City Council Bill 12-053 – calling for voters to decide whether municipal agencies should be regularly audited – is starting to resemble the cliffhanging sequences of The Perils of Pauline.

Like the famous silent-screen damsel in distress, the audit charter amendment has faced a rocky road of opposition, acceptance, rejection and now (apparent) re-acceptance by the Stephanie Rawlings-Blake administration.

Going back to the last reel, at the Council’s June 25 meeting, the bill was defeated in a 8-7 vote. Describing himself as “stunned,” bill sponsor Carl Stokes angrily accused three fellow councilmen of switching their votes to “nay” under pressure from the mayor’s office.

Stokes pronounced the bill “dead.”

But like Pauline strapped to the railway tracks but saved in the nick of time, Bill 12-053 yesterday escaped oblivion at the hands of the Judiciary and Legislative Investigations Committee, where it had been sent after its ignoble defeat.

New Amendments

Late yesterday the committee approved a revised bill with the support of (or more precisely, without opposition from) the mayor’s lobbyists.

Eight amendments were the price of political rebirth.

Most of them were technical. The most significant change strikes out the requirement of biennial audits of all city agencies and substitutes the word certain.

Those certain agencies are listed as: Baltimore Development Corp (BDC); Finance; Fire; General Services; Housing and Community Development (HCD); Human Resources; Law, including the Minority and Women’s Business Opportunity Office (MWBOO); Planning; Police; Public Works; Recreation and Parks; Transportation; Mayor’s Office on Criminal Justice; and Mayor’s Office of Information Technology (MOIT).

(Two agencies also targeted for audits – the Mayor’s Office of Employment Development and Office of the Labor Commissioner – were exempted at the request of the mayor, informed sources told The Brew.)

The other big change is the timing of the audits.

Under the revised bill, seven agencies will be audited during fiscal year 2014 (that’s a year from now): BDC, Finance, General Services, HCD, MOIT, Rec and Parks, and Transportation.

Seven other agencies will be audited beginning in fiscal 2015 (that’s two years from now): Fire, Human Resources, Law and MWBOO, Planning, Police, Mayor’s Office on Criminal Justice, and Public Works.

After that, the agencies will be audited every other year.

Stokes said in an interview today that he is “very satisfied” that the amendments “will allow us to move forward to give the citizens better accountability of where their tax dollars are going.”

Bill 12-053 is scheduled to go before the full Council on Monday. Whether it will pass – then placed on the November ballot for voters to make the final decision – is something not even a good Hollywood script writer could say for sure.