The sad fact is that Baltimore continues to lose population.  It is time to reconfigure the city to reflect its shrinking population.  Instead of spending millions of dollars a year stabilizing vacant housing, the City needs to come up with a master plan that will involve the demolition of tens of thousands of abandon buildings with the goal of creating parks, and development tracts in their place.

On Crime:

The primary drivers of crime in Baltimore are drugs and the lack of opportunity.  We need a broad based approach that involves improving education, offering residential drug treatment on demand, and we need to get the police out of their cars and back out walking the streets. We need to develop trust between the police and the communities.

On School Construction:

We spent $15 Million dollars of stimulus money that was earmarked for long term infrastructure improvements on a Formula One race, $300 Million dollars on a convention hotel that blocks the view from Camden Yards, and now we are being asked to spend $1.5 Billion on the new State Center project, when half of the office space Downtown is vacant.  We have the money to renovate our schools, just not the will.

On Baltimore City's Shrinking Population:

There are existing and potential competitive advantages of our City as a less expensive alternative to Washington.  Until and unless we fix education and the crime rate here, we'll keep losing jobs to the surrounding, lower-tax counties.  We must not ignore entry-level and so-called "blue collar" job opportunities; instead of just chasing high-tech or bio-med jobs.

On Property Taxes:

We need a significant cut to the City property tax in half.  It is unrealistic to think that Baltimore City will thrive when the property taxes are almost double that of any other jurisdiction in the state.