“Many nonprofits receive funds directly from agency grant programs, and we don’t track that centrally,” said Raquel Coombs, chief of staff for the Department of Budget and Management, in an email.

The Baltimore Sun sent inquiries to individual Maryland departments and agencies, asking them to provide the amount of money they allocate to nonprofits. A few provided specific dollar amounts, while others said they would need more time, and some large departments said they couldn’t provide the information.

“It seems like a simple question on its face, but … this is actually kind of a complicated exercise, especially for an agency or a government like the state of Maryland that has millions of transactions,” said Thomas Luke Spreen, an associate professor at the University of Maryland School of Public Policy. “It is a question that … we should be able to answer … It just requires a lot of research.”

David Brinkley, who served as Republican former Gov. Larry Hogan’s secretary of the Department of Budget and Management, said he wouldn’t be surprised if around $1 billion or $2 billion goes directly to nonprofits, out of the state’s $67 billion budget, based on his prior experience. A Washington, D.C.-based think tank, Urban Institute, estimates Maryland nonprofits received more than $6 billion in federal, state and local government grants in the 2021 tax year, and researchers say that’s a conservative estimate.

“An awful lot of money goes out the door,” Brinkley said.

The crucial concern, he added, is accountability.

“It’s easier for the nonprofits to come and secure 141 votes rather than … go out and raise money from 141 donors,” he said, adding, “It’s easier to ask elected officials and tug at their heartstrings because they are being asked to spend, as I call it, ‘OPM: other people’s money.’”

Even if Marylanders knew how much the state government spent on nonprofits, some experts suggest it wouldn’t have much impact on lawmakers’ future budget decisions. But even small improvements to government transparency have some value, said Scott Walter, president of the Capital Research Center, who formerly served as special assistant to Republican President George W. Bush.

“Even small increases in transparency cause bureaucrats to have to look over their shoulder, and that’s a good thing,” Walter said. “Human beings improve their behavior when they think somebody’s watching.”

‘Thousands of dollars in research time’

Democratic Gov. Wes Moore’s office didn’t provide any estimate for the state’s total allocations to nonprofits when asked. The governor’s director of communications, David Turner, told The Sun in January that the money allotted to nonprofits is “a miniscule amount of the budget every year.”

Press Secretary Carter Elliott told The Sun in a July email that the only way to compile the data is to “go through the budget line by line and research each individual item to see if it’s a non-profit.” But the budget bill and budget documents don’t contain all nonprofit allocations.

The Sun sent funding information requests to around 60 departments, governor’s offices and other state government entities. Elliott told The Sun the inquiry would be “such a large scale data project,” involving “dozens and dozens of hours for each agency” and “[t]ens of thousands of dollars in research time.”

Senate Minority Leader Steve Hershey, a Republican, expressed concern about the lack of information on nonprofit funding.

“This is a massive failure of oversight,” he wrote in a message to The Sun. “How can we ask taxpayers to give more when the government can’t even track how their money is being spent?”

The other members of Maryland’s House and Senate Republican and Democratic leadership did not respond to requests for comment for the story.

There’s nothing in Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (GAAP) that requires governments to report how much they spend on nonprofit organizations or for-profit firms, Spreen noted. Such information is not included in Maryland’s annual comprehensive financial report, which is published after the conclusion of each fiscal year.

Spreen added that, while agencies can see how much money they send to each vendor during the course of a fiscal year, they probably don’t have a variable in their data sets to distinguish between types of vendors.

“You could just rework the accounting systems to record that type of detail and then come up with a number, right? It’s just … it’s not free to do that. So it’s like, you kind of got to do a cost-benefit analysis of, is it worth it to keep track of this?”

‘The information … is not available’

While some agencies provided The Sun with specific dollar amounts of how much they spend on nonprofits, others said they couldn’t fulfill the request.

“It looks like we don’t have the ability to pull that detail,” said David McAllister, a spokesperson for the Maryland Department of Health, in an email.

The health department data, in particular, “would be tricky because they have a lot of vendors,” Spreen said. “If it’s Medicaid, right, you’re working with tons of nonprofit hospitals and clinics, and it could just be really onerous to try to go through all of the data to answer that question.”

Spreen added, “I’m sure they could give you an answer. It’s just like, ‘Is it worth 100 hours of our accounting staff’s time?’”

Department of Labor spokesperson Dinah Winnick told The Sun that the department doesn’t routinely collect the tax-exempt status of each of its funding recipients, “so the information you are seeking is not available.”

A public records request to the Department of Human Services also couldn’t be fulfilled.

“While the Department does have agreements with nonprofit entities, the available search functionality is not aggregated by vendors or grant recipients with a 501(c)(3) status,” a department records custodian said in an email. “The Public Information Act provides a mechanism through which members of the public may access and inspect public records; it does not require a State agency to create records.”

The Department of Juvenile Services also can’t “search for specific expenditures for nonprofits,” said spokesperson Michael Sharp.

Some agencies referred The Sun to the Maryland Transparency Portal, which provides public information about grants, loans and payments to vendors. But determining the amounts allocated to nonprofits isn’t a simple task, as the site is not categorized by vendor type, and there are thousands of vendors to analyze. The site also excludes vendors that received less than $25,000.

‘Should not be a secret’

The Governor’s Office of Crime Prevention and Policy has an interactive grant map that allows a user to filter vendors by organization type, including nonprofits that are religious and non-religious.

The tool was the brainchild of the agency’s executive director, Dorothy Lennig, who joined the agency around two years ago. Lennig previously ran the legal clinic for House of Ruth, a nonprofit domestic violence program, and said her past experience made her appreciate the need for nonprofit transparency.

“There was always interest in the nonprofit community about who else was getting money,” Lennig said. “And so I thought, you know, this is the public’s money, and it should not be a secret where the money goes.”

The other reason for providing a grant map was to inform people seeking services about the resources available in specific areas of the state.

“After the Brooklyn shootings, I had state legislators reach out to me at the House of Ruth and ask me what services were available,” she said. “And so I thought if we had a map where you could click on a jurisdiction and see what services are being provided by the state, that would also be helpful.”

