August 26, 1999

Baltimore City Department of Planning
417 E. Fayette Street, 8^th Floor
Baltimore, Maryland 21202

Attn: Amy Hasson

Dear Ms. Hasson:

The Baltimore Regional Partnership ("the Partnership") is pleased to review the most ambitious draft of the City’s planning document. In its broadest form, the draft report provides a glance at the City’s vision for 2020. The Partnership works on a common agenda to enhance quality of life in the Baltimore Region through urban revitalization and environmental protection. In this spirit, we offer the following comments to the draft:

The Partnership agrees with many of the assertions made in the draft which support Smart Growth and reinforce Baltimore’s posture as the anchor for the region. Generally, though, the Partnership finds the efforts implied in the plan to be passive and lacking any measurement of achievement. A lackluster role will make Baltimore more reactive to regional movements rather than a force for change. Baltimore can benefit greatly from Smart Growth legislation, and must position itself – without alienating its neighbors and counterparts – to achieve the maximum gain of any current and future legislation. Specifically, the Partnership recommends:

That the document assert Baltimore’s role as a champion of Smart Growth, and lead the efforts to remedy shortcomings in the legislation;

That the document assert Baltimore’s support of regionalism and the "One Maryland" concept espoused by Speaker Casper Taylor;

That elements throughout the document place Baltimore as being the state’s leader in providing tangible, sensible alternatives to greenfield and sprawl development, especially in the city’s underrepresented communities.

This is a laudable element of the plan; however, there are four immediate concerns:

Resource management. All of the implementation partners mentioned face limitations. The City anticipates a shortfall of receipts exceeding $153 million dollars over the next four years; and City-funded non-profit partners face similar limitations. Where is the capacity to carry out these tasks effectively?

Many neighborhoods have undergone one or more planning processes over the past several years. Another planning process with little or no progress from the previous process is an exercise in futility. How are these plans accounted for?

Adjacent community coordination. The State’s Smart Growth legislation addresses the inadequacies of isolated planning processes. Who will manage the contradictions and gaps between neighborhoods and jurisdictions?

Sub-areas. The Partnership has two concerns regarding this concept: first, a stigma accompanies classification as a reinvestment or redevelopment area. The media already inaccurately portrays criminal activity with blanket descriptions – East and West Baltimore as the most maligned parts of town. Will communities now be stamped with labels that identify their level of disinvestment? The depiction of the more severe areas requiring attention is accurate. The people who live in these neighborhoods are disproportionately old and poor. A home is a person’s greatest asset; while the challenges of their current living situation may erode its value, the City does not need to be another catalyst to their plight. Second, if the name-game dilemma is not mitigated, in a city that has championed block-by-block organizing, cataloguing an area with a label is shortsighted and misguided: when residents realize the stigma is connected to their neighborhood, and not an isolated block within it, the error of this association will be realized.

It is not easy to develop positive terminology to describe the more dire areas. However, it may be better to describe and market them as "areas in the city with the greatest growth opportunities."

The Partnership supports many of the elements in this section of the document, but offers a citation to be included. Several community partners, including the Neighborhood Design Center, Historic East Baltimore Community Action Coalition, Morgan State University’s Institute of Architecture and Planning and the Baltimore Chapter of the American Institute of Architects, sponsored an international design competition to look at the solutions to the undercrowding dilemma. While the competition site was in one neighborhood, the lessons learned from the competition should serve as a springboard for the demolition and replenishment strategies undertaken by the City.

The Partnership also wishes to highlight one point mentioned under the recommendations in goal four. There is concern that the citizenry is being put upon to do the work of the City in cleaning up their neighborhoods. The civic duties of the citizenry become hollow when there is little perceived enforcement or support of City codes and policies. The Partnership recommends that the City first review and modify its policies as necessary so that they may be enforced on a city-wide basis. It should then broadly advertise its policies and then effectively enforce them with the support of its citizens. The Partnership recognizes and champions the continued effort of the City to maintain twice-weekly trash collection.

Lastly, the Partnership agrees that none of the work of sustaining the city can be accomplished by the administration alone, and recognizes the strength of partnerships in a network. Several of the partners – namely community development corporations (CDC’s) – are supported by the City. Several CDC’s overlap in boundaries and purpose; and the efficacy of some is questionable. Since financial resources are finite, the Partnership recommends that the City, as part of its annual funding evaluation, incorporate measures of satisfaction with the service provided by the CDC as criteria for continued funding.

This chapter highlights a great weakness in the planning effort: where is the place for the current citizenry in Baltimore’s future? While the draft weaves in references to Baltimore’s under-educated populace and the need for educational reforms, nothing in the noted development sites holds promise for educationally-challenged, entry-level wage earners. The advent of Welfare Reform, with its support limitations, requires an active, effective economic development strategy. The Partnership urges the City to become a leader in developing "low tech" initiatives that can offer employment opportunities for current citizens. These initiatives can help support several other elements of the draft plan and give birth to "green" industries in our neighborhoods. Specific examples include:

Develop a blown cellulose insulation business. Such a venture uses recycled paper and water to create insulation with an R-value superior that of fiberglass batt – an ideal product for the existing stock of preserved residential structures. The city’s housing industry presents a ready market to successfully grow such a business. Equipment start-up costs are in the $200,000 range;

Urban forestry. With the amount of vacant land in the city anticipated to increase, an ideal re-use of the land would be to begin tree nurseries for street tree placement. With the City as a market foothold, this business stands a good chance of successfully expanding to markets throughout the region. The positive re-use of the land will also reduce the run-off of soils and potential contaminants into the Chesapeake.

