2024 Goals
Thank you to the nearly 100 people who completed our end of year survey! I am honored you took the time to send in your thoughts about our performance and your concerns for our city and our district. With your input and that of so many of our constituents, as well as my expertise and personal reasons for being in public service, we have crafted our goals for 2024.
Continue Excellent Constituent Service: Our District 14 staff strive to answer every email and every phone call each day. We will continue to escalate city services concerns to the correct agencies and ensure a resolution very quickly. Where a quick resolution is not available, we will strive to ensure the resolution is accomplished in a timely manner. We will continue our newsletter and social media, as well as have at least one town hall per year.
Focus on eliminating vacant housing, increasing housing and affordable housing: Housing issues are my expertise. We made great strides in 2023 on the affordable housing front by passing Inclusionary Housing and the Councilwoman Mary Pat Clarke Tenant Opportunity to Purchase Act. We also continued to advocate strongly for eliminating vacant properties. In 2024 we will have a renewed focus on this, with my Land Bank legislation hopefully passing, and expanding the Judicial In Rem acquisition strategy to include more vacant homes. We will continue to focus on improving the systems meant to help our neighbors experiencing homelessness so they are confident to enter housing, and make more rental assistance available to help residents avoid evictions.
Older Adults Home Repair: While there is more funding for home repair, the backlog is long because there has not been emphasis on the operations side of the work. I will advocate strongly for more funding to have more case managers to fulfill the multiple requests in our district for home repair. Our older adults deserve to age in place with dignity!
Tax Sale Reform: I will continue to advocate for complete reform of our property tax collection system so that residents do not lose their homes because they cannot pay taxes, and that vacant properties are put to productive use. This will include legislation at the state and local level, and more advocacy for the work already done - like implementation of the payment plans legislation we already passed.
Continue traffic calming initiatives: This year we were able to have more speed bump requests fulfilled than at any other time - over 60 speed bumps installed just in our district! It is my goal to have all of the speed bump requests fulfilled, and those we have added, within the next two years. In addition, we will work with DOT on all of the speed reduction requests this year, and look forward to fulfilling them.
Public Safety: We will continue to coordinate multi-agency strategies to address public safety. When many agencies are involved, we look to prevention as well as enforcement for addressing crime.
Water System and Water Billing: The Water Governance task force recommendations will require significant oversight while we continue to escalate water billing issues to the right department for resolution.
Supporting Small Businesses: I represent several retail business areas - including Waverly/Greenmount Avenue, Hampden, Charles Village, Coldspring Lane. Our small businesses are the heartbeat of our district! I will continue to find additional support for our small businesses and bring amazing opportunities to the area - like the Baltimore Book Festival - to help Baltimore discover all we have to offer here in our district!
Graffiti and Sanitation Issues: The Graffiti is outrageous across the District and the City! Addressing this in a proactive way will be important to help move our neighborhoods forward. Strategies include, more murals, more attention to hot spots, and proactively encouraging the artists to move elsewhere or be prosecuted. In order to reduce illegal dumping, we will continue to support the East side transfer station development so that haulers have more legal spots to take their waste, and work with city agencies to catch the illegal dumpers in action. We will pick up the trash initiative again to help encourage residents to keep District 14 clean! The signs along The Alameda and Loch Raven medians are working!
Zoning and Development: There are several requests for zoning changes or variances. My typical process is to work with the immediate neighbors on their thoughts before moving forward. We will continue engagement as these requests come up.
Access to City Services for those who do not speak English: We will continue our efforts to make sure that City services are available for those who do not speak English. Last year we began an effort for City government to hire Latine residents to help in leadership roles. That effort also included the need to make sure that agencies are ready to provide translation in public meetings, and that the City Council is ready to provide those services during hearings. This year we will continue that effort (since the Spanish 311 is STILL not available!) and include American Sign Language interpretation in our efforts.