‘Cannot be quantified’

Maryland isn’t the only state that doesn’t know how much it spends on nonprofits.

An official from Virginia’s Department of Planning and Budget told The Sun that some state-funded nonprofit services “are specifically noted in the budget and some are not,” and that there is “no mechanism to know the extent of this use or the dollar value … Consequently, the total amount of nonprofit spending in Virginia cannot be quantified.”

Candid, a national nonprofit organization that gathers data on the nonprofit sector, said it doesn’t have data on government funding at the state level. Maryland Nonprofits, an advocacy group supporting 1,800 member organizations and 40,000 nonprofits across the state, also didn’t provide information about state funding for nonprofits after multiple inquiries.

The amount of money the government should spend on nonprofits is a “value judgment,” said Spreen — the University of Maryland professor — and he doesn’t think he could say what the “right amount” of spending on nonprofits would be.

Walter, from Capital Research Center, said he’s not as interested in the proportion of the state budget that’s allocated to nonprofits as he is in what the money is accomplishing.

“Sunlight is the best disinfectant,” he said. “Transparency is always important for governments. They have a duty to be transparent to us.”

Have a news tip? Contact Brooke Conrad at bconrad@baltsun.com, 443-682-2356 or @conrad_brooke on X.

Seshamani acknowledged that the state’s relationship with the federal government is “being challenged right now.” Some recent changes include Medicaid cuts recently passed by Congress and new policies being implemented by Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy. She also said she’s working on regaining “trust” with the disability community after funding cuts during the last legislative session.

Seshamani replaced Laura Herrera Scott, who left the position in February. Seshamani assumed the role in April, after serving as deputy administrator for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services under the Biden administration.

Treating drug overdoses

Maryland ranked 15th on overdose fatality rates nationwide in 2022, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Baltimore is a national hotspot for drug overdoses and recently made national headlines for a mass overdose event involving 27 people who were hospitalized.

Asked what the state can do to improve drug treatment, beyond merely preventing overdose deaths, Seshamani said behavioral health is “absolutely a priority” for her and that it’s important for substance use disorder to be “incorporated into the full spectrum of behavioral health care.”

“My behavioral health team has been working on that continuum of care to start with prevention, going all the way to post-acute [care], and how does substance use fit in there,” she said.

Baltimore Mayor Brandon Scott has advocated for bringing supervised drug consumption sites to the city, where people can use illegal substances with health care professionals available to prevent overdoses and provide clean needles for injection. The nation’s first such site opened in New York City in 2021.

Asked whether she believes Maryland should adopt supervised drug use sites, Seshamani said she didn’t have an opinion on the matter.

“We are always open to considering various options,” she said. “So that’s something that I can take back to the team.”

Seshamani noted that the department administers grants to providers “because it’s very important that people are hearing from their local trusted messenger.” She also noted a partnership with the Department of Labor for training for “peer recovery coaches” in rehabilitation facilities.

Medicaid coverage

An estimated 175,000 Marylanders will lose Medicaid coverage under the expansive tax and spending bill passed by Congress earlier this month. The total amount of money expected to be lost by Fiscal Year 2034 is around $2.7 billion, with most of the funding losses occurring in the 2027 and 2028 fiscal years.

The new federal policy requires people to work 80 hours per month in order to qualify for the Affordable Care Act Medicaid expansion, which covers adults earning incomes of up to 138% of the federal poverty level. Around 331,577 people in Maryland currently qualify.

Seshamani said the state will work to set up systems so that people “don’t get caught up in that bureaucracy,” noting the administrative problems that occurred when Georgia implemented a similar program.

“We want to try to set up these programs in the best way possible, and we know what potential pitfalls are, and we absolutely will do our best to try to avoid those,” Seshamani said.

Last year, the state underestimated Medicaid costs for the 2025 fiscal year budget, leading to budget cuts in other areas.

Asked how the state can avoid that situation in the future, Seshamani noted she wasn’t serving in her role during the previous legislative session and emphasized collaboration for solving “complex problems.”

“This is another area where being able to look at, okay, what are the numbers showing? How are projections being made? What are the assumptions? How should this potentially be altered?” she said. “When we’re dealing with complex problems, there’s never just one straightforward solution.”

Relationship with Trump’s HHS

Seshamani said the department is “working through various changes” coming from the federal government, and said it’s important to have good federal and state partnerships in health care.

For example, last year, Maryland officials were able to inform the CDC of a listeria outbreak they discovered that was tied to Boar’s Head deli meat, leading to a recall of more than 7 million pounds of contaminated meat. The outbreak resulted in 10 deaths and 61 illnesses across 19 states.

“Imagine how many more [deaths] there could have been, had there not been, not only that funding, but also that data sharing partnership,” Seshamani said. “And these are things that I will continue to prioritize.”

Kennedy has received criticism from medical experts for his opinions on vaccines. On Wednesday, he accepted a recommendation that flu vaccines no longer contain the preservative thimerosal, calling it “a long-overdue promise to protect our most vulnerable populations from unnecessary mercury exposure.” He also previously removed COVID-19 vaccines from the vaccination schedule for pregnant women and healthy children, sparking a lawsuit from a coalition of doctors’ groups.

Seshamani noted she’s an ear, nose and throat doctor who has cared for patients with pertussis.

“Vaccines have science behind them, and I believe in following the science, having good evidence-based, good data for any decisions that you are making,” she said.

Asked about Kennedy’s stances on removing certain food dyes and cutting back on ultraprocessed foods in the American diet, she noted that “healthy food is critical to overall health.”

“Food as medicine programs, healthy food nutrition programs, are actually fundamental to the innovation that our state has been doing, particularly for prevention and treatment of chronic disease,” she said.

She said the department is working closely with the Department of Agriculture on providing Marylanders with access to healthy food — figuring out how to pair healthy food and nutrition with local farming.

But she added that the nutrition conversation also has to be paired with a conversation on behavioral health.

“You can lecture someone about taking their insulin or eating healthy or exercising, but if they have depression or anxiety and can’t get out of bed in the morning, you’re not caring for that whole person,” she said.

