Ryan Dorsey
Candidate in May 14 primary
Democratic
Mayfield
Age: 42 on day of General Election (Nov. 5)
Occupation: City Council Member
Education: Bachelor of Music, Peabody Institute of the Johns Hopkins University
Baltimore School for the Arts, class of 2000
Previous political experience: City Council Member (2016-present)
Why are you running for office?
I love this city and I love the third district. I love representing the people and want to keep doing it. I’ve made the City more transparent and helped it work better for you. With critical legislation on good governance and public accountability, transportation, fair housing, consumer protection, and a host of code changes to allow for improved City service outcomes, I have a strong record of accomplishment on your behalf. I’ve also worked closely with City agencies and the several Mayoral administrations to bring about policy change and operational improvements, and to deliver big community investments. Some of these things have been enacted and are paying dividends. Some still need work. I bring an earnest and often unique perspective to a wide range of issues, and I maintain a high bar in constituent service and open accessibility. Change takes time. As a lifelong District 3 resident, I’m proud of the work and thankful for the opportunity. There’s much more to do. I’m here for it.
What are the most pressing issues in your district, and how would you address them?
A citywide housing shortage is causing property taxes and rents to rise unsustainably, impacting every household in the city, middle- and modest-income households especially. While the rate of taxation hasn’t changed, residential assessments have doubled in just ten years, doubling tax bills. The only responsible way to address this is to build enough housing to meet market demand, which cannot be done without zoning reforms I’ve proposed.
Agencies communicate poorly and fail to meet demands of basic City services. It would be easy to simply blame bad management, which is a major contributor, for sure, but nothing in City government is properly funded because the tax base is insufficient. Service delivery can be improved to a degree through better operations management, which I work endlessly to assist in, but we need to grow our tax base to increase overall funding, for which a lot of new housing construction – at all price points, in every neighborhood – is absolutely necessary.
Baltimore’s homicide rate dropped in 2023 for the first time in nearly a decade. What do you believe is the council’s role in overseeing the police department and what would be your approach?
The Council should be working to dispel the myth that there’s any reality in which the number of police officers is going to increase. There is no place in the country where greater hiring incentives or stronger recruiting efforts are increasing their police numbers, so we should stop pretending that Baltimore is going to break this trend. Instead, the Council should press BPD to put sworn personnel only where needed, staffing all possible positions with civilians, and transferring as many duties out as possible, like giving response for non-injury vehicle crash response, which takes up an enormous amount of time, to the Department of Transportation, and dispatching mental health and social workers to cases that likely have no need of police. In general, also, the council should be working to dispel the myth that police are reducing crime, so that it becomes more politically acceptable to transfer funding to more impactful programs.
What do you believe is the council’s role in facilitating responsible development in the city?
Responsible development is making sure we function like a city, not a suburb. Responsible development makes the highest and best use of land, encouraging density in a way that helps support mass transit utilization, main street business development (and the jobs that neighborhood businesses create), and gets more people walking so that eyes on the street can help reduce crime. To quote Fran Lebowitz, “Pretend it’s a city.” The Council should be reminding us that cities are made of people, and that we should be welcoming all possible housing development, everywhere, without which we cannot grow our tax base sufficiently to provide city services, give value (attract businesses and jobs) to commercial space, or become environmentally sound.
Is the current structure of the City Council, and the balance of power between the mayor and council members, appropriate, and why or why not? If you would seek to change it, what would your model look like?
It is a terrible aberration of democratic norms for the public to elect one at-large member to pick winners and losers among all the other members. Virtually every legislative body in the world is led by one member who builds consensus and is chosen by the members to speak for the majority. We don’t vote on the Speaker of the House or the President of the Senate at either the State or Federal levels, and other local jurisdictions don’t elect their Council President the way we do. With Baltimore’s exceptional Strong Mayor system and this independently empowered Council President, what we have is not a system of checks and balances between two branches, but rather political rivalry or alliances between an actual executive and a pseudo-executive. The only change that needs to be made to the Council is to abolish the Council Presidency as an at-large elected position. Add a 15th District, let the members choose one to preside, and rotate leadership.
What are the most important issues the council has dealt with in the last four years? Name several smart decisions and several not-so-smart choices members have made.
At the beginning of the term I introduced two bills to “study and report” on certain issues. This type of bill had never been done in the City before, and while by no means the most important thing we’ve done this term, they set a new and noteworthy precedent for informed decision-making, and we’ve since seen 13 other such bills from six other members.
The most important work this term was to establish a new inclusionary housing law. Unfortunately it puts City taxpayers on the hook to make up the rent gap to pay developers to make even the most expensive units affordable at 50% and 60% AMI. This is especially troubling with respect to the Council’s biggest blunder this term, Harborplace. The high-rise housing the ballot measure seeks to allow will not only be ugly with many floors of above ground parking, it will cost us out the nose in subsidies to make the most expensive housing in the city affordable, and compromise our ability to subsidize many more lower cost dwelling units.
What weaknesses do you see in the delivery of city services? What can be done to improve response time and resident satisfaction?
You shouldn’t have to go to your elected representative to fix every little problem, so I spend a lot of time working to improve agency operations, especially at DOT. On issues like parking enforcement dispatch, traffic calming requests, impound, and street lighting repair, my efforts are bringing about new management systems that will deliver better results and lead to fewer complaints.
We need continuity of leadership and a strongly supported and clearly articulable direction, the absence of which has led to difficulty in recruitment and retention of key personnel. We also need clear commitment to developing and following strong rules, regulations, and standards of practice. I passed the Administrative Procedure Act to address exactly this.
Nothing can be done as well as we want without adequate funding, and literally nothing is funded adequately. As I’ve said throughout these responses, we must rebuild our tax base, which will require vast amounts of new housing.
Editor’s note: Baltimore Sun Media received this candidate’s responses on March 12.
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