I hear you

Over the last three months I have been listening at dozens of community meetings. I’ve been listening at your doorsteps. And I’ve been listening in our telephone conversations and zoom chats. We want better schools, better health care, more activities for children and youth, and more amenities in our neighborhoods. We don’t want Baltimore’s beauty hidden under the wrong narratives.

• We can halve the murder rate by fully funding anti-violence strategies that are proven to work.  We need more funding for proven strategies. These include group violence reduction strategy and cognitive behavioral therapy. Too many Baltimore agencies are too weak to coordinate with law enforcement so that we can make the right strategies work. As your delegate, I will fight for more funding for the strategies that work and more support for agency coordination.

• We can end corruption in Baltimore by changing Baltimore City’s property tax structure.  Slashing property taxes would make developers less dependent on big subsidies for wealthier neighborhoods, while residents and small businesses get little to no support. Let’s slash property tax rates by 61% to $0.86 per $100.00. This would help level the playing field between wealthy and poorer communities and big and small developers.

• We can end trash in our streets by hiring more people to pick it up.  Unemployment in some Baltimore neighborhoods is in excess of 20%. As your delegate, I would work to establish or expand a Conservation Corps for Baltimore—a state-funded program to put thousands of Baltimoreans, especially returning citizens, to work on projects with environmental benefits.  Franklin Roosevelt successfully did this for our country in 1933 after the Great Depression.  His program provided the dignity of work and careers in environmental conservation for more than three million Americans.  We can do it too. For Baltimore.
  
  I also support a bottle and can deposit program for the state of Maryland. Redemption centers need to be easy to access with public transportation. Businesses should not have to take bottles back through their stores.