Pittman and Friends Podcast

Governing with Baltimore Mayor Brandon Scott

• County Executive Steuart Pittman • Season 2 • Episode 1

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Baltimore Mayor Brandon Scott joins County Executive Steuart Pittman for a candid conversation about Baltimore's remarkable public safety turnaround. The city is experiencing its lowest homicide rate in 50 years through a comprehensive public health approach to violence prevention. With $50 million invested in community violence intervention programs, Baltimore has expanded from four to ten Safe Streets sites where credible messengers – often those who previously participated in street life – intervene in conflicts before they escalate.

"When the community steps up to do it in a different way, some folks push back," Mayor Scott notes, addressing the resistance he's faced from traditional power brokers. Despite this opposition, his administration has implemented innovative strategies, including hospital-based violence response teams and a focused deterrence model that combines support services with accountability.

The conversation reveals how prevention plays an equally crucial role. Under Scott's leadership, Baltimore has increased its Recreation and Parks budget by 40%, investing $200 million in capital projects, including new pools and recreation centers with extended hours. This summer alone, 12,000 students participated in learning programs while 8,500 young people secured employment through YouthWorks.

Mayor Scott also addresses Baltimore's structural challenges, particularly its limited tax base with 25% of property being tax-exempt due to hospitals, universities, and government buildings. His administration has reduced vacant properties from 16,000 to 12,000 through innovative financing approaches, with a $3 billion plan to eliminate vacancies entirely.

Ultimately, Baltimore Mayor Brandon Scott's journey from Park Heights to City Hall represents a profound shift in leadership – one where lived experience meets 18 years of government service to create transformative change. More importantly, his leadership proves that when core cities thrive, entire regions benefit. This episode offers valuable insights for anyone interested in governance, violence prevention, and equitable community development.

If you like the stories and insights in Pittman and Friends, be sure to follow the County Executive on social media and sign up for his Weekly Letter using the links below.

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County Executive Steuart Pittman:

Al right, everybody. Welcome to season two of Pittman and Friends podcast, and this one's a little bit different. First of all, you might notice that my voice is deeper. I'm in Ocean City, and it's the Maryland Association of Counties. It happens every summer. Local government people come from all over, so you know you go out late at night and you get in these places where it's really noisy and you end up shouting a lot. But I took this opportunity to sit down with my really good friend from just north of the border, Baltimore City Mayor Brandon Scott. Welcome. Thank you.

Mayor Brandon Scott :

Thank you, my brother, for having me. Thank you. MaCo is always a very interesting place. But as someone who doesn't drink, I spent my night yelling and screaming for a different reason. I was playing basketball in the late night hours.

County Executive Steuart Pittman:

You were playing basketball while everybody else was out at going from reception to reception? Okay, good for you. You always do things differently.

Mayor Brandon Scott :

I tried to give what. I started doing this in, I guess, 21 or 22 to give folks a reprieve from just having to go to receptions to drink. So every year Mayor Scott's makeover reception is basketball. So last night, we had about close to 20 people playing basketball, another 25 to 30 watching myself, some delegates, some of the lobbyists, people that work staff coming, just have a good time.

County Executive Steuart Pittman:

And I didn't get invited because I suck at basketball.

Mayor Brandon Scott :

It went out to everybody. The whole MACO knows. People want to come see the mayor shoot a three-pointer in their face, so that's what happens.

County Executive Steuart Pittman:

Yeah, yeah. You know, you got to play to your strengths, and that's definitely one of yours.

Mayor Brandon Scott :

Exactly, drinking is definitely not one of my strengths.

County Executive Steuart Pittman:

No, no. Not me either. I didn't drink much, but I did have to shout to be heard so you know the music and everything.

Mayor Brandon Scott :

Bars.

County Executive Steuart Pittman:

Yeah, yeah. Alright.

County Executive Steuart Pittman:

So I've been looking forward to this because you and I have been through a lot of things together.

Mayor Brandon Scott :

Yeah, yeah.

County Executive Steuart Pittman:

And I think we've gotten a lot of things done together. I mean, I actually wrote about you in my weekly letter. I wrote about Mayors a few weeks back, and you're one of the Mayors, I think, all-time greats.

Mayor Brandon Scott :

Thank you, sir.

