Q&A with local City Council candidates

Long-time City Councilwoman Mary Pat Clarke faces a challenger in the upcoming Democratic primary to ultimately represent District 14, which includes Charles Village, on the Baltimore City Council. Her opponent is 34-year-old Terrell Williams, regional cafeteria manager for Baltimore City Public Schools. The winner will face Republican and Independent candidates in November to earn the position on the City Council.

Before 2004, Clarke had served on City Council for 16 years. She represented the old 2nd District in the Council between 1975 and 1983 and served as the Council’s president between 1987 and 1995, the first woman to have been elected president of the City Council. In 2004, when single-member City Council districts were approved, she ran for office again representing the newly founded 14th District.

In addition to Williams’ position with Baltimore City Schools, he is also an adjunct professor at Stratford University. He is on the executive board of the Coldstream Homestead Montebello Community Corporation.

Both Williams and Clarke sat down for separate interviews with The News-Letter, discussing their political history, motivations and platforms.

The News-Letter: What were the main goals of your past term in office?

Mary Pat Clarke: It sounds very boring, but one of the things I’ve spent a lot of energy on is a new zoning code for the city of Baltimore. The one we have is 40 years old. It’s a little outdated. It’s voluminous. It’s detailed, and it’s incorrectly affecting people’s lives, but they don’t know it until something happens and you need to rely on it to protect the land you’ve built on.

Something I’ve spent a lot of time on this last term was storm water fees, and again, basically the City Council is not the Congress or even the General Assembly. It’s the nuts and bolts of living your daily life.

I’ve always worked vis-à-vis Hopkins. We worked with Hopkins to enact a model of what is called medicine social code legislation. This legislation imposed this fine on any private location that impacted adversely on the surrounding homes due to excessive noise. And what’s different about it, for me what’s important about it, is there are very strict citations on party throwers, but more importantly on the landlords who own the properties where these problems occur. So they have to take responsibility and stiff fines.

It’s working pretty well. The hardest part is to get people to call 911 and make sure that officers respond because your officers who are thinly spread. They will come and write a citation to the host then that citation can be written to the landowners. It’s all about the undergraduates, what the motivation is. But if we can sort of calm down the social scene it’ll be safer.

N-L: I know you’ve received some blowback from Hopkins students due to these noise ordinance laws. Is there anything you’d like to say in response?

MPC: If you hear the bell ring, you know something’s actually happening.

N-L: So what are the main goals for your next term?

MPC: I can’t say I’ve done anything very significant about it, but I’m very concerned about the homeless in Baltimore City. And one thing I did do, that was enacted very quietly, was protections against discrimination by reason of the source of income in the rental or sale of housing. So if part of your regular income is government subsidized vouchers, you cannot be discriminated against by someone renting. It needs to be a consistent source, a reliable source, but there are a lot of negative sources of income that some landlords might say no to. Now it’s illegal.

I’m interested in raising [minimum wage] to $15 by 2020. By then it’ll be hardly enough, but it’ll be a big leap and a sign of a place where some of these jobs that are generated by the tourist and hospitality industry, for example, will actually pay enough to support families.

That’s what I mean when I say turn the city around. It’s been desperate for a long time. It came to a head with Freddie Gray. And we can’t live everyone’s life for them, but we do know that a lot of violence is just anger, and that’s something that we’ve got to work with in our communities and in our schools in terms of just working with people to feel good about them and about their chances in life and not just negative so that they can love themselves and have a chance.

And we need to get rid of lead paint. We’ve made progress, but we’re not there. Children six and under are the most susceptible to lead paint. The system’s underfunded and it needs to be restructured. We shouldn’t wait for the child’s illness to do something drastic about the lead poisoned environments in which people are forced to live.

N-L: Can you talk a little about the differences between your and Mr. William’s platform?

MPC: Honestly, I can’t. I’ve been to three community forums in a row and he has not been in any one of them, so I have not heard his presentation or read it.

N-L: Is there anything you would like to say to Hopkins students in particular?

MPC: Hopkins is a part of this community, and I think President Daniels is really stepping up to the plate big time. And not only stepping up to the plate, but taking on the job of spreading what they’re doing to other institutions which is key.

Being an inaugural candidate, Terrell Williams discussed his motivation for running and his platform with The News-Letter.

N-L: What was it that helped you decide to run this year?

