The head of the Baltimore City Council has withdrawn her support from an effort to streamline the opening of city group homes, a decision that could trigger a costly federal lawsuit.
Council President Stephanie C. Rawlings-Blake said she will not vote for legislation proposed by Mayor Sheila Dixon that would create more housing for drug addicts and other disabled people. The proposal, Rawlings-Blake said, "does not provide adequate safeguards for neighborhoods."
"I made some suggestions based on things I was hearing that would have made it more palatable, but it still was not palatable to many communities," she said. "It is a down economy, neighborhoods are fighting for stability. They are seeing this as one more thing that potentially weakens them."
While the City Council president has just one vote on legislation, her position is influential. Federal authorities wrote to Rawlings-Blake in December, saying that they don't believe the bill will pass without her support and that they will seek a civil rights lawsuit to bring the city's code in line with the Americans with Disabilities and Fair Housing acts.
Advocates, hoping to revive the legislation, plan to hold a rally in front of City Hall today.
Lawyers with the Department of Justice's civil rights division investigated the city's zoning code last year after advocates alleged in a legal complaint that city zoning creates undue hardships for those hoping to open state-licensed group homes because each project requires council approval.
Dixon, in December 2007, proposed legislation that would strip the City Council of the authority to veto licensed group homes, and federal authorities support the legislative fix. Unlicensed homes, which provide less care, do not require council approval.
The mayor says the cash-strapped city can ill afford defending against a federal suit and said failing to fix problems in the city's code is "very irresponsible."
"We've been back and forth on this group home issue for a number of years," Dixon said. She said the council needs to understand "the ramifications of what it is going to cost the city."
The controversy around the legislation can be measured by the size of the bill file in City Hall, which contains a 3-inch stack of legal analyses and letters from community groups - some of which support the change and some of which don't.
One public hearing last summer lasted five hours, and the sign-in sheet for those testifying ran to 11 pages.