County Executive Steuart Pittman:

But I remember when you came in, some people said, "oh, he's not ready and you know he's in over his head. That was the people who were, you know, who've been running the city from the smoke-filled rooms for a lot of years.

County Executive Steuart Pittman:

And I think it was more your manner, but it was also you know. You basically said no, you know, I work in the public interest. I'm not going to make a deal that isn't in the public interest. Do you feel like you're different than previous mayors?

Mayor Brandon Scott :

Yes, in many, many different ways. I think the funny thing about that, Steuart. As you know, I first ran for office when I was 27. But this is my 18th year in City Hall. I came to City Hall when I was 23.

County Executive Steuart Pittman:

So you have a lot of experience.

Mayor Brandon Scott :

A lot of experience. I had 13 years of experience in City Hall when I ran for mayor. And when I ran for mayor, it was the first time I ever heard someone say that I was too young or I needed more experience, which is always funny to me because there's a lot of things there. Yes, what you said is absolutely true. They knew that I was coming in in this mindset that the way that we had been operating was broken. That just because a group of people got in a room and said this is what the mayor should do, doesn't mean that was the right for the city. It doesn't always mean it's going to be wrong. When they were right, I was going to say they were right. When they were wrong, I was going to say they were wrong.

Mayor Brandon Scott :

There's obviously racial undertones there. Right, because I was 36. Our good friend, Johnny Olszewski, Jr. was 36 when he became the county executive. I don't remember a lot of stories about Johnny's age. When he became, right, our good friend, a Senate president, was the same age roughly when he became the Senate president. I don't remember that and I think you just have to unpack that. But it is very different for me, and I didn't think about it this way myself until recently. Someone who works for me, Andre Bundley, who runs my African-American male engagement agency I've known since I was in daycare because he was the principal at a school in my neighborhood and so he's literally seen me grow up. He's known me since then and recently I was frustrated about.

County Executive Steuart Pittman:

You grew up in Park Heights?

Mayor Brandon Scott :

Grew up in Park Heights with the best neighborhood in Baltimore, and he said he said, "brandon, you got to understand it's different for you. And I'm like what do you mean, doc? And he says you're the only one that's ever had to live through all the bull. And then I thought about it. Even other mayors that look like me right, they were either older, they didn't grow up in a neighborhood like Park Heights. They were secluded from some of the things that I had to experience. And it's different when you're born in 1984 in Baltimore and you lived through the 80s and 90s and early 2000s. You lived through the height of drugs, the height of violence, the height of zero-tolerance, policing. It's different when the gun's been pointed in your face. It's different when you've been at your friend's funeral. So it is very different for me and I take all of that experience and all those years of experience working as a staffer, right. I just was talking with Ebony Magazine last week and they was like well, who let you in the door? I said, "look, I wouldn't be here.

County Executive Steuart Pittman:

Being a staffer is big. I wish more people.

Mayor Brandon Scott :

Only let me in the door, but as a 23-year-old, she let me in every single room as her personal mentee. So I knew what was going to happen because I was sitting there. But many of the folks who wanted me to be different ignored the fact that I was there because I was just this young kid. They never thought in their wildest dreams that I would be the person sitting at that head-to-the-table, not that far away from there. And I think those years of experience and it's no different. We don't just let somebody walk in and be like, oh, I'm going to be the CEO of a company. We don't do that right. Why is it the CEO of a government entity? For mine, in my case, it's a full billion dollar one. Shouldn't they have the experience actually working there and knowing what it's like?

County Executive Steuart Pittman:

So, being south of the border in Anne Arundel County, I don't know how many county executives in Anne Arundel have actually looked to Baltimore City for good ideas and how to do things, but I found myself doing that. When I was running for office, there were people in the northern part of the county that said they wanted to shut down the light rail from the city.

Mayor Brandon Scott :

Oh, I remember this.

County Executive Steuart Pittman:

Yeah yeah, going down to Cromwell Station, and I said, no, actually we need more ridership. We need more people living by the stations. You know we need to do transit-oriented development. We just passed a bill for the Cromwell station that allows housing to go there.

Mayor Brandon Scott :

Oh right. It was right, so it was industrial.

