Mayor Stephanie Rawlings Blake asked in her Sunday (May 1) op-ed piece "What would William Donald Schaefer do" with the city's loss of jobs, corporate headquarters and business.

The answer is simple. He would have found ways to address those problems with his famous "do it now" spirit, without ever forgetting to do it right.

What the mayor forgets is that hasty decisions, which circumvent critically important laws and further imperil the central business district, do not justify "progress."

Mayor Schaefer always put the people's interest first, not special interests or cronyism.

He would have recognized immediately that skirting competitive bidding laws on the State Center project promotes mistrust of government, costs taxpayers hundreds of millions of hard-earned dollars and forever alters the very reasons why those laws were enacted.

The mayor should put the people's interest first, not those of a select group of handpicked developer friends.

Ramsey Flynn, Baltimore

Ramsey Flynn is a spokesman for the Coalition to Save Downtown Baltimore, a group of business and property owners who object to the proposed State Center redevelopment and have sued to stop it, alleging that the state failed to follow procurement law.