A proposal to slash Baltimore’s property tax rate would be a violation of state law and therefore won’t make the November ballot, the city’s election director ruled Tuesday.
Setting the rate, which could have been nearly cut in half if the proposal were approved by voters, is the jurisdiction of the mayor and City Council, Baltimore City Board of Elections Director Armstead Jones said in a letter to an attorney representing Renew Baltimore, the coalition that gathered over 23,000 signatures in an attempt to put the question on the ballot.
Jones said Tuesday the Board of Elections typically conducts a review of ballot question petitions before they are circulated — and did so in the case of Renew Baltimore. That review, however, was preliminary in nature. A full review is not conducted on the legality of a ballot question until signatures for a petition have been submitted, he said.
Letters exchanged between attorneys for Renew Baltimore and the election board show Renew requested an “advance determination” of the petition’s legality under state code in June. Jones declined to provide one. Both the initial review and the final review were conducted by Assistant Attorney General Thomas Chapman who serves as the board’s attorney.
“For the initial review, we just do a preliminary type of thing,” Jones said. “The final determination is mine,” he added, noting that Chapman only makes recommendations.
“I have determined that the petition is deficient,” Jones wrote in the letter to Renew Baltimore, which describes itself as a volunteer group of city “leaders, residents, business owners and economists. “State law provides that the power to set a specific property tax rate in the counties and Baltimore City must remain with the county or city council.”
The proposal asked to cut the rate from 2.248% to 1.2% over seven years and could have a major impact on city finances. Baltimore had about $3.6 billion of revenue in fiscal year 2023, according to the city’s annual audited financial report. Almost 30% of that money — about $1 billion — came from the property tax.
Renew Baltimore said in a statement Tuesday it will seek judicial review of the ruling in city circuit court.
Jones said the board will continue to count signatures for the Renew petition in anticipation of judicial review, which petitioners are entitled to.
“Just in case, we’ll go through it, so if the signatures are there, and there are some legal matters that occur, we’re on top of it,” he said.
In his letter, Jones points out that city charter can’t conflict with state law before citing a 1990 case in which the Maryland Court of Appeals, now the Supreme Court of Maryland, ruled Baltimore and Anne Arundel Counties could set a cap on future growth of property tax rates but could not roll back rates to lower levels. The court made a similar ruling in Talbot County in 1995.
The Greater Baltimore Board of Realtors PAC gave $23,000 to Renew Baltimore, while the Maryland Multi-Housing Association PAC contributed $30,000, campaign finance records show. The campaign also received $25,000 each from CFG Community Bank and developer Terra Nova Ventures.
Christopher Meyer, a research analyst with the Maryland Center on Economic Policy, said last week Baltimore would need to gain 325,000 new residents within seven years to maintain existing tax revenue if the cut is enacted. Last month Mayor Brandon Scott called the proposal “dramatically short-sighted.” During its campaign, Renew Baltimore argued the cut would attract more residents and businesses to the city, increasing its tax base and offsetting the multi-million-dollar hit to city revenue.
Courtney Jenkins, president of the Baltimore Council of AFL-CIO unions said in a statement the proposal was “extreme.”
“The measure was a simple-minded fantasy, created to benefit the very wealthiest at the expense of the rest of us,” Jenkins said on behalf of the opposition coalition Baltimore City Is Not For Sale. “If implemented, city residents would have suffered from having fewer firefighters and EMS workers, the closure of multiple fire stations, the elimination of street and alley cleaning, and the cancellation of all pre-and-post-natal maternal health and [lead exposure] visits.”
Baltimore Sun reporter Emily Opilo contributed to this article.