County Executive Steuart Pittman:

Yeah, and we got that done, and you and I worked together to try to get more investment state investment into transit. But one of the things that I wanted to do in the county was to make sure that we had good reentry programs. I wanted to make sure that when we were trying to reduce crime, that we were doing it with people in the community engaged. And so for those things, I looked at Baltimore City, because you had years of experience, and so I went up. I remember I went up to Turnaround Tuesday, which is a sort of community embrace of folks as they're coming back from being incarcerated, and I spent my day up there participating in it and learning about it. So we started Turnaround Thursday and that's grown into a great program.

County Executive Steuart Pittman:

And then, on gun violence. You have shootings almost every day, but we had the shootings at the Capital Gazette and that really woke people up. But we have other shootings as well and and so we went to the health department and we started the gun violence intervention team and now we've got violence interrupters, just like you did.

Mayor Brandon Scott :

That's right.

County Executive Steuart Pittman:

So tell us about I want to hear about the violence interruption program and some of the data that's gone along with reductions in crime in those communities.

Mayor Brandon Scott :

I think, Steuart, this is an issue for me. That, literally, is the reason why I'm in public service. Right, the first time I saw someone get shot, I wasn't even eight years old and no one really cared right. And, as you said, I grew up in the shadows of Pimlico. So imagine living in a neighborhood that's the center of the sports world every Thursday or Saturday in May.

Mayor Brandon Scott :

And then having someone get shot in a neighborhood and not even people don't care, they don't treat you like a human, right. And I think, when you think about gun violence and having that lived experience and that government experience. For me, one we have to recognize that gun violence is a public health issue and the only way to solve a public health issue is through a public health approach. So we actually, when I was a council person, passed a bill that says Baltimore has to have no matter who the mayor is a comprehensive violence prevention plan that is led not by the police commissioner but the health commissioner of Baltimore City. Right.

County Executive Steuart Pittman:

Amen.

Mayor Brandon Scott :

Fate would just have it that I'm the mayor that had to introduce and do the first one. And throughout CFIP, we have so many different tenants of what we're doing. We have, and we were blessed to get $641 million of offer funding from our congressional delegation and President Biden and Vice President Harris. We use 50 million of that to grow our already existing community violence intervention ecosystem.

Mayor Brandon Scott :

We've had Safe Streets, a city program, since 2008. We had four sites, we're now at 10, where we pay people, including those and mainly those who used to be involved in that life, to be out and intervening in that violence first. And I always used to park at Safe Streets, for example, because reporters and folks are always used to park high safe streets. For example, because reporters and folks are always amazed that, like, when I'm there, the guys and I are just talking and they're like what do you guys know each other? And we just look and be like we all went to school together growing up. And I use that as a point to tell them like, look, yes, I can have conversations on this corner that no other elected official can have, but I still can't have the same one that they can. Because, even though I grew up with some of those folks that are out there too, I was never out there on that corner, involved in the things that they were involved in. It's different when my friends that were involved in that life, the change of life, have that conversation, and that's what we're saying to folks. It has to be a both, and no one is saying like, oh, just eliminate all policing.

Mayor Brandon Scott :

No, people never said that they didn't want policing in the neighborhood. They said they wanted constitutional policing and they want community based involvement in solving problems in their own community. Right, which is something that we hear all the time the community has to do it. But when the community steps up to do it in a different way, some folks push back. But then we expanded beyond that. We're funding organizations like We Are Us that I used to be a member of. They don't let me walk around anymore, but they do the same work. They're out focusing on where violence is, focusing in on folks that they know, trying to get these people off the street. Hospital-based violence response. And then, when you look into the partnerships that we have, even in law enforcement, our flagship.

County Executive Steuart Pittman:

When you say hospital-based, I know you're talking about what's the organization called? They're coming into Anne Arundel.

Mayor Brandon Scott :

So for us it's based on two hospitals. So Lifebridge has them in hospitals. St. Agnes has them. Hopkins has them, so everyone that gets shot.

County Executive Steuart Pittman:

So they go to victims of shooting?

Mayor Brandon Scott :

Correct, yeah.

County Executive Steuart Pittman:

Because they're most likely to be either a victim again or a perpetrator.