‘Regain trust’ on disabilities

Faced with a multibillion-dollar deficit heading into the past legislative session, Maryland lawmakers made a controversial decision to cut funding for the Developmental Disabilities Administration.

Asked about the effect on Marylanders with disabilities going forward, Seshamani said she “absolutely heard, loud and clear, that there was an opportunity to hit the reset button in terms of the interaction and collaboration and partnership between the Department of Health and the disability community.”

She added that she attended a roundtable with the disability community to “really try to improve how we are working together.”

“And so that has been a priority for me as well, to try to help regain trust with the communities and to regain that bi-directional, meaningful engagement that’s so important when you’re tackling tough issues that are very personal.”

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“The Governor is committed to ensuring that every student in Maryland has the best education possible,” Moore’s spokesperson Carter Elliott said in a statement. “The Trump Administration’s approach on this issue has never been tried before. We are evaluating all of the options to ensure Maryland students have the best opportunities to succeed.”

The federal school choice plan was passed as part of President Donald Trump’s expansive tax bill earlier this month. If Maryland opts in, taxpayers could choose to donate up to $1,700 toward private education grants in the state and receive the same amount back as a tax credit.

A spokeswoman for Maryland Congressman Andy Harris, a Republican, wrote in an email that he strongly supports federal school choice and that “[e]very child — regardless of zip code, income, or background — deserves access to a quality education that fits their needs, not a one-size-fits-all system.”

Maryland’s U.S. Sens. Angela Alsobrooks and Chris Van Hollen, both Democrats, also didn’t say whether they would support Maryland opting in.

“I am committed to making sure all of Maryland’s students get the education they deserve,” Alsobrooks said in an emailed statement on Monday. “Meanwhile, this Administration is taking the opposite approach — working to dismantle the Department of Education and undermine the promise of an education for all Marylanders, by further eroding the resources districts, teachers, and students desperately need to succeed.”

Van Hollen said in an emailed statement, “Instead of working to achieve the goal of ensuring that every child receives a quality education, Donald Trump and Republicans in Congress are attacking public schools and the federal resources they depend on to support students while pumping more dollars into private education.”

School choice advocates argue that opting in would be a win for Maryland families who are dissatisfied with public school options, while opponents contend that the program would remove students from public schools, depriving them of funding and resources.

School choice is complicated to implement and it’s been a “sticky issue” in the past, said Roger Hartley, dean of the College of Public Affairs at the University of Baltimore. He added that with another election season on the horizon, politicians may avoid taking sides on the issue without first “having done their homework.”

Maryland has a small private school voucher program at the state level — Broadening Options and Opportunities for Students Today (BOOST). It provides around $9 million in the form of vouchers to help families send their kids to private and religious schools. Moore has proposed cuts to the program in the past, which began under his Republican predecessor, Larry Hogan, though BOOST has continued so far during Moore’s administration.

Funding debate

Advocates for the new federal program note that it would be funded at no cost to Maryland.

“It doesn’t cost the state a dime,” said Jeff Trimbath, president of the Maryland Family Institute, noting that the state faced significant deficits that it had to adjust for during the past legislative session.

But Liz Zogby, co-chair of the Maryland Down Syndrome Advocacy Coalition, noted that even though the program doesn’t cost state dollars, it will take money out of public schools if they lose enrollees. This can be especially harmful for students with disabilities, who need public school resources and may not be able to attend a private school, she said.

“Let’s say you have a student who is not being well-served in a private school, not making progress, acting out, having challenging behaviors because they’re not being well-supported — that school can just expel them,” Zogby said.

But in public schools, she said, an Individualized Education Program (IEP) meeting would be convened to figure out how to help the child. “So they don’t just kick kids out,” she said.

Whom does school choice benefit?

There’s also a debate over which students would benefit from the program.

Kalman Hettleman, a former member of the Baltimore City school board and the Maryland Commission on Innovation and Excellence in Education, said school choice funds “go mainly to people of means,” since scholarships may not cover the full cost of a student’s private school tuition.

“In many cases, the education savings accounts and vouchers will be able to go to people who have already left the public schools [and] are paying the whole private schools’ bill already,” Hettleman said.

Trimbath noted most schools offer other scholarships that could supplement a school choice scholarship, and that most schools “means-test” their support, offering more money to lower-income students.

Garrett O’Day, deputy director of the Maryland Catholic Conference, urged Moore and state education leaders to opt into the program and said that even if Maryland doesn’t participate, Maryland taxpayers can still choose to donate to scholarship organizations in other states.

“In other words, if the state doesn’t opt in, Maryland dollars will go out of state to the detriment of Maryland kids who need it, taking away money available for education for both public and private school students,” he wrote in an email.

‘Unpredictable federal funding cuts’

Paul Lemle, president of the Maryland State Education Association, advocated against the opt-in for Maryland.

“We strongly oppose giving away public funds to private schools as Maryland public schools — which serve 90% of Maryland students — continue to face chaotic, drastic, and unpredictable federal funding cuts to schools that will hurt students and the supports they depend on,” he said in a statement.

Harris’ spokeswoman wrote in his statement that school choice is “not about taking money away — it’s about giving parents control.”

“The federal plan is designed to empower families, not bureaucracies,” she said in an email to The Sun. “When parents can choose the best education for their child, all schools — public and private — must compete to improve. That’s a win for every student, including those with disabilities, who will benefit from increased options tailored to their needs.”

A spokesperson for the Maryland State Department of Education did not respond to a request for comment.

Have a news tip? Contact Brooke Conrad at bconrad@baltsun.com, 443-682-2356 or @conrad_brooke on X. 

Among the regulations discussed Tuesday at a meeting of the Maryland State Department of Education’s Charter Workgroup is an increase in administrative costs from 2% to 5%. Those funds are managed centrally by school districts rather than by individual charter schools.

Will McKenna, founder and executive director of Afya Baltimore, which runs two city charter schools, said the new regulations would “certainly sink the charters in Maryland.”

McKenna questioned the proposal for increased administrative costs. “What is the evidence that it should be 5%?” McKenna asked, in an interview with The Baltimore Sun. “It just seems like they said it was going to be 5% but they don’t know why.”

