Land bank debated

Dixon's plan for agency to sell city-owned lots faces opposition from council president and comptroller

Baltimore Mayor Sheila Dixon's plan to create a quasi-government agency to sell city-owned vacant land is facing opposition from elected leaders worried that the organization could conduct its business outside public scrutiny and wouldn't be financially viable.

Dixon envisions a nonprofit Land Bank Authority, partially modeled on a successful program in Michigan, that would take the titles to many of the 10,000 city-owned vacant lots and houses and sell them to responsible buyers. Handling the sales process outside the immediate scope of city government would cut the red tape associated with purchasing land, she says.

"It is trying to streamline some of the deals," Dixon said in an interview. Reducing blight in the city is one of the mayor's priorities, and she has pushed the land bank in each of her three State of the City addresses. She introduced city legislation for it in January, and she will hold a news conference today to rally support for the bill. Tomorrow, she will take the unusual step of testifying in support of her legislation before a City Council panel. But as the details about her proposal have emerged, City Council President Stephanie Rawlings-Blake and Comptroller Joan M. Pratt have said the mayor should fix problems within that Housing Department that prevent land from getting on the market instead of creating a new bureaucracy.

"Will this actually work?" Rawlings-Blake said. "We have to do something about the vacant housing problem in the city. My concern is, I don't want to, in efforts to fix a problem, create a different problem."

Under the mayor's plan, property originally purchased with city tax dollars would be sold to small developers and nonprofits outside the purview of the Board of Estimates, a spending panel that meets weekly to approve all transactions of more than $5,000.

"We already have a process [for selling land]," Rawlings-Blake said. "It is a process that has credibility. It has the transparency built in."

Dixon notes that the City Council president and the comptroller would sit on the land bank's board and would each have two votes. The mayor would have seven votes. Pratt controls the city's real estate office, which allows her to hold up some land deals. The land bank would operate outside that authority.

Pratt said she worries that the land bank could be a bad financial move for the city.