Mayor Brandon Scott :

Who better. Everyone that gets shot goes to the hospital right when they go there, these hospital-based respondents go to them. Try to calm the situation down, see what we can do to mediate those issues so that folks don't have to go back and forth, and I think that's important work. And then we do it in another way.

County Executive Steuart Pittman:

Incredibly effective work too.

County Executive Steuart Pittman:

The data on it shows that.

Mayor Brandon Scott :

Data does not lie.

Mayor Brandon Scott :

And then we have our group violence reduction strategy. You lived in Maryland. You know about our consent decree in Baltimore for policing, because our police department was operating unconstitutionally, literally for most of my life. From 1984 until 2015, when we had this start. Now what we're doing, instead of going into a neighborhood like mine, where I grew up and saying to everybody that's there, that's black or brown or poor, is most likely to be a victim or perpetrator of gun violence, what we did is working with our partners at UPenn, the police department. We identified the small group of people, right, starting in the western district in Baltimore, that were the most likely, and what we do is we go a focus deterrence model group violence reduction strategy. We go to them.

Mayor Brandon Scott :

First. They actually get a letter from me that says I know who you are, I know what you do. We want you to stay alive. You can't do that continuing to operate the way that you operate. We will help you with housing, education, mental health, substance abuse, whatever relocation. This is your last chance. If you don't, the partnership is that we will then remove you through the police department. The attorney general. The state's attorney.

County Executive Steuart Pittman:

So a lot of that $50 million you're talking about is actually going into services for people?

Mayor Brandon Scott :

Yeah, it's lifting services into lifting these people up. We have community moral voice partners that go out and give those notifications to folks, the customer notifications for folks. There's a room of folks that sit there to talk about who's going to go talk to this person. Is it going to be the police? Is it going to be Safe Streets? Is it going to be a Roka? Is it going to be yeah, is it going to be a pastor? Sometimes it actually ends up being me, right, like, oh, the mayor knows this person's family. The mayor has to do it.

Mayor Brandon Scott :

And I think that like. What we've been able to accomplish, though, is that, through all of that, through the police department removing 2,500 illegal guns, turning those people over to our state's attorney attorney general to prosecute, through the investments that we've made into youth programming. When you and I are sitting here talking right now, Baltimore has the lowest homicides that we've had through this date on record, right. They've been keeping records of that for 50 years on record. We've never seen it this low, and we're not celebrating, but we're now, and it was only like three years ago.

County Executive Steuart Pittman:

Three years ago, it was over 300.

Mayor Brandon Scott :

It was 300.

Mayor Brandon Scott :

And you're talking about? We've had two in the month of July.

County Executive Steuart Pittman:

How much of the. Did having a different governor help? We remember what, what the former governor used to say about the city, and it was all about, just, you know, getting people locked up and keeping them in longer and this governor, as we know, is, uh, you know, different very much believes "leave no one behind.

Mayor Brandon Scott :

That's right. Opportunity for people is that is that had an impact for you as mayor and I think that for your listeners. The best way for people to see that there's actually a documentary called "the body politic. We were nominated for emmy, uh, this year. That documents my first two and a half years in office and building up the very programs that we're talking about. It took me eight months for me winning the election, which in baltimore, you know, is the primary, until I think january or february of the next year, to even get a meeting with the former governor. Yeah, consistently, them not scheduling it, etc. Etc. Not want to talk about it and him just dog don't worry, it wouldn't make with me either.

County Executive Steuart Pittman:

I know that.

Mayor Brandon Scott :

Yeah, okay, but I think it's important for people to know. But now I can call Governor Moore and he can call me back within an hour or two, right.

Mayor Brandon Scott :

And having. We did get the former governor to finally come to the table, but they were never fully at the table. Now we're having conversations and partnerships, for example at MACO last year. For example, at MACO last year, I met with the team at DJS because they wanted to figure out how they could mirror some of the stuff that we're doing with GVRS, with young people, and we connected them with some of our partners Baldwin Brothers. We Are Us and they're working with the high-risk young people that are DJS involved. That's what true leadership does, and I thank the governor for being a real partner in that.

Mayor Brandon Scott :

But if folks want to see it, check out the Body of Politics.