The state superintendent will offer a recommended regulation in time for the State Board of Education’s December meeting. The Board will then decide whether to publish the regulation for further public comment.

The new proposals are spurred in part by the state’s landmark education reform plan, the Blueprint for Maryland’s Future. The debate over the new proposals follows a long history of tensions related to funding between charter schools and school districts, dating back decades.

Charter schools claim school districts are withholding too much of their funding, making it difficult to provide unique education opportunities that draw more than 25,000 students statewide, with around the same number on waiting lists. McKenzie Allen, executive director of the Maryland Alliance of Public Charter Schools, told The Sun she believes all charter schools would close in the next several years if the draft regulations are implemented.

“Some charter schools have reserves that they would have to dip into to survive even two years, three years. But no charter school would survive longer than four years if it were to pass as is,” she said.

The Baltimore City school district, which oversees the majority of the state’s charter schools, previously told The Sun that it’s necessary for the district to retain funds in order to cover expenses like employee benefits and special education services, and also disputed charter schools’ claims that they are in danger of closing.

“As active participants in the work group, City Schools is encouraged with the direction of the work,” BCPS told The Sun Tuesday. “We are hopeful that the final result will align with our well-established approach to charter school funding and our desire to ensure an equitable funding formula that works for all students, including both traditional and charter students.”

‘What should the rules be?’

During Tuesday’s meeting, Mary Gable, assistant state superintendent at MSDE, said the conversation around charters should focus on two questions: “One is, are the LEAs [local education agencies or school districts] following the rules? And two, what should the rules be?”

McKenna said he “applauds” MSDE for tackling these questions, but said there’s a lot more work to do.

“It’s great that they’re trying to figure out what the rules should be, but they have yet to determine whether or not the LEAs are following the rules,” he said.

Allen took issue with the 5% administrative fee proposal, saying the number was “arbitrarily selected” and that more research needs to be done to determine a “realistic percentage.”

In response to a question during Tuesday’s meeting about the rationale for the change, Gable said the fee percentage ranges widely across the country from as low as 2% to numbers far higher than 5%.

“We are not tied to the 2%,” Gable said. “This is a recommendation to look at the 5%.”

BCPS previously told The Sun in a May interview that a 2% administrative fee is too low and “inequitable,” and that it is inconsistent with the law and previous state board decisions.

“Loophole”

Another proposed change states that for countywide obligations and contracts for goods and services that are not managed by individual schools, the school districts can exclude those from charter school revenue. McKenna described this as a “loophole.”

“Who defines what county obligations are? The county does,” he said.

At least one of the regulations would turn out to benefit some charter schools, McKenna said. For charter schools that operate in private facilities, they would be exempt from having the local system deduct debt service from their revenues. Charter schools that operate in buildings owned or formerly owned by a school system would have debt service deducted.

A closer look at school budgets

In May, charter leaders celebrated as the State Board of Education resolved that school districts should submit their budget breakdowns and methodology for charter school funding by July 31. That deadline has been extended to August 22.

“Seeing mathematical projections out of what things would actually cost, and what these withholdings would actually mean for a public charter school … would be really important,” Allen said.

Have a news tip? Contact Brooke Conrad at bconrad@baltsun.com, 443-682-2356 or @conrad_brooke on X. 

“If you are using today, please do not use alone. Please go slow and have Narcan available,” Sara Whaley, executive director of the Mayor’s Office of Overdose Response, said at a news conference Friday headlined by Baltimore Mayor Brandon Scott.

While several people told The Baltimore Sun they agree with Scott’s harm reduction approach, some community leaders say more could be done to deter drug use and dealing.

The mayor says these issues require thinking beyond criminalization while distinguishing between drug dealers and the people using substances they provide.

“The days of approaching drug addiction and overdose as a criminal thing are gone, because it’s not inherently a criminal thing. The police department can deal with the actual folks that are providing and dealing … drugs and bringing this into the community,” Scott said Friday. “But when you’re talking about the folks that are using, we have to be ready to help them with the services that they need when they are ready for them because you cannot force someone into treatment when they aren’t ready.”

In a statement to The Baltimore Sun, Scott spokesman Jonas Poggi explained the mayor “emphasized Good Samaritan laws” during his remarks instead of “incarcerating people for using drugs.” Under Maryland’s Good Samaritan law, people who experience or observe a drug- or alcohol-related medical emergency will not be prosecuted for: Possessing or using a controlled dangerous substance, possessing or using drug paraphernalia or providing alcohol to minors.

‘There’s a lot more that we all could be doing’

State Sen. Antonio Hayes, a Democrat who grew up in Penn North and spoke alongside Scott on Friday, said “there’s a lot more that we all could be doing” to discourage people from using drugs. Hayes told The Baltimore Sun that more “public awareness strategies” could convince more residents not to engage with substances.

“They have road signs that literally display the number of deaths associated with [the] opioid epidemic on a daily basis, and it scares people,” said Hayes, who marched through his neighborhood with “Just Say No” signs as a boy and lost his mother to drug addiction shortly before being sworn into office.

Keith Bailey, president of the Fulton Heights Community Association, walks through Penn North almost daily. While he agrees with Scott’s talk about getting tough on drug dealers, he believes police in the area are not enforcing the distribution of drugs aggressively enough.

“We need the policing, and I’ll say this because when I go up to that area, I see police sitting in the car while the people are distributing the drugs right there in front of them,” Bailey told The Sun. “Sir, I can’t agree with that!”

Bailey added that he is “troubled” by the number of outsiders who come to Penn North to by drugs, especially parents of young children and pregnant women. Dealers did not use to sell drugs to pregnant women but now do because “they look at it differently, as long as I get the money,” Bailey said.

‘Use wisely’

It “goes without saying that we should be trying to tell people” about the dangers of drug use, said Kelly Little, a community advocate with the Penn North Community Association. “But the reality of it is … when someone’s coming out and getting free testers from the drug person standpoint, there’s no rational thought process of behavior. They’re going to get the free drugs.”

He added, “if we’re really being real about it, whatever the mayor is saying, they’re not getting that message anyway.”

