City Paper Mayoral Questionnaire
 
1.       If elected, what will be your top three priorities? List them in order and explain why they are ordered this way.
 
1.      Gaining control of our Baltimore City agencies by installing oversight and accountability, bringing agencies back to City Hall from two powerful institutions with too much control on major aspects of development and economy all with no transparency and all moving great amounts of city revenue without transparency.  Rebuilding oversight and accountability is not simply ‘doing annual audits’.  It starts by what I mention above----reigning in all of the outsourcing of Baltimore agencies that has broken the ability to administer the city.  Rebuilding all public agencies out to the communities while bringing control back reverses that hold of two powerful institutions and brings control back to the citizens and with it----oversight, accountability, transparency, and public voice in policy.  Reviewing all corporate subsidy, corporate tax breaks, and making sure corporations are indeed paying the taxes owed----that is how all of what my campaign talks of enacting will be funded.
Simply doing this will allow Baltimore City Hall to double its budget and all of this new revenue will come out to all communities.
 
2.       We must rebuild Baltimore’s economy as local, domestic, small business/small manufacturing to create the platform from which the city will gain economic health and stability. Starting development in all surrounding communities to include demolition, hauling away and recycling of debris, rehabbing houses, breaking away all concrete infrastructure to downsize communities while opening and creating a great public greenspace central to each community.  Mind you, this is important to all communities already under development and it will not impede current development plans.  This is critical for two reasons.  .  This will happen as we rebuild our surrounding communities since small construction businesses and home improvement businesses will be one economy within all communities.  Then as well, the green space I see as a fresh food center with grand green house, barn for animal husbandry/fish farming and you have small businesses tied to harvesting this food, creating food products as butter or sausage, distributing this food, and small fresh food stores in each community creates a fresh food economy.  Two economies built with initial development will spawn lots of other businesses that will want to augment.
 
3.      Housing policy must be installed as all this development occurs that will address mixed income housing and public/low-income housing needs.  Baltimore will use this opportunity to clear away all lead/asbestos chemical public health issues in houses, soil, and zoning in ways to keep new corporate pollution out of air, water, and ground.  We cannot rebuild mitigating an old threat to public health while new ones come in the form of global corporate factories and campuses.  The current push is to demolish communities to install global corporate campuses----I would do the opposite. The construction economy I speak of above will build a platform for the poorest in a community to own a rehabbed home.  The public green space developed with public recreation and public school will attract middle-income families. Anyone homeless will be sheltered and see re-entry into housing in their own communities.  This community stability will lower crime, violence, and drug addiction as citizens marginalized feel ready to reattach.  The crime, violence, and drug dealing is a top issue and nothing will be done to address this until this step occurs.  That is why these are the top issues for the city.
 
 
If you must cut the city’s budget, which agencies would you cut first, second, and third, and why?


1.      First, I see the ability to grow the budget and agencies with oversight and accountability so the only cuts may be initially as we restructure agencies.  If we are going to rebuild our local, domestic economy we must stop directing so much of the city’s revenue to building global markets and that is much money.  I am not against building global markets, I simply see it critical that Baltimore builds a stable, healthy, local economy free from Wall Street boom and bust---free from global corporate monopoly killing our ability to create small businesses.  Once we have that----then augment the city’s economy with global markets.
2.      Baltimore City marketing and development agencies tasked with bringing people, investment firms and venture capitalists, and corporations to Baltimore.  We have plenty of people, revenue, and the drive towards small and regional business development to keep the city busy for years.  Tourism is always a city’s focus and different from what I describe above.
3.      Education funding geared to corporate university research and patenting.  In a city starved of funding for K-12 public education and a city with citizens wanting strong affordable public higher education we must reverse these policies making our universities into basically corporate R & D and patent mills.  That is not what university missions have been throughout American history and it violates the division of university as non-profit and simply corporate for-profit entity.  Baltimore has moved too much revenue towards this corporate university model as our citizens are made to pay higher and higher tuition or are simply not able to attend.  Education is the top issue for Baltimore citizens and this is a key funding issue.
 
 
If the city needs to raise more revenue, what will be your first step?


The biggest problem in revenue for Baltimore is the level of debt being tied under the guise of Wall Street leveraging and credit bonds.  Taxpayers lose hundreds of millions of dollars in fees, fines, and fraud from these deals.  We have so much bond debt that taxpayers will pay over a billion dollars in fees over 30 years and that is a low estimate.  We have an bond market collapse coming---bringing an economic recession ---so the first step for any new mayor will be revisiting every leveraging and bond deal tied to the city to assure these are written in the public interest free from damage caused by the coming bond collapse and economic downturn. Do you know if Baltimore had a local, domestic economy that none of these Wall Street booms and busts would affect the city?  This question alludes to taxation and I will not be raising taxes on individuals or small businesses.  As I stated in the first question------allowing corporations to be good corporate citizens will bring that needed revenue.  Revisiting Wall Street deals and moving them to public interest will then allow for Baltimore taxes to be lowered.  As the bond deals are written-----all of Baltimore’s tax revenue is tied to financing that debt and no candidate for mayor will be able to lower taxes.
 