Terrell Williams: Over the last five or six years I’ve been very involved in the Coldstream Homestead Montebello Community Corporation, and I’m a member of their executive board. I got to see a lot of the behind-the-scenes process of how the city works and some of it I didn’t like. That’s what gave me that final push to say I’m actually going to go and seek elected office.

N-L: Why do you think people should support you?

TW: I’m not a career politician, so I don’t come with some of the bad habits as a career politician would — not saying all of them do. But unfortunately some career politicians, they forget that they actually work for the people that they elected and not the interest of big business. I bring fresh ideas to old politics.

N-L: Can you talk about your political platform?

TW: The things I’m really passionate about is community redevelopment, education and putting people to work. Just take for instance the community I live in. Again, Coldstream Homestead Montebello, you could say we’re a neighborhood on the cusp. It could go either way at any given time because, unfortunately, we don’t get that development dollars from the city, just as the neighborhood right next door to us, let’s say Waverly would get. You can literally travel from one neighborhood to the next and they’re totally different.

Another thing is education because I’m an educator myself, and I also worked for the local school system, so I get to see firsthand how a lot of work goes on and a lot of our classrooms and a lot of our schools. And common core, one of the practices we use, is actually hurting our students because what it does is it tells the teacher you have to teach a lesson the exact same way to every student.

N-L: How do you plan on going about enacting these changes?

TW: Unfortunately, Baltimore City has only a small say in what happens in Baltimore City Public Schools, so right now there is a push for the city to take back full control of the schools from the state level, which I’m actually in agreement with.

And also more to that education reform, there’s also hiring and retaining the best teachers possible. A teacher’s job is one of the hardest jobs ever. And a starting teacher’s salary is around $45,000. To some people that may seem like a decent salary, but when you actually look at their job they’re tasked with they’re actually shaping minds for the future. And you can’t put a price tag on that. With smaller class sizes, teachers are able to better reach those students and in Baltimore City that’s why the public charter model has been somewhat successful in Baltimore City because they have smaller class sizes and they don’t do the basic common cores.

And for home ownership, I think we need access to affordable housing. Unfortunately, in Baltimore City property taxes are very high and to get into more desirable neighborhoods, it’s very expensive.

N-L: What do you see as the most pressing issue currently facing Baltimore City?

TW: There’s several. We need access to quality jobs. We need extreme crime prevention programs in Baltimore City. We need affordable housing to bring residents back to the city.

N-L: How do you think politics has changed in response to the uprising last April, and how are you planning on addressing some of the issues brought forward?

TW: This is the first time in I don’t know how many years that every single council seat has a challenger, and the challengers are millennials. So you have a lot of young people that have decided that, “You know what, to better my city I am going to seek public office.” You have those that chose to riot and then you have those of us that choose to seek change on the part of the people that sets the policies and actually make the changes.

N-L: Why have you chosen to run against Clarke?

TW: Politics is about choice and I really want to have a choice of who they seek to be their elected official. There shouldn’t be where one person just has their name on the ballot and that’s the only choice you have. Secondly, it’s because I bring fresh ideas because unfortunately you can’t keep doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results and that’s just part of politics.

N-L: What are some problems you have with Ms. Clarke’s platform, or are there things she’s done that you would have addressed differently?

TW: Let’s just say we have a corner store. If it stays vacant for two years under the current zoning law it has to become a residential home and can no longer be for commercial use. But the way to redevelop some of these communities is those small businesses. Particularly when a small business owner comes in and they purchase their property for let’s say a store front, a lot of times they’ll live right upstairs, and that’s bringing new home ownership into a community that brings an added service to the community. The part we agree upon is that if it’s a corner store or a liquor store, there are enough of those. But what I think is give it a chance to be another useful commercial pace.

N-L: Clarke brought up that you hadn’t attended the three community forums that she’d been to. Why is this?

TW: Unfortunately, a lot of forums, those dates were actually dates when I teach. And two of those forums I actually had a procedure done and I wasn’t able to come. One of them it was the day before the procedure and there was actually another one that same day where I actually had the procedure done and it was around my throat area, so I couldn’t do it. The prescription was rest and to keep your speaking at a minimum, so I couldn’t push myself medically to go and do a forum.

N-L: Do you plan on going to them in the future?

TW: If any of the upcoming forums fit into my schedule I will be there. At the first one I actually went to, Ms. Clarke wasn’t present at that forum so we’ve been kind of hit or miss on the forums.

This article has been condensed.