The Partnership believes that professionals in the environmental communities can provide technical support to diversify Baltimore’s economy to benefit all of its citizens.

Baltimore uses very little of its Block Grant allocation to support economic development. In fact, the term "community development corporation" is a misnomer for CDC’s that are largely housing developers. Few are simultaneously engaged in comprehensive human and economic development activities. As another measure for allocating dwindling CDBG resources, the City should fund CDC’s that support community-based economic development.

The last comment is more of an exclamation point. That the statement, "[I]mproving City coordination should be an immediate goal" is buried on page 94 of the draft is disheartening. If the City, with vacating resources and population, has not made interdepartmental coordination a mandate (by example rather than edict) prior to the publication of this draft, how can it implement and facilitate the visions and processes articulated in this publication?

The Partnership fully supports urban design strategies that support mixed-use strategies and incorporate zoning that permits for creative re-use of existing structures.

One of the more disturbing notes to this section is that as written, the city is losing trees at the rate of 100 per year by the DPW’s work alone (p.152).

The Partnership recommends the inclusion of sustainable landscaping and ecological management techniques. We further recommend that the document connect water quality to land use. Also, water quality techniques should include measures such as bio-retention, bayscaping, native plants for low water use.

Finally, the Partnership recommends that the City re-evaluate its recycling and trash collection policies. In certain neighborhoods, these policies are neither reinforced nor practical. Problems can be mitigated with the development of City-led programs in solid waste management, collection and recycling. This does not preclude the competitive bidding of refuse removal (the City of Indianapolis has made competitive bidding a fair measure).

The Partnership longs for a "regional vision for land use, economic development and environmental protection, based on Smart Growth principles, to be used as the framework for all transportation planning and spending in the region." Unfortunately the Partnership strongly believes that the Baltimore Metropolitan Council (BMC) and its Transportation Steering Committee (TSC) in their current form are institutionally inadequate to manage the region’s transportation resources. For a planning process that requires citizen input, these bodies fall far short of inclusion; this much has been recognized by the Federal government in its re-certification findings for the Baltimore region. The Partnership has assembled recommendations that present a path to a more equitable representative body in the TSC; they are attached as an appendix.

The Partnership strongly supports the notion of an integrated transit system. However, throughout the draft document, parking seems the only solution to the area’s nagging transportation woes. One notable exception is the proposal of "high speed train service" (p. 86), a pseudonym for Mag-lev. Why does Baltimore continue to pursue study after study of non-connective measures to cure its current transportation malaise? Mag-lev is not a transportation remedy for the city; at best, it serves the region in its 2012 Olympic bid.

Integrated transit solutions would include:

Increasing the breadth of light rail to reach to the east and west neighborhoods and inner ring suburbs. This would provide better service options for city residents. The current parking lot to parking lot termini for the system (save the transit links at the airport and Penn Station) demonstrate the true customer base for the system.

Technology exists to grant traffic signal right-of-way to light rail. For those with a choice, the stop-and-go of light rail from, for example, the Mount Royal to Camden stations, causes enough of a time delay to make transit the less favorable option. For those without the luxury of choice, the delays are an unnecessary inconvenience. Even Los Angeles’ light rail has right-of-way privileges!

Expanding a transit hub and spoke concept at termini and links. Camden Station and Mondawmin are more accurate as multi-modal facilities than Lexington Market (one name for two stations a block apart does not make it multi-modal). Mondawmin works well as a hub and spoke, however, enhanced and coordinated bus service to the Camden Station transit hub could serve both southern light rail and MARC passengers.

A single transit pass!

The Partnership fully supports the notion of suspending, eliminating or reducing the farebox recovery mandate, and will lend support to the City and MTA’s revision of this regulation.

The Partnership supports serving the needs of reverse commuters. This is important to providing equitable transportation options for city residents. Creative solutions to meet this challenge are at hand. Recently passed legislation providing tax credits for employers and employees who pay for transit will propel this as an option. The Partnership recommends that the Federal and Maryland Commuter Choice tax credit options be emphasized in similar fashion to the economic development tax credits on page 90.

The City should review its options for infrastructure maintenance to include sub-contracting segments of its maintenance work. The City-State maintenance procedures strain work crews and often lead to deferred maintenance problems on secondary and tertiary streets.

The Partnership fully supports providing for increased pedestrian and bicycle access throughout the city.

In general, the Partnership believes that the significant shortcoming of this plan is the presentation of goals without measures. We recommend that quantifiable measurements be included as part of the goals process to validate the plan.

For the Baltimore Regional Partnership,

Citizens Planning and Housing Association
Baltimore Urban League
1000 Friends of Maryland
Environmental Defense Fund
Chesapeake Bay Foundation