Mayor Kurt L. Schmoke declared victories last week over four enemies: crime, discrimination, physical decay and the shackling constraints of government rules.
He had given greater security to residents of public housing projects who had been helpless before drug lords and gunmen. He had extricated families from squalor.
He had given economic opportunity to minority contractors shut out of the marketplace.
And he had done it all very quickly.
"A tremendous success," the mayor said.
Others said he had used worthy goals and a crisis in public housing -- some of that crisis created by his own inaction -- to justify the award of lucrative, no-bid contracts to friends and relatives. Some of the work was done poorly and on occasion not at all while city inspectors were ordered to remain silent about building code violations they had documented.
In one case, a house said to be worth about $30,000 was rehabilitated at three times that sum. Mr. Schmoke insisted Baltimore got good value for the 1,100 homes it repaired, including the one rehabilitated at a cost of almost $100,000.
Federal auditors say the Schmoke administration misspent and overspent the taxpayer's dollar by at least $725,759 -- and demanded immediate repayment. The mayor and his housing commissioner, Daniel P. Henson III, said the federal government always barks but never bites. In time, they said, the city would prove it had done nothing wrong.
Yet, after the auditors' findings and a three-part examination of those findings by The Sun, Mr. Schmoke may wonder if his own image had not changed more than the image of public housing.
This man with the brilliant smile and Ivy League resume had seemed oddly gray over his nearly eight years in office. He was well-spoken but unassertive despite his risky appeal for a debate on decriminalization of drugs and his privatization of schools.
His top appointments regularly landed him in some sort of trouble and he seemed unable to extricate himself.
Now suddenly he was emerging as a Do It Now guy, a man more like his predecessor William Donald Schaefer, who was famous for impatience with bureaucracy. Mr. Henson seemed to welcome the comparison.
"You have to weigh the greater good of the community against the criticism you may get down the road," Mr. Henson said. "What I couldn't live with was doing nothing. . . . Show me someone who can renovate 1,100 houses in a year and a half and not run into some problems."
The mayor had wider concerns, of course. He had to worry that the climate for government programs in Baltimore had worsened at a particularly precarious time: at the start of the $100 million Empowerment Zone project and on the eve of a mayoral election.
City Council President Mary Pat Clarke, who would like to deny him a third term, held nothing back in her criticism of the rehab program.
"This is corruption combined with incompetence," she said. The news of last week may well have weakened the mayor sufficiently to make Mrs. Clarke look stronger, to give her a chance in the eyes of campaign contributors. This program might have cost the mayor his lock on some givers.
To be sure, the mayor had his defenders.
Councilman Wilbur E. "Bill" Cunningham, a 3rd District Democrat, was puzzled by what he regarded as a less than effective defense.
"I would be talking more about the 1,000 families we helped," he said, adding that he'd also be emphasizing the value of a doer such as Mr. Henson.
"I supported Henson from the beginning. It was one of the smartest moves the mayor made. Henson pushes the limits a lot of time. When you have a crisis, you need a Schaefer type of attitude."
A similar view came from Councilwoman Vera P. Hall, a 5th District Democrat, who defended the mayor: "People said they wanted an activist person in housing and the mayor went out and found one. When you're an activist things happen."
She, too, was critical of the poor workmanship, but she said tenants should shoulder some of the blame for work done poorly at their homes.
"You cannot go in and save people from themselves," she said.
But this program seems to have made some of the problems worse.
"I'd be taken to court. I'd be thrown into jail," said a contractor who called a radio talk show on which Mr. Henson was the guest last Wednesday evening. The no-bid project and its reliance on minority contractors raised questions about Mr. Henson's judgment in two areas. He has close ties to virtually every minority contractor in the city and he has served as a political operative for the Schmoke campaign. Under the circumstances, the Housing Authority could have awarded the contracts without the appearance of a conflict of interest only if it strictly followed the bidding process -- especially when many of the contractors had contributed to Mr. Schmoke's mayoral campaign.
Because some of the contractors had spotty track records, some observers question whether the administration showed disregard for the poor people it claims to have been helping. Would the administration have hired these firms to remodel City Hall?
On the radio show, Mr. Henson suggested that The Sun had targeted only minority contractors for criticism. The minority businesses were "given" contracts while white businesses "won" them, he said.
"They were all no-bid contracts," he said. The no-bid approach was essential, he said, because preparing specifications, advertising and the like would have taken 18 months -- while vandals made away with the sinks and roofing materials.
The caller said he thought the issue was poor management, not race. Reports of the program's difficulties and Mr. Schmoke's effort to defend himself raised eyebrows among businessmmen who have complained for years about the unresponsiveness of City Hall. And now the public at large was getting a look in the dollars-and-cents terms that people understand.
"Only federal funds, not local tax dollars," the mayor said: If the city hadn't used the money it would have gone back to Washington. He and Mr. Henson spent $24,000 on advertisements in The Sun to make his case.
The current political atmosphere could not have been less hospitable. Even his Democratic colleague, Sen. Barbara A. Mikulski of Maryland, sternly admonished him.
"Baltimore wasted federal funds, mismanaged and misused those funds. . . . We have enormous human needs and few federal dollars and we have to make the best use of those dollars." She urged the city to pay up and to "stop spending tax money [on the ads] defending the indefensible."
Others wondered if Washington would try to punish the city by withholding Empowerment Zone money: If the city had operated in such a careless way with the $25 million in rehab money, what fate would befall the next $100 million?
Mathias J. DeVito, chairman of the Empowerment Zone's board of directors, said he was not familiar with the charges now leveled against the housing program.
"I have felt it has nothing to do with us," he said. "Our program will be administered with strict accountability. Whether or not we do the right job will depend on us. I'm steadfast in feeling that we will do it right."
He said Mr. Schmoke had given governance of the Empowerment program to a separate board "so we will be apart from all of the issues relating to the city government, not just the HUD issue, but all the methodologies of doing things in the government form."
Last week's controversy was not without its ironic -- Mr. Schmoke and Mr. Henson say unfair -- undercurrent.
Criticized by some for sleepwalking past the collapsing urban landscape -- and urged to act decisively on the housing front -- Mr. Schmoke found himself hammered for moving too quickly.
C. Fraser Smith is a reporter for The Baltimore Sun.