Little said that what’s more important than messaging is the work being done on the ground to help people, including through recovery centers. He added that there are many people who have struggled with addiction at Penn North and later found a job or bought a house. But they often end up moving away to another community, which can make it appear that nothing is ever changing.

“Once they get back on their feet and [they’re] doing well, they leave and go to other areas … And then you could be in, you know, a better neighborhood, or in the county somewhere,” Little said. “And when you fall down and totally, you know, hit rock bottom, you know where you end up? You end up in the Penn North [neighborhood]. So there’s always this recycling thing.”

City Councilman James Torrence, whose district includes Penn North, told The Sun that public health experts say that even if you tell people not to use drugs, they will do it anyway because of their addiction.

“A lot of what the mayor said today is what we have seen from evidence-based interactions with people who have addiction. Those are the things that … we found that had the best outcomes,” Torrence said, adding that someone who goes into withdrawal from not using drugs can suffer from “other sicknesses or illnesses as well.”

Susan Sherman, a Johns Hopkins professor who specializes in the health of marginalized populations, also authored much of the city’s opioid abatement plan — part of an effort to use more than $400 million from settlements with pharmaceutical companies to tackle the drug epidemic. As an advocate of harm reduction measures to treat people suffering from addiction, Sherman believes city officials had the right message for the moment on Friday.

“They said, ‘There’s something out there today. Use wisely.’ Some people have the epiphany that they’re going to quit as soon as something like this happens, but that’s not necessarily the majority of people,” Sherman told The Sun. “So they were trying to, I think, talk to the situation at hand,” Sherman said of the mayor’s comments.

Tavon Benson, director of community outreach at the Druid Heights Community Development Corporation, said the mass overdose event at Penn North is “unfortunate for the mayor because he’s done so much … invested so much of city resources and time in the Druid Heights, Penn North, Upton, Sandtown area.”

Benson added that “there are many messages out there about not using drugs,” but people aren’t necessarily going to accept the message.

“We have to remember, addiction is a disease and it affects the brain in ways that people who don’t use hard drugs or use drugs at all can never fully understand,” he said. “Until a person’s ready to truly stop getting high or stop using drugs, the only thing people can do is just keep trying and keep reaching out.”

Have a news tip? Contact Carson Swick at cswick@baltsun.com. Contact Brooke Conrad at bconrad@baltsun.com, 443-682-2356 or @conrad_brooke on X.

The solution, Kelly said, is more resources for drug addiction, while others say the problem lies with law enforcement and city leaders.

“I don’t think we go deep enough when we talk about the root issues,” said Kelly, who leads the Citizens Policing Project and has been recovering from drug addiction himself for the past 18 years. He told The Baltimore Sun he was at the scene Thursday following reports of multiple overdoses at Penn North.

Marvin “Doc” Cheatham, president of the Matthew Henson Neighborhood Association, located several blocks away from Penn North, described the drug overdose situation as “unacceptable” and blamed elected officials for not doing more to address open-air drug markets.

“I’m shaking my head in disbelief that this has actually happened,” he said. “We’re having a massive overdose of drugs that have been sold right there on the corner.”

West Baltimore Council Member James Torrence, who represents Penn North, has another solution: neighborhood development. He noted several investments in the area recently, including the creation of a new greenspace and recreation center, and improvements to a nearby playground and library.

“People only take advantage of people in areas where they believe there’s disinvestment,” Torrence said.

But Kelly said he’s not seeing the impact of neighborhood investments when it comes to overdoses.

“As long as there’s money, there’s going to be somebody to step in after the next person,” he said. “The solution is with treatment and resources and, once again, helping people find a way out.”

Torrence noted there have been multiple federal indictments in the past several years related to the open-air drug market at Penn North. That included six indictments announced by the U.S. Attorney’s office in 2021, involving 29 people charged and 23 arrested, for conspiracy, drug distribution and firearms charges.

Torrence said he could not disclose the reason why the overdoses occurred, though some people with connections to the neighborhood suggested it could have been related to the release of “testers” or a “bad batch.”

Cheatham said that police can often be seen “sitting in their automobiles” near the metro stop.

“At any given time, you can see at least four or five police cars, MTA cars, on the corner,” he said. “You see all these people. They’re passing out drugs. They’re selling illegal items right there on the street.”

Cheatham added that the police in the Western District don’t “have a workable relationship with the community.”

Baltimore Police didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment about how the department has been addressing drug dealing and overdoses in the area.

In a statement Thursday, Baltimore State’s Attorney Ivan Bates said his office “stands ready to support the Baltimore Police Department, Baltimore City Fire Department, and the Baltimore City Health Department in their vital work to uncover how this situation unfolded.”

Kelly said if it’s discovered that the cause of the overdoses was “malicious or intentional,” then law enforcement would need to address it. He added that he doesn’t think that more police officers are needed in Penn North, but that there needs to be more resources for drug addiction.

“This could happen again tomorrow at any heavy open-air drug market, because there is no immediate action to stop addicts from accessing narcotics,” Kelly said. “There’s not enough intentionality on addressing the pain that these communities are in, and that’s why people are looking for drugs.”

Kelly added that the drop in homicides and violent crimes has allowed city agencies to “feel like they’re doing so well, and we’re excusing a lot of other things that are deficient.”

Torrence said that fixing the problems at Penn North is more than just cleaning up the area.

“It’s a culture change as well, for people to think that they can still get drugs at that corner,” Torrence said. “We’ve had multiple federal indictments where they’ve gone days or weeks without any drug dealing at that corner. But now people have come back.”

Torrence added that since people are congregating mainly near the MTA stop, it makes it hard to say whether someone is “trespassing,” since it’s public property. He added that police do make arrests, but they have to witness actual drug transactions.

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Market Fresh Gourmet, scheduled to arrive in mid-2026 following COVID-19-related delays, is one of a number of planned investments for the Baltimore area made through Opportunity Zone tax incentives. The legislation was passed by President Donald Trump in 2017, during his first term, and designed to spur economic growth in low-income areas.

“Places like Baltimore are what inspired the Opportunity Zone,” said Brookings Institution fellow Tracy Hadden Loh. “There’s actually a ton of incredible assets in Baltimore that are just under-invested in.”

