With the raid of Mayor Sheila Dixon's house, the complicated financial investigation that has bubbled through Baltimore news cycles for years officially jumped the local threshold. Political and public relations experts say this whiff of scandal will likely be an investigative cloud hovering over Baltimore's executive office, taking time and attention from pressing city business and potentially thwarting Dixon's agenda for progress.
Though Dixon has not been charged with any wrongdoing and an investigation involving government contracts hardly tips the public's meter for salaciousness - as has, for instance, the sex scandal involving Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick - political watchers say it doesn't take being caught in a hotel room with a crack pipe, as Washington's Marion Barry was, to tarnish a city's reputation or to hobble its renaissance.
"Immediately I thought, 'There you go, another distraction in Baltimore,' and Baltimore, like Detroit, doesn't need any more distractions," says Robin Boyle, a professor of urban planning at Wayne State University in Detroit. "When you're facing a national recession, the last thing you want is a bevy of lawyers throwing writs at one another."