 
To reduce crime, what must the police department do that it is not doing?

Crime and violence in Baltimore is a poverty and unemployment driven problem---not a policing.  That is why I placed rebuilding our surrounding communities at the top----this must happen to begin to reduce crime and violence with any meaningful, lasting effect. It is the failure to do this that has made all policing strategies fail----we must reform the criminal justice and public justice system as we rebuild communities.  People need to feel they have rights as citizens and an access to justice in order to move away from empowerment through violence.  We will not build community policing while we have a militarized policing policy and I will remove all militarized policy from our community policing.  That is Homeland Security and emergency staffing----not policing in communities.  This is the only way to rebuild trust.  Hiring from the city and/or communities is the next thing towards trust.  Only with trust can policing become effective.  All of these institutional barriers have long blocked successful reduction of crime and violence in Baltimore.
 
What would you do to improve police-community relations?

I included this in the answer above.
 
Name the key mistake the city has made in terms of public education, and the first three things you will do to improve schools. How will you accomplish these things?


Baltimore never allowed Federal funding and Constitutional Amendments of Equal Opportunity and Access be installed in the 1970s.  Maryland Assembly has withheld Federal funding that would have maintained and created public school conditions conducive for learning and Baltimore City Hall did not pursue obtaining those Federal funds in Federal court.  We have today a $700 million public city school court awarded lawsuit yet to come to Baltimore that would have rebuilt all city schools.  That is one issue I will address first.  We must secure the funding we already have and then work to increase local school funding which can simply be done by designating a percentage of property taxes to school funding. It is critical for parents wanting strong public schools that they feel allow them voice in administrating and curricula to remember that must go for all citizens. When we create tiers we create barriers to moving forward.  All communities must have a public school their children attend; all public schools must remove the corporate partnership that the current policies see leading to our K-12 as attachments to corporations for only vocational training for children.  To have broad curricula with liberal arts and humanities we need to move away from schools as businesses and students in job training from pre-K forward.  This is why I ask all citizens in Baltimore to stop allowing a tiering system in education be built because this will end taking all students and public schools. We have the funding to rebuild our public schools, to make them well-resourced with strong permanent staff, to rebuild rigor without testing and evaluation---but with teachers feeling free to administer classrooms, by motivating students to achieve their best, and to recognize success as more than just a grade.
 
 
Baltimore has thousands of vacant buildings and thousands of homeless people. How would you improve the city’s housing policies?



I answered this above-----the housing of homeless needs to be temporary sheltering in their own communities with strong re-entry into the workforce.  I will have a public shelter system in each community and that will be augmented by non-profits wanting to support this effort.
 
What would you do to attract investment and economic development to Baltimore? How would this differ from current and past policies?



Corporations come to a city because it has citizens with the earning capacity to consume products and to achieve education levels needed for employees.  All corporations want market share so when we are told that a corporation will not come to Baltimore without making the city tax-free, totally free market----that is not true.  Baltimore must rebuild competition with the corporations we have in the city now to create the platform for future corporate citizens.  The current approach is bringing thousands of new people----foreign rich opening their own corporate campuses and factories----and that is not what the citizens of Baltimore want as an economic growth strategy.  There is no shortcuts to rebuilding our own wealth and education strength that will attract corporations to Baltimore.  Most of the corporations being brought to Baltimore are low-wage and offering no long-term career pathways.  We want to build our own small business manufacturing that wants to hire Baltimore citizens; we want to build small technology businesses and energy businesses that want to compete with the BGE/Exelon and Verizon/Comcast crowd to break monopoly.  It is monopoly that empowers corporations to tell a city what it must do to keep corporations in town.  It is competition for market-share that makes corporations want to be good citizens.
 
Baltimore City’s unemployment rate is about double that of the rest of the state—not counting those underemployed or not looking for work. What would you do to improve this?


Baltimore’s economy was kept high because when industry left Baltimore, City Hall did not rebuild a small, local economy to replace it. This was deliberate stagnation.  This is why rebuilding our communities with permanent public structures that act as platforms for small business development is critical. Unemployment would drop considerably in the first 4 years of my administration simply rebuilding our public agencies and communities. 
 
 
If you were not running, which of the other candidates would you vote for? Why?


I honestly feel Cindy Walsh is the only candidate not associated with the current Baltimore Development establishment so I could not say.
 
 
Thank you,
 
Cindy Walsh for Mayor of Baltimore.