The Trump administration is pushing for passage of another round of Opportunity Zone legislation as part of the much-debated “One Big Beautiful Bill.”  Though supporters highlight a number of prominent Opportunity Zone projects — including Yard56 in Southeast Baltimore and downtown affordable housing — detractors frame the program as lining developers’ pockets and claim there are other ways to spur development that would be more effective.

“If the major problem in distressed areas is jobs, it didn’t create jobs in distressed areas,” said Bob Embry, who’s retiring as president of the Abell Foundation and previously served as an assistant secretary of Housing and Urban Development under Former U.S. President Jimmy Carter. “If the motive is to give tax benefits to developers, then it was successful.”

But others say the incentives are having measurable impact.

Arctaris, a Boston-based investment firm looking to invest in Opportunity Zones in Trump’s second term, so far has invested around $37.5 million through zones in the Greater Baltimore region. That includes the conversion of a former downtown Embassy Suites hotel into 303 affordable housing units for households earning up to 80% of area median income (AMI). The firm just this week closed a similar hotel-conversion deal in Silver Spring, which will create 227 units affordable for households earning up to 60% of AMI.

For the Baltimore development, the neighborhood’s median household income is around $70,000, with 57% of households spending at least a third or more of their income on housing, according to the firm’s 2024 impact report.

“There’s a huge community revitalization consideration, given that the hotel was sitting empty since the COVID pandemic, and it really wasn’t being used in a way that could help the neighborhood which it’s in,” said Patrick Mullen, managing director at Arctaris.

‘Missed opportunity’

A major criticism of Opportunity Zones in Baltimore and elsewhere is that they weren’t adequately targeted to the most distressed areas. West Baltimore Council Member James Torrence said that was particularly true of his district. He noted the need for more grocery stores as well as opportunities for childcare and jobs in West Baltimore so that residents aren’t traveling outside of the city for work.

Researchers from Johns Hopkins University and Columbia University have described Opportunity Zones as a “missed opportunity” in West Baltimore, according to a paper published in 2022.

They wrote that only a small percent of Opportunity Zones capital is flowing into deeply distressed neighborhoods and that “65% of all OZ capital is flowing into Port Covington, a census tract with a household median income approaching $100 thousand and where a $5.5 billion project was already underway.”

Despite his skepticism of the program, Torrence said Arctaris’ downtown affordable housing investment is a “positive development” for the city. He said it could help the city work toward creating mixed-income neighborhoods, since downtown income levels are “drastically higher” than in West Baltimore. “It provides an opportunity for people to be closer to employment, too,” he said.

“We have an affordability crisis,” he said, “So any opportunity to do [affordable housing] would be great.”

Measuring OZ impact

Opportunity Zones “definitely” have had a net benefit in Baltimore, said Mark Anthony Thomas, president and CEO of the Greater Baltimore Committee, which works to foster economic growth in and around Baltimore.

He pushes back against criticism that certain projects don’t align with the intention of Opportunity Zones.

“If that state [government] identified that area as the zone, that is really their responsibility to make sure that the project aligned with their objectives,” Thomas said. He added that the next round of Opportunity Zones should be “very intentional” in focusing on underserved areas.

Thomas noted Yard56 as an example of a project benefiting an underserved area and that Opportunity Zones played an important role.

“A project like that needs a lot of different financing, and … Opportunity Zones is one of a pretty elaborate capital stack of things that have to come together for a project like that to be viable,” Thomas said.

Loh, from the Brookings Institution, said there’s not enough information available to researchers about the impact of Opportunity Zones in order to assess its true impact.

“There’s all kinds of projects that have benefited from this incentive that are really dubious in terms of their community benefit, but there are also some very worthy projects, and the problem is, we don’t know what the split is,” she said.

Mullen said his firm would have had “a tough time” with its Baltimore investments if it hadn’t been for Opportunity Zones incentives.

Congress debates legislation

Maryland Secretary of Housing and Community Development Jake Day said his greatest concern with federal legislation at the moment is the Trump administration’s proposed housing cuts, and the biggest need right now in Maryland is “resources.”

Day added he doesn’t believe Opportunity Zones are an improvement on prior, similar programs, or that the OZ program is easier to navigate.

“In my opinion, it creates a new opportunity for consultants and lawyers and accountants to make money,” he said.

Thomas, from GBC, said he understands why there are people who want more of an anti-poverty focus in the form of subsidies and grants. But he said it’s important to be “adaptable” to different political environments.

“We need to focus on how do we get the same outcomes using the tool and make sure that people are at the table to have the capacity to take advantage of it,” he said.

This article has been updated to reflect that Arctaris is a Boston-based investment firm, not developer.

Have a news tip? Contact Brooke Conrad at bconrad@baltsun.com, 443-682-2356 or @conrad_brooke on X.

“We were really battling. And my hat went one way. My shirt got torn,” he said.

Someone who’d observed the scuffle met him at the police station afterward, holding the abandoned hat. “Officer Street, you lost this during the fight,” Street said the person told him.

To the retired detective, such moments demonstrate effective community policing — where an officer builds enough trust with the community that they, in turn, also support him in his work. Street was one of three officers named in 1981 as The Evening Sun’s “Policemen of the Year” and combated drug-dealing as a member of the department’s STOP Squad.

“The secret to winning the so-called war against crime is the public. You can’t do it without the public’s help,” Street told The Baltimore Sun in a recent interview. “These policemen today — and it’s not their fault, but — they’re strangers to the community.”

The sentiment is echoed by several Baltimore residents and community leaders, who say the department still has a long way to go on community policing. Some residents told The Sun the police department is not responsive to calls and that drug-dealing and other types of crime are rampant in their communities, to the point where one woman said she was unable to sell her home due to people dealing drugs directly in front of her house.

Frustration with police stems partly from abuses of the past, leading to Baltimore’s ongoing consent decree with the U.S. Department of Justice.

The police department says it’s continuing to work on improving community policing, building trust between the police and residents through trainings, community service outings and collaboration with agencies that can address problems with mental health and employment.

