Reporter John E. Woodruff's Sunday Sun article on the Baltimore Development Corp. documents so much sloppy work and lack of direction that a thorough review of the city's economic development agency should be conducted without delay.
For a declining city, successful economic development is an essential task. It is particularly challenging here because Baltimore in recent years has increasingly become a branch-office town and thus lacks big-business glamour. Far from justifying complacency, these adverse conditions call for creative skills, flexibility and aggressiveness.
These qualities seem to be lacking in the Baltimore Development Corp.
When this agency was born in 1991 through a merger of the Baltimore Economic Development Corp. and the Charles Center-Inner Harbor Management Corp, many were skeptical of the marriage of two organizations with such diverse tasks. This mishmash might have worked, except that the agency's leader always was hamstrung by Mayor Kurt L. Schmoke's political strategists, lawyers Ronald Shapiro and Larry S. Gibson.
Their influence over the Baltimore Development Corp. was formalized when an associate, Honora Freeman, was named to head the agency in 1991. Lacking any relevant training for the $81,000-a-year job, Ms. Freeman's main asset was her loyalty. As staff vacancies developed, she hired and promoted other loyalists, who often had scant qualifications.
Historically, the city development agency's director played second fiddle to the housing director, who was in charge of overall coordination. After Mr. Schmoke became mayor nearly eight years ago, that arrangement was ended because such responsibilities were beyond the competency of his first housing commissioner, Robert Hearn. Thus, the city was left with a weak housing bureaucracy and a weak development corporation. Baltimore has paid a heavy price.
The Baltimore Development Corp., according to one knowledgeable observer, "tends to have one client and that is the mayor. There is another client, the job-producing corporate community. That connection has been lost."
As a result, the Baltimore Development Corp. is spending too much time on City Hall-initiated assignments -- like planning more non-profit museums -- which have limited or questionable potential for economic development or job generation. Meanwhile, links to major corporations are meager and infrequent.
It is time for a new focus for the Baltimore Development Corp. Things cannot continue this way any longer.