County Executive Steuart Pittman:

And I will also say that while we're at MACO, and I don't want to make this all about, you know how great our governor is. Although, you know, you and I both think he's pretty great. But you know, MACO is about local governments. In every county, in fact, there are more red ones than blue ones, and it really matters when the governor's staff as well is working with the county staff, and that's been happening all over the state, and we hear it from our Republican friends that, wow, this governor shows up. You know, this team is always there and so that's been good to see, but there's a huge difference in the way those two governors handled gun violence.

Mayor Brandon Scott :

You know, just a very, very different way. But one actually handled it, the other one just talked about it. That's the difference.

County Executive Steuart Pittman:

That's true, that's true. Politicize it and all that and and uh, we won't even get into what you know what this president is is doing claiming a crime is up when it's down and then sending troops in and all that. So and I hope law enforcement, of course, is all across the state stands up in their uniforms, our chiefs of police, and says we know what we are doing and we got this. We don't need help from troops.

Mayor Brandon Scott :

I got a unsurprising uh because I know this person but if to most people it would be surprising, to me it's unsurprising tweet uh from the former president of Baltimore for this morning, Bob Cherry, who I've known for a long time. Him and I disagreed a lot. We agreed a lot, but for him, someone who voted for the president, to tweet openly and at me and say leave the policing to the police. Mr. President, it shows what kind of time we're in.

County Executive Steuart Pittman:

Yeah, yeah. So you're doing a lot on the youth engagement and employment and stuff. You've got a program that's going on this summer, right?

Mayor Brandon Scott :

Yes, we have a lot of programs that are going on this summer and I think this is also a part of reducing violence. I think that we for a long time looked at our children, Steuart, and even when I was one of them as an issue to solve, not a resource to invest in. When you think about my childhood, where I lived, when they were closing recreation centers in Baltimore and pools left and right. Every time the budget got tough, they were closing recs. And it's kind of like at the state level every time the budget gets cut, they cut HUR funding right, it was like clockwork.

Mayor Brandon Scott :

It happened every time. Now we flipped that on its head. In my time in office, Rec and Park's operating budget has seen a 40% increase. Right, and you think about. Now we have 200 million of capital projects going on. I opened three brand new pools this summer, including one at Tawanda Rec Center, which is my childhood rec center that I renovated. When I came into office in 2020, it was the exact same as it was when I walked in a door in 1989. The pool. I never swam in it.

County Executive Steuart Pittman:

And you and I should both acknowledge that part of the reason we've both been able to do infrastructure things like that is wisely investing federal money when it was available. It's not available anymore.

Mayor Brandon Scott :

It's not.

County Executive Steuart Pittman:

But creating things that will last forever and improve communities forever with that money was the wise thing to do.

Mayor Brandon Scott :

And both of us got a lot of criticism for that.

Mayor Brandon Scott :

They're like you should put it into programs, not in the capital. And we're like, "nope, nope, because we have to spend it before they try to take it back. And, my lord, uh, am I so glad that both of us and many of our colleagues did the same thing. But when you think about that right, that opening, the fact that I never swam in that pool, let's do it. We had pools in Baltimore city that they had metal fences in to divide the deep and the shallow in. Right. Now we have aquatic centers, but we go beyond that. We had 12,000 seats in city schools over the summer, with young people there learning and earning.

Mayor Brandon Scott :

8,500 young people had summer jobs in Baltimore through YouthWorks and it's not like our old-time youth works program where they're just making sands and cutting grass. People are working at Hopkins for me, directly in the mayor's office. They're working at the Orioles. All of these things creating BG, all of these companies hire these young people to give them opportunity. I met a young lady two summers ago when I went to visit all the Orioles youth workers, who now works for the Orioles full time. That's what we're talking about and being able to do that. Midnight basketball leagues, that we have team pool parties, that we have block parties, 42 summer camps, the recreation parks and all of our pools, our public pools you can swim in for the price of free 99, which is the best price in the planet.

County Executive Steuart Pittman:

So you think that might have something to do with the reduction in bad stuff going on, right?

Mayor Brandon Scott :

Absolutely, when you keep people engaged, right. We have nine rec centers across the city, that we extended the hours to 11 pm on the weekends and we gotta keep the young folks engaged as much as possible. And then hold people, whether they're young, old, Black, brown, responsible. Make the arrest when people commit crimes.

