WWW: Let me begin by saying thank you so much
for joining us; we appreciate your time. I guess we will jump right in to the
most pressing thing on everyone’s mind: COVID. You were just inaugurated. How do
you think the city has handled COVID so far, and what do you think you can do
better in the future as mayor?
Scott: I think that we have really done a good
job of handling COVID thus far, under the leadership of the city health
commissioner, Dr. Dzirasa, who is doing a fantastic job. But, yes, there’s
always room for improvement. We are, first and foremost, going to continue
following the advice of the public health professionals. I also want to say
that I feel lucky to be mayor of the city that has 11 hospitals. It has Johns
Hopkins, which is leading the world in COVID research. We also have University
of Maryland Medical System; we are using them as well to help influence what
we’re doing and how we’re doing it.
We’re going to
communicate more frequently with the public, and we’re going to try to be more
nimble in sending credible messages out into communities. We need to have the
well-respected folks in the neighborhoods, including within the Orthodox Jewish
community, carry the message so that it is reaching everyone and so that people
understand how important this is and trust us as we move through this very
trying time – especially as we prepare for the vaccine rollout.
WWW: When do you think the city can expect to
start receiving vaccinations?
Scott: This
should be happening in the coming days and weeks. The health commissioner is a
part of the vaccination rollout team, and we will be following the governor’s
guidelines. First responders and those who are most at risk will receive it
first. But we are likely not going to have enough vaccine to give to everyone who
is supposed to get it, even within those categories. We will follow the
guidelines, working with the state, working with our health workers and
hospitals – so that we can see the light at the end of the tunnel of COVID.
WWW: Have you learned anything different as
mayor than as president of the city council that would indicate when we can
expect the end of this?
Scott: No, I’m still hearing the same information. I
am hearing from hospitals and other folks that we need to do the things that
have been done in other places. We’re going to look at some of our counterparts
in Australia and other places that have become COVID-free because people
actually adhere to the guidelines. We are going to have to do that here in
Baltimore and across the country even as we administer the vaccine.
WWW: You recently issued some additional
closure guidelines. What metrics will be used to determine when the city and
businesses can begin to reopen?
Scott: Listen, we’ll continue to do what we have done
– that is, looking at our positivity rate, our death rate, our case rate, and
making sure that we are following and scrutinizing that data as we make a
decision on when things are going to reopen. This is the same information we
have been using all along. Again, we are following the public health
guidelines. We will see how things are going for about three to four weeks and
then assess where we have to go from there. Announcing more closures was not
something that I wanted to do on my first full day in office, but it was
necessary in order to put the city in a better place.
WWW: Shifting the focus now, still on COVID,
but more on the economic aspect: How can the city make up the budget deficit
that is expected as a result of COVID?
Scott: Listen, we are better off than we thought
we would be, something we should be happy about. But it is still going to be
tough. We know that we are going to have to look at deficiencies and tap into
our rainy-day fund, but the residents of Baltimore should understand that the city’s
fiscal responsibility in the most recent years has put us in a better position.
If we had not made those tough decisions, if we hadn’t implemented a 10-year
financial plan in 2018, we would be in a much more dire situation. But I want
to add the importance of not just the city stepping up. We need the federal
government to actually lead in the way that they can. And that is to send
support directly to cities, directly to citizens, directly to businesses, and
put aside the partisan politics that they have been engulfed in for at least the
last four years. Put it all aside and understand that we are in the worst
situation economically that we have seen in over a generation, and in the
middle of a pandemic. And we need them to act – and act now.
WWW: How can the city, in the future, attract
tax-paying citizens? The city’s population has drastically decreased over the
last 50 years, and it seems like that decrease is accelerating. What can you do
as mayor to reverse that trend?
Scott: First is to fix the things that have
forced people to leave in the first place. That means to have a functioning city
government. A government that is a 3.5-billion-dollar entity needs to be run
like a 3.5-billion-dollar business – not like some Mickey Mouse organization. We
have already identified and hired the first city administrator of Baltimore, a
professional who will operate city government. This is not someone I went to
school with or someone I happened to know, but someone who is qualified for the
job. We are modernizing the city government to make sure that the services
people ask for and need get done. And they need to get done while understanding
the differences among our communities, and how we have to serve all of our
communities in Baltimore. We also have to tackle the big items: dealing with
the violent crime here in Baltimore – getting on a path to significantly reduce
that – and improving our schools. You have to attract people by handling the
issues that you have, not just ignoring them as people have done in the past.
WWW: Is there any potential tax relief on the
radar? Or is that something that will be looked at...never?
Scott: No, we’re actually going to look at that.
I’ll be very open. First and foremost, everyone understands the reality that
we’re in now with COVID. But beyond that, the first thing we have to do, before
we can look at reducing the taxes, is to know how the city is spending all of
its money and making sure that every agency is as effective as possible. We
know that that is not the case, right? As we talk, today, on December 15, 2020,
city employees still do their timesheets by hand. There’s no efficiency there. They
can’t tell me how much property the city owns; they can’t tell me if city
employees have multiple cell phones, or how many employees have cars, and all
of these other things, so that we can get rid of duplications of services. We
have to do a deep assessment first and then set a path, as they are doing in
Nashville and San Francisco. We have to say, “Okay, this is where we are, this
is where we’re going, and this is how we’ll get there” – responsibly, without
eliminating services.
WWW: What information can you provide about
the two public buildings that are for sale in our neighborhood, Northwestern
High School and the Police Training building?