The recent officer-involved shooting in Upton and the community reaction illustrate the continued healing process between police and those they serve, said Jamal Turner, chief of Baltimore’s Police Accountability Board. Video released earlier this week shows Bilal Yusuf-Muhammad “B.J.” Abdullah Jr. removing a gun from his bag as officers tackled him. Abdullah fired three shots, and police fired a total of 38 rounds, killing Abdullah. One officer was injured on the foot.

Turner said a big difference between this incident and previous eras of Baltimore’s history, including Freddie Gray’s death in police custody in 2015, is that there is now a system for civilians to review complaints against police. In Abdullah’s case, Turner said he believes police were justified in responding with force, but he questions whether they should have fired as many shots as they did.

To Crystal Parker, president of the North Avenue and Hilton Street Baltimore Business and Community Task Force, community policing is about finding ways to help people change behavior that doesn’t just involve arrests.

Parker said she has begun to see positive change in her community, partly as a result of a Neighborhood Policing Plan implemented in her area by the mayor’s office and the BPD in late 2023. But throughout Baltimore, there still needs to be a “change in mindset,” she said.

“Some police come in some neighborhoods with, you know, guns drawn, ready to shoot before they ask any questions. And some police will go in other neighborhoods [where someone is] threatening to have a gun, and they will sit down and have a coffee with them.”

‘A fine line’

Several Baltimore residents complain the police department is understaffed and they want more police presence.

But West Baltimore resident and police reform activist Ray Kelly, who has helped with the implementation of the consent decree, said he doesn’t believe anyone wants more police.

“They want less crime, less violence,” he said. “And when you hear people saying they want less police, that’s because they live in communities where, historically, the police department has — I’ll be nice and say ‘misbehaved.'”

Turner, of the accountability board, said it depends on the characteristics of the neighborhood — some may want less police interaction, while others feel safer with a more visible police presence.

“There’s a fine line between safety and harassment. There’s a fine line between safety and over-policing,” Turner said.

Baltimore’s Police Accountability Board reviews hundreds of community complaints about interactions with police officers, many of which could have been avoided if people had been treated with more respect and compassion, he said.

Turner added that building trust with the community also can’t be established overnight.

“It has been more than 100 years of, especially within Black communities or communities of color, where those relations, those interactions with police officers — although the majority may be OK — there still have been a multitude of incidents where it hasn’t been,” he said.

Residents say crime goes unaddressed

Several city residents say they want police to be more proactive, rather than responding to crimes after they occur.

One Brooklyn resident, Rae, says she hardly sees any police presence in her community, despite the area being riddled by prostitution, drug-dealing and gun violence — including a recent shooting just outside her home.

“I literally tell the dispatchers at 911 that I’ll talk to them in 10 minutes, because [the police] don’t come,” she said. Rae asked to use only her first name due to concern she might be treated differently by police, and due to fear of armed drug dealers.

A Curtis Bay resident in her 70s, who requested anonymity due to fear for her safety, said drug dealers have been selling across the street from her house for at least two years. She wants to move, but she said a real estate agent told her she’d never be able to sell her house because of the drug activity.

Asked about the residents’ concerns regarding lack of responsiveness to crime, BPD Chief Lisa Reynolds, who heads up the department’s new “Youth and Community Partnership Division,” described weekly “blitzes.” Members of the police department and representatives from various city agencies, including the Mayor’s Office of Neighborhood Safety and Engagement, walk through the community and address various needs related to vacant housing and squatters, trash pick-up, abandoned cars and employment development.

BPD Spokesperson Lindsey Eldridge also noted a recent drug bust in Curtis Bay and said there are many examples of drug arrests in the city. She added the department is also trying to help people with addiction and “reduce the demand” for drugs, so that “we can then also tackle those that are dealing.” She added that it also takes time for officers to build cases.

The Sun attempted to speak with current BPD officers but was told they would need permission to speak with the media. Eldridge offered a ride-along with police, but later said she was unable to confirm scheduling.

Loss of community policing

Street, the retired detective, said he believes the idea of community policing has been lost in Baltimore.

He recalls working in Baltimore’s Fairfield neighborhood in the 1970s, a “poverty-stricken” area where some kids had never been to a baseball game. He reached out to the Orioles, and they provided tickets for 50 people to attend a game, along with hot dogs and hamburgers.

“I’ve got some of the older people that still stay in touch with me from down there. They said, ‘I remember when you took us to the baseball game.’ That’s community policing,” Street said.

Have a news tip? Contact Brooke Conrad at bconrad@baltsun.com, 443-682-2356 or @conrad_brooke on X.

Asked about the justification for salary increases by a Baltimore Sun journalist, Scott responded with a direct, verbal jab.

“First of all, the chief of staff didn’t get a raise. He got a new position that has a higher salary,” Scott said during a Monday news conference. “So if you [go] from your position to being an editor, you’re probably going to get an increase in your salary. That’s how it works when you grow up in your job.”

Scott added, “You might try to make this about my office, but this is about making sure that Baltimore has the best and brightest.” He said the higher salaries have helped him attract a team that has reduced crime to its lowest rate in decades.

The mayor’s chief of staff, Calvin Young, joined the office last year as a senior adviser, making $140,000 a year. When he became the mayor’s chief of staff in April, his salary jumped to $250,000 a year — which is $20,000 more than the person who previously held the role.

In addition, the mayor approved the following salary increases for seven city leaders:

• Berke Attila, Department of General Services director, from $199,000 to $211,013.01.
• Faith Leach, chief administrative officer, from $260,100 to $275,940.09.
• Reginald Moore, Department of Recreation & Parks director, from $216,490.59 to $229,674.87.
• Ebony Thompson, Baltimore city solicitor, from $245,000 to $259,920.50.
• James Wallace, Baltimore City Fire Department chief, from $218,000 to $$224,540 annually.
• Richard Worley, Baltimore Police Department chief, from $285,000 to $311,427.20.
• Khalil Zaied, Department of Public Works director, from $245,000 to $252,350.62.

The mayor signed the city’s $4.6 billion budget Monday, closing an $85 million deficit, “without cuts to core services, without layoffs, and without any broad-based tax increases,” he said in a news release. The budget also includes increases in fines and fees. In addition, the new budget also partially fulfills a request made by the inspector general’s office for increased staffing — transferring $112,000 away from the state’s attorney’s office.