County Executive Steuart Pittman:

Exactly the same as in our county, everywhere. Everywhere. One of the things that's not the same as in our two jurisdictions, though, is the tax base, and what I'm talking about. I say this sometimes, and people in my county might not like to hear this, but I sometimes say the suburban counties stole the city's tax base. What we said, what we did, was we said come on out to the land of pleasant living. We got this, that and the other, and lower taxes, and so people move out of the city and they move into the suburbs, and they build the dream home and all of that, and then they say well, you know, we don't want any more people here.

County Executive Steuart Pittman:

We got too much traffic, overcrowded schools and all that, which is understandable, because that's how human beings, how human beings are. But then it leaves the city, left the city with not enough property of high value, and things start to crumble. The city's a lot older, too, than the buildings in the county, and so you've got that to deal with, and so then your property tax rate ends up higher than than everybody else's. You can't really cut it, because then you, you got no ability to deliver services, and so tell us about how you handle the need for redevelopment, the need to. You know both vacant homes, but also commercial stuff in downtown. And then how you work with the private sector that builds that stuff, whether the developers and all of them. How do you make sure the right stuff's getting built?

Mayor Brandon Scott :

Yeah, I think it's a very different time, right, and we also we have to. When you talk about especially downtowns and economic development right now, you also have to think about the impacts that we're now seeing, the full impacts of COVID. Right, because every mayor and I talked to everyone's talking about their downtown and how people work differently now. So office space and all of those things are just, you know that, right, it's, it's never going to be what it was before February of 2020, right. We just have to come to that realization and what we try to do is have a balanced approach. Right, you can see things that are being built in the city, whether it's Baltimore Peninsula. Whether we're talking about Harbor Point, right, the expansion there. And then now that we can see we have $7 billion being invested in downtown Baltimore over the next few years, where the Harvard Place that we finally got in good hands.

Mayor Brandon Scott :

Right, and I think that's the power of executive leadership right, Harvard Place had been sitting there deteriorating on itself since I was in college. Right, every mayor that had this job before me could have done what I did, but they didn't. I pushed it through my law department into receivership. Only one person raised his hand and went in and said in the receivers court I want to get it. Dave Bramble just happens to be a guy from West Baltimore, a local developer yeah right, and bought it for three million dollars, only to then have the the folks you were talking about earlier say that I gave it to him in a backroom deal. But we now have that is actually going to happen and what we have to do.

County Executive Steuart Pittman:

And we should note that it's going to happen, but there was enough opposition that it actually ended. You had to do a referendum.

Mayor Brandon Scott :

It had to be on the ballot.

County Executive Steuart Pittman:

The voters chose to make it happen.

Mayor Brandon Scott :

The voters saw through all the racism, all the NIMBY, all of those things. They saw through it, thankfully, and we can move forward.

County Executive Steuart Pittman:

How dare you have a local guy designing this thing in Baltimore? There's these wonderful developers from Europe and designers that will come in and make it like it.

Mayor Brandon Scott :

The irony of that is that the folks that owned it previously were external to the country and we're like well, why would we make that mistake again? So it's just about having balance. We obviously have tax breaks and things like that, but we are in a very different positions to it. We have a quarter of my property tax base I can't tax. We have 11 hospitals.

Mayor Brandon Scott :

We have basically, if you get really sick in the state of Maryland, you come to Baltimore to get service. We have the universities. A lot of state and federal buildings are in the city and the federal ones. That's an even different conversation right now. So we have that and we have the impacts, as you were talking about, from the vacancy, and that's why we had to come up with a program that we've been in partnership with myself. Build GBC. The governor in partnership with myself. The governor, once he got into office, a $3 billion 15-year plan to end vacant homes in Baltimore. But we're using some of the things that we would typically only see in the wealthy areas. So we're going to do a TIFF for vacant homes in a few months so that we can see that, because the tax increment financing, where the new tax revenues go back into that community what we we're now.

Mayor Brandon Scott :

When I came into office, we had 16, 000 vacant properties right in 2020. December 8th of 2020, December 8th of 2000, there were 16, 000 right. It had the number had not moved. We're now at 12, 000 and something. The number is going down consistently. But we needed the capital to make, take that to scale and that's how we're going to consistently. But we needed the capital to take that to scale and that's how we're going to do it, while we continue to fight for things that we think are our fair share.