Scott: The Northwest building is swing space
right now for Cross Country Elementary School. That’s off the table for now. About
the training facility, as I said to Councilman Schleifer and the 41st
delegation and everyone in that neighborhood, I’m going to organize a group of
people, including folks from the community, to look at the space and determine
the best usage for it. We have some great youth programming going on there now,
with the Maryland Church. Everyone in the neighborhood loves it and it’s a
great opportunity for them to continue there. We do have to figure out
something with the building. We’re going to do that in consultation with the
community, and you can expect to see that in the coming days.
WWW: Shifting to something you said
previously, about tackling the crime issue: Generally, what can be done? Although
we do not see murders in our neighborhood very much, there is a lot of other
crime. What can be done to reduce those harder crimes throughout the city?
Scott: You have to have a mayor that accepts and
understands that it starts with you. It starts with me. I have to let every
agency know, not just the police department, that this is a priority. Then you
have to actually have a plan. We know that violent crime in Baltimore is
continuously committed by the same groups of people. Let’s target them,
not everyone who lives in Baltimore City, but the people who are actually doing
the violence. We’ll do that through a group violence-reduction strategy.
We are going to
target the flow of guns in the city. For the first time ever, we’ll target gun
traffickers. This year, for the first time, over 70% of the weapons that BPD
has recovered have come from outside of the city of Baltimore. We will do
innovative things like increasing how we use license plate reading units to
catch people with stolen cars. We are going to fully invest in a comprehensive
strategy that includes our police department, health department, transportation,
and recreation and parks. But first and foremost, we are going to have a group
violence-reduction strategy that is targeted enforcement on the people doing
the acts of crime in Baltimore and letting them know that we will remove them
from our neighborhoods.
WWW: Is there a judicial component associated
with that plan?
Scott: Fully implementing a group violence-reduction
strategy is a partnership with the police department, state’s attorney, and all
law enforcement partners. Also, we need programs to help folks change their
lives. We are going to bring in services. So if someone wants to change and not
be involved in a life of crime, we will provide resources for that as well. We
will do all of these things to have a complete approach.
WWW: What can be done to end the lower end
crime in our neighborhoods? Car-jackings and assaults are very much quality-of-life
issues, but they don’t end up in the paper like the murder rate. A lot of the
perpetrators are typically juveniles, and it’s a revolving door: they come in,
get arrested, and are out within 24 hours, and there are no consequences and no
follow-up. Councilman Schleifer recently made a proposal to the state
legislature about tracking these perpetrators. What do you think can be
done, and what would you propose?
Scott: First let me say that while it may not make
the newspaper, car-jackings are a priority for me. It is a violent crime; we
had someone shot on Wabash and Cold Spring this fall during a car-jacking. This
was a priority for me as council president. We have to utilize the resources
that we have. This is why we are going get license plate reader units. The BPD
is utilizing them and making sure that officers are trained in using them so
that we will be able to recover cars and figure out who these people are.
But this
accountability thing is not just going to be about car-jackings. We know that
there is a revolving door: how many times have we arrested someone with a gun,
and he ends up right back out on the streets? We have had this conversation for
decades now: police blaming judges and state’s attorneys, state’s attorneys
blaming police – all of that. This has to stop. We have to have all adults in
the room. I am going to restart the Criminal Justice Coordinating Council
through the Mayor’s Office of Public Safety. We are going to call it the Mayor’s
Office of Criminal Justice. We are going to institute accountability; we’re
going to help those agencies close the loopholes of how these things are
happening, so that we can keep our neighborhoods safe. It doesn’t have to be in
the press; it doesn’t have to be done by beating your chest. It has to be done
in a collaborative way.
WWW: You were council president for a short while,
but maybe you can tell our readers what led you into politics in the first
place?
Scott: I grew up in Park Heights, on the corner
of Park Heights and Cold Spring. When you live in a neighborhood that the world
descends on for a horserace and then every other day of the year you are not
even seen as a human, it changes you. When you see your first shooting before
your tenth birthday, it changes you. It forces you to make a decision on
whether you are going to accept that this is how life is or whether you are
going to do something to change it. I chose to change it because I knew no one
was coming to save me.
WWW: What do you think are the greatest
strengths of the city of Baltimore?
Scott: Our people – and that’s an easy one. When
people come here, they never leave because the people here are what makes our city
the greatest city in the world!
WWW: Where do you want to see yourself in 10
years? I won’t ask about five years because hopefully you will still be our Mayor,
and you’ll still be governing us very well.
Scott: I will be what? 46? Hopefully,
10 years from now I will be serving the city of Baltimore in some capacity. I
may be retired. Who knows? But I will be here in Baltimore working to make my
city a better place. I could just be coaching sports at that time. But I will
be here in Baltimore, working.
WWW: Is there any closing message you want to
send to our readership?
Scott: Yes, I’d like to let the readership know
that I am a son of Park Heights. I will always keep Park Heights near, dear,
and close to my heart. I understand the neighborhood, and I am appreciative of
the diverse nature of our neighborhood and the cultures there. It is something
that I will always work to protect and uplift. I will be your mayor each and
every day, working hard to make our neighborhood and the city a better place.
WWW: Thank you so much for your time; we
really appreciate it. You’re our mayor, and we wish you luck and hope
that you will really bring some positive change to the community.
Scott: Thank you!
Judah Katz is a Baltimore native and a partner with
the law firm of Neuman & Katz, LLC. He
focuses on corporate law and estate planning. He can
be reached at jkatz@neumankatz.com. Please note that this interview has been
edited for length and clarity.
