh remains confident her administration can tackle those obstacles.

A top priority for her administration is cutting red tape in the licensing and permitting process, which she says her administration had done by moving the process online, reaching out to business leaders to strengthen ties and agreeing to a consent decree with the federal government intended to reform the city’s police.

“So there are a lot of things I think we need to be able to connect the dots on. But I think with the kind of leadership and the team that I’ve provided we’ll be able to do that, and so I’m excited about the future of Baltimore. I’m really excited about the energy around me and the people who are willing to help,” Pugh said.

The mayor sat down with reporters and editors from The Daily Record on Thursday to discuss her vision for the city and what she’s accomplished so far in her short time as mayor. What follows is a condensed version of that conversation.

The Daily Record: There’s an adage that presidents get too much credit and too much blame for the economy. I was wondering from a mayor’s standpoint … if you feel that mayors have that much power over the economic development of a city?

Mayor Catherine Pugh: Yeah, absolutely. When I think about having a conversation, and I won’t name the company until I can lure them here, we said that, you know, we would love to have a conversation with all of the hospital presidents, and I said, ‘Do you have a distribution center in Baltimore?’ and they looked at me and said ‘We hadn’t thought about that.’ I said, ‘But you’ve got the No. 1 hospital system in the world in Baltimore. You’ve got among the top leading hospital systems, University of Maryland … Mercy Hospital. … You’ve got about four or five systems right here. So help me understand why you don’t think it’s important to have a distribution system here.’ So that conversation is beginning.

TDR: In the economic development plan that you laid out on your campaign website there’s a sentence in there about eliminating licensing and permitting red tape.

Pugh: Guess what? We’ve done that.

TDR: Well I was going to ask you for some examples of that?

Pugh: Yeah, we’ve done that. So I learned that in the permitting process it would take sometimes 30-some-odd trips to downtown to get your permit. Crazy. Today you can do it online. Straight up. You don’t have to come downtown. You can pay online. You can apply online and you can file your permitting process, and it’s been tested and it’s working. So we’ve got that piece done. OK, next question.

TDR: Which permits are you talking about?

Anthony McCarthy, Pugh’s spokesman: We’re going to have a press announcement about this. [Laughter]

TDR: Sounds like you just did. [Laughter] Which permits are you talking about, building permits?

Pugh: All of them. Oops, I forgot. That’s an upcoming press conference.

TDR: We were talking about economic development in the neighborhoods versus the Inner Harbor, etc. There’s been this sentiment of the ‘two Baltimores’ and it’s something that your predecessor at an event at Harbor Point said was baloney, that the economic development the city has done is benefitting all of Baltimore. Do you believe that there are two Baltimores and do we need to adjust our economic development policies to bring those two together to benefit everyone? And if so how do we do it?

Pugh: I don’t know I think that when you say Baltimores. There’s one Baltimore. You don’t get to go to two Baltimores, there’s one Baltimore. It’s Baltimore City.

The question becomes how do we spread our dollars so that we make sure we’re inclusive of all of Baltimore. I think what people are referring to is a lack of investment in certain parts of the city. When you think about Pennsylvania and North avenues, and it’s like someone was saying we’re going to redevelop certain parts of the city and I said, ‘What about Pennsylvania Avenue?’ When I was taking my Cabinet on a bus tour and someone was talking on the bus about what their plans were for Pennsylvania Avenue and said, ‘Well, we’re going to bring back the Royal Theatre, we’re going to bring the African-American Heritage Festival over there” and somebody yelled out ‘Are you dreaming?’ And I said, ‘Let’s go up Pennsylvania Avenue.’

And I pointed out a field where children play, families come and bring their chairs, and they play football, they play baseball on the field, and they mark them with cones because the field is not level and it’s not marked. What does it take to level a field, mark it in a community that has no recreation? … I mean there’s a recreation center there, but there’s not enough there.

So we’ll fix that because when you do things like that it says we respect this community. The lack of investment says that you don’t respect the neighborhood or the community or you don’t value the people the same. And I think that in many cases it’s easier, in some areas, to develop, and some of our more challenging areas we think, you know, somebody else is going to do it at some point. So, no, I don’t see us as two Baltimores. I see us as not spreading the opportunity across the city in the ways that they should be.

TDR: You said your top (legislative priority) is mayoral appointment authority to the school board. Are you going to get that?

Pugh: I think we’ll get that, and for me it’s about selecting the right people to be on the school board. I think if you’re in our school board you should know about our public school system, you should have a love for it. You should have engaged in some kind of way with the school system. I don’t know how you engage as a member of the board if you have not been in the public school system. Some people say. ‘Well having children in the public school system is enough.’ Well I don’t have any children. I just created a school and I’m engaged because I love the fact that every child deserves the right kind of education. So, I think we’ll get that.

TDR: You started off in your statement about the consent decree. Have you noticed any changes between (the Trump) administration’s Justice Department opposed to the Obama administration’s Justice Department?

Pugh: No I have not. I was pleased to be in court on yesterday and to speak with the judge to demonstrate or express my commitment to the consent decree because I think that we’ll all be better for it in the long run because it is about how we bring about police and community relationships, how we train our officers, how we create transparency in our police department. As I said to them, one of the reasons it was easy for me to participate in the negotiation is because I had been involved in criminal justice reform at the state level. So it was easy for me to say, ‘Well wait a minute now, because we’re already doing this. We have a body camera plan and we’ve got body cameras on police officers, we put cameras inside our vans and we put seatbelts inside our vans.’ So I was able to make sure some of the things we were doing we got credit for. So I’m very, very comfortable with that.

TDR: Any estimates as to how much this will cost the city?

Pugh: We know that we’ve put at least $10 million in the budget for this year. We’ve asked the governor for some hardware money in the capital budget. We also have grants coming in, I know from the Ford Foundation, I’m not sure what that dollar amount is yet. We know there’s some hard and fast costs as it relates to the monitor, that’s $1.5 million, but I also know that I have some agencies that I can reshape that will help to adjust us and be able to accomplish these goals.

Catherine E. Pugh

Age: 66

Education: Bachelor’s degree and MBA, Morgan State University

Political career: Mayor of Baltimore City since December 2016; Member, Maryland Senate, 2007-2016; Member, Maryland House of Delegates, 2005-2007; Member, Baltimore City Council, 1999-2004

Professional career: President and CEO of C.E. Pugh & Co., a public relations consulting firm, since 1988