Salary increases

City Comptroller Bill Henry abstained from the April 2 vote improving salary increases for the agency heads, saying that qualifications for employment agreements should be more explicitly defined.

Young, the mayor’s chief of staff, is a longtime friend of Scott’s who helped him win reelection in the Democratic primary last year. He co-founded a growth equity investment firm, Green Street Impact Partners, which focuses on education and workforce learning.

When Young was hired as a senior adviser in September, he had 30 days to file an ethics disclosure form, which asks city employees general questions about outside income, real estate holdings, gifts and other potential conflicts of interest. More than 100 days passed before it was filed, and Young did not face any fines or penalties from the Baltimore Board of Ethics.

Funding for immigrants, youth, public safety

City Council President Zeke Cohen said he’s proud of the city’s final budget and its “focus on public safety, accountability, supporting our immigrant community in this moment, our elders, the young people.”

“There were hard questions. There were active negotiations and debate. And I think it is that kind of creative tension that makes us all stronger,” he said at the news conference.

The new budget includes $2 million in “additional funding for the Mayor’s Office of Immigrant Affairs and the immigrant community to have the tools and resources they deserve in these uncertain times,” according to the mayor’s news release.

It also includes $216.4 million in federal grants, with the mayor’s office saying it “will continue to closely monitor the status of federal awards to understand where future adjustments may be needed.”

There’s also $634.4 million approved for youth initiatives, including YouthWorks — a youth job skills program — recreation centers, and B’more for Healthy Babies, which seeks to reduce the city’s infant mortality rate.

An additional $1.2 billion was approved for public safety, including for the Group Violence Reduction Strategy, which Scott credits with helping produce a dramatic drop in the city’s homicide rate, and efforts to boost traffic safety. The mayor’s office added that it is saving $1.1 million annually by transferring more administrative tasks from sworn police officers to people serving in civilian roles.

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Johns Hopkins has lost more than $800 million in federal grant money. The University of Maryland lost tens of millions of dollars. But some cuts have been blocked by legal challenges, though litigation is ongoing. Researchers describe disappointment and uncertainty as they determine how to move forward.

Alternative funding has been secured for a clinical trial in Bangladesh aimed at managing life-threatening diarrheal diseases in children, which was previously halted due to U.S. Agency for International Development funding cuts. The work has yet to resume.

“It just takes a long time to rebuild the teams and get things in place again to start,” said Judd Walson, chair of the Department of International Health at Johns Hopkins University, which partnered on the project. “The disruptions that are happening are really catastrophic.”

Legal challenges

Over the past several weeks, 17 NIH awards have been terminated or had an unclear status, including two training awards supporting doctoral-level researchers, Walson said.

“We’re not getting a lot of communication, so it’s a little bit hard to say exactly what the status of some of these awards are,” he said.

The National Institutes of Health didn’t respond to questions about funding cuts to Maryland research institutions. In a lawsuit challenging NIH research cuts, lawyers for the federal government wrote in a recent court filing that its terminations of grants for DEI-related studies were “sufficiently reasoned,” and that the NIH has “broad discretion” to decide what grants to provide.

Johns Hopkins is a plaintiff in two lawsuits involving caps on reimbursement of indirect costs for research — one challenging the NIH and the other against the Department of Defense. The latter suit also lists the University of Maryland, College Park, as a plaintiff. Both schools have also filed a brief in support of a lawsuit filed by Harvard University against the Trump administration’s funding cuts.

New grant terminations have been arriving “nearly every week,” Johns Hopkins University said in a recent update published on its website. There’s also been a nearly two-thirds decrease in new awards compared with last year, the university said.

Canceled projects

Johns Hopkins atmosphere and ocean sciences researcher Darryn Waugh was disappointed upon receiving notice that his NASA grant to study air pollution in Baltimore was canceled by the Trump administration.

The termination came as a result of President Donald Trump’s executive order, “Ending Radical and Wasteful Government DEI Programs and Preferencing.”

“It wasn’t clear to me that this actually falls under this diversity, equity, inclusion,” Waugh said. “It was research that I think we still wanted to do — to understand how the air pollution varies through the city — and the environmental justice was only actually a relatively small component of it.”

Waugh was working through the second year of a three-year grant, totaling $1,465,950.

“We’ve got kind of a preliminary analysis,” he said, regarding the research. “But to get anything conclusive, we would need more than one year of funding.” Waugh said he intends to find ways of continuing the research without the NASA grant.

Disputing “DEI” labeling

Daniel Mullins, at the University of Maryland School of Pharmacy, had a grant canceled for a “Health Equity Research Hub,” which examined how to encourage greater participation in health-related research.

Mullins said the loss of the grant affected five positions, and the individuals will be removed from the university due to a lack of funding. He added that the termination stated that the grant was DEI-related, which he disputes.

“I think under the DEI umbrella, a lot of times, the government will refer to it as just one racial ethnic group,” he said. “We’ve worked in different geographies, in different racial and ethnic populations, but what’s cool about what we do is it really does apply to all patients in all populations.”

Mullins said his research group has additional funding from other agencies and is writing new proposals.

Walson said social determinants of health — involving factors like poverty and other “inequities” — are “foundational to our understanding of health.”

“So the idea that we would not be able to pursue work that focuses on identifying and managing those particular issues, which are the underlying, core issues at the heart of health issues, is really challenging,” Walson said.

Worldwide impacts

The Trump administration’s cuts have had an impact across the world. Walson said it’s estimated the cuts will result in hundreds of thousands of deaths globally, and could eventually lead to millions of deaths over the next couple of years.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio has said it’s “a lie” that people have died because of USAID cuts. During a Congressional hearing in May, Rubio said the U.S. is the world’s “largest humanitarian provider.”

“I would argue: How many people die because China hasn’t done it?” he said. “How many people have died because the U.K. has cut back on spending and so has other countries?”

Contact Brooke Conrad at bconrad@baltsun.com, 443-682-2356 or @conrad_brooke on X