City Services

The city has issued pink slips to 76 police academy recruits in order to prepare for layoffs that could occur if the city's budget for the fiscal year beginning July 1 does not include sufficient additional revenue to keep them on the payroll. But before those two recruit classes would be let go, the city would first eliminate 110 vacant positions from the 3,200-sworn- officer department, Police Commissioner Kevin P. Clark said yesterday. "I'm cautiously confident that the City Council members recognize the importance of public safety," Clark said.

A City Council not known for flexing its muscle with the mayor appears to be doing just that, offering Martin O'Malley about $15 million less than he sought for the next budget. In preliminary votes yesterday, the council signaled its intention to cut O'Malley's proposed $45 million tax package to just under $30 million. The result will likely be cuts in city services and jobs in the fiscal year that begins July 1, administration officials said. Pink slips are in the mail to hundreds of city workers.

An apparent gap in child protective services allowed a teen-age mother with a history of abuse to leave Johns Hopkins Hospital with her newborn twin girls that she and the infants' father are accused of beating to death less than a month later, city officials said yesterday. Officials from several agencies are to meet today to try to determine why a teen runaway - whose first child was removed from her custody when she was five months' pregnant with the twins - was allowed to take the girls home to the basement of an abandoned Northeast Baltimore rowhouse that lacked basic amenities such as electricity and toilets.

Members of the Baltimore City Council said yesterday they would kill a hotly contested proposal to make it illegal for homeless people or anyone else to sleep or lie on sidewalks downtown. Meanwhile, officials announced they would move the city's Office of Homeless Services from the city's housing department to its health department as part of an effort to provide more drug treatment and mental health services for the indigent. "The sidewalk law will have a respectable death in committee," said City Councilman Robert W. Curran, chairman of the Judiciary and Legislative Investigations Committee, which was considering the ordinance that had been advocated by downtown business owners.

Baltimore officials unveiled a bleak budget picture yesterday for next year that calls for eliminating more than 500 municipal jobs, increasing a variety of fees and reducing fire protection and trash collection. The city should also consider increasing how much it can tax the annual assessment growth of homes, currently 4 percent, Mayor Martin O'Malley said. The change could cost homeowners in neighborhoods with escalating real estate prices hundreds of dollars a year in additional taxes.

Some suggest it is the first sniping of the 2006 gubernatorial campaign, with Gov. Robert L. Ehrlich Jr. and Mayor Martin O'Malley waging a publicity war over Ehrlich's appointment of lawyer Floyd Blair to run the city welfare office. During a radio interview Wednesday, Ehrlich introduced Blair and asked listeners to support him despite Ehrlich's fight with O'Malley about the selection. Yesterday, Ehrlich administration officials invited the media to watch them hold hands with Blair, sway and sing "We Shall Overcome" during a prayer service at Blair's church, the Pennsylvania Avenue African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church in West Baltimore.

The tug of war between Gov. Robert L. Ehrlich Jr. and Mayor Martin O'Malley over the appointment of Baltimore's social services chief continued yesterday at a meeting in the governor's office in Annapolis. The two political foes agreed on one thing: that they will meet again soon to try to resolve the question of who should head the Baltimore City Department of Social Services. But neither showed signs of budging. While O'Malley's side produced a legal opinion supporting its position that he should have a say in the appointment, Ehrlich said he wasn't having any second thoughts.

Martin O'Malley, the young mayor who urged Baltimore to believe in him and itself, easily defeated a high school principal in a Democratic primary yesterday that also gave a victory to City Council President Sheila Dixon and created some long- term lame ducks on a revamped council. In declaring victory, O'Malley invoked a football great and a famous abolitionist to urge Baltimoreans to have faith that the city can overcome its many problems. "We are still the hopeful people that Johnny Unitas and Frederick Douglass loved.

People annoyed with their neighbors' barking dogs, buildings turned into eyesores because of graffiti or axle-busting potholes in Baltimore have yet another way to get City Hall's attention. A gateway to the city's 311 system for reporting complaints, promoted by Mayor Martin O'Malley as "your call to City Hall," has been placed on the Internet. By logging on to the city's Web site at www.baltimorecity.gov and clicking onto 311 Services, a computer user will reach a request form that leads to a series of questions that asks for the type, address and details of the problem as well as the name and e-mail address of the person making the complaint.

TWO YEARS ago, 23 tax-exempt Baltimore nonprofits, led by the Johns Hopkins University, pledged to help the cash-strapped city by voluntarily paying $20 million over four years in lieu of taxes. It was to be a one-shot deal, but already whispers are being heard at City Hall about extending it. And why not? Why shouldn't huge nonprofit corporations pay their share of city services, even if their real estate is tax-exempt? Baltimore is not the only city confronted with this dilemma. As the number of nonprofits nationwide has exploded, their tax avoidance has increasingly become a political hot potato.