Mayor Brandon Scott :

You know, this is a big issue for me. When the suburbs were being built around the country, every state, basically. But the state of Maryland, said that we had to backfill the city's tax base and they did that through sales tax. They allowed the city. So if you're my sister city in St. Louis or Philadelphia or Columbus or Cleveland, Ohio, they 80-something percent of big cities keep some of the local sales tax right too. Also, and if I had 1%, literally 1% of the local sales tax debt spent in Baltimore, which is roughly like $71 million right, would allow me to put me at the level, basically, that everyone else is when it comes to property taxes.

County Executive Steuart Pittman:

But we haven't been able to pass state legislation to do that.

Mayor Brandon Scott :

We haven't. Not yet. We're going to keep fighting for it because it's the right thing to do, and it will level the playing field. And ultimately alleviate some of the stresses that the city puts on the state and everyone else, because we're now operating at that level playing field.

County Executive Steuart Pittman:

Yeah, and even though you are doing things to encourage development, incentivize development, the right kind of development, you were never the choice of the kind of old school, local developers as mayor, right. They tried to get you booted out after your first term.

Mayor Brandon Scott :

No, they did. Unsuccessfully. I won the second time in a larger fashion than I won the first time, and I think that it's unfortunate.

County Executive Steuart Pittman:

Against some major major financial resources.

Mayor Brandon Scott :

Major financial.

County Executive Steuart Pittman:

Big money.

Mayor Brandon Scott :

You're fighting folks that own TV stations and the newspaper, right.

County Executive Steuart Pittman:

Yeah, control the media. Control the media, control the media. Oh man.

County Executive Steuart Pittman:

They went after the Baltimore Sun.

Mayor Brandon Scott :

They made me. I am the boogeyman, as I always say to folks. Like when everything. Perfect example is violence. They asked me when we weren't I set a goal that we were going to reduce it homicides by 15%. When we didn't hit it that first year, well, we actually had a decrease it. It was a small decrease, we had a decrease. It wasn't that we had a decrease. It was like you didn't reach your 15% goal. Now that I'm reaching and exceeding it, it's everybody.

Mayor Brandon Scott :

Well, it's not the mayor's fault. It's because people are being prosecuted, which I love, that we're prosecuting people for gun crimes. The state attorney's team. They do an excellent job. The state attorney's team.

County Executive Steuart Pittman:

They do an excellent job. Those numbers don't explain. Well, it's not just that. A huge reduction.

Mayor Brandon Scott :

Well, no, it's part of it. Absolutely, it's part of it. I'm not saying that. But they prosecute cases based on the work of the police to focus on guns and gun and violent offenders and directing them to like focus there instead of being focused on all these other ancillary things that they have been focused on for all those years. It doesn't happen, and I think that, that you know. They're going to move the football, but for us, it's about doing what's right for the citizens of Baltimore. Those folks are thinking about the people that you're talking about, what's right for their pocket, and we don't care about that.

County Executive Steuart Pittman:

Well, I mean, I want to congratulate you for the work that you've done, congratulate you for getting the voters to step you know the voters for stepping up, the voters of Baltimore to continue the work. That's actually what is actually working. And then I also just want to note that, as a you know, as a county in the Baltimore region, we're part of the Baltimore Metropolitan Council. We all get together, we work together, and we learn from each other. And there's no question in my mind, I think most people understand this when they think about it that when the core city is strong, then the whole region is strong. And you know, I look forward to meeting you out on the water in the Patapsco.

Mayor Brandon Scott :

Let's do it.

County Executive Steuart Pittman:

You on the kayak, right.

Mayor Brandon Scott :

I'll be on the kayak.

County Executive Steuart Pittman:

Me on the pontoon boat, and we'll have a good time together. But thank you for joining us for this.

Mayor Brandon Scott :

Anytime. Anytime, my friend. You're listening to the Pittman and Friends Podcast. If you like what you hear, please hit the subscribe button, share with a friend and join us for the next episode.

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County Executive Steuart Pittman

Host
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Mayor Brandon Scott

Guest