Amid pushback from council and community members during a hearing on legislation to eliminate term limits in Baltimore, a City Council committee recessed yesterday without taking a vote on it.

Signaling he knew after debate that the measure could be in trouble, bill sponsor Ryan Dorsey, who also chairs the Charter Review Special Committee, suggested they vote to pass the bill to the full council without making a recommendation.

“The thing that I would be most comfortable with is the committee voting just to take the second reader without a recommendation. Just to put options on the table to the full council to debate,” Dorsey said.

That didn’t sit well with bill co-sponsor Odette Ramos.

“That just negates our responsibility as a committee,” she exclaimed, prompting Committee Vice Chair John Bullock to reveal that he was leaning toward abstaining on the measure. “I feel generally uncomfortable voting on it one way or another,” he said.

His bill stalled for the moment, Dorsey didn’t say when a vote on would take place on it.

He had begun the hearing by reciting his arguments for repealing restrictions that limit the mayor, comptroller, City Council president and 14 Council members to two terms in a 12-year period.

Enacted as a result of a 2022 charter amendment approved by 72% of the voters, term limits are “bad for the public interest” because they take away voters’ rights to re-elect a candidate if they wish to, Dorsey argued.

“Good legislators get better over time, and the ones who work hard at the job get things done over the long haul, even when things are tough at the outset,” Dorsey observed, adding that Councilwoman Sharon Middleton’s district “probably would not have a new library coming to it if she had been limited to just two terms or even three terms.”

Bill co-sponsor Mark Parker gave his arguments for why term limits are “fundamentally undemocratic,” adding, “Let’s not have that choice constrained or abrogated in any way, and certainly not by the will of a wealthy businessman from the county.”

This was a reminder that the campaign to place term limits on the ballot was bankrolled by conservative businessman David D. Smith, Baltimore Sun co-owner and chair of the Sinclair Broadcast Group, who personally spent over $500,000 on the ballot initiative.

Parker also invoked the names of past mayors who served multiple terms, such as William Donald Schaefer and Thomas J. D’Alesandro Sr., and unnamed others “who didn’t run again or weren’t re-elected.”

“Their time was up . . .The voters decided somebody else would do it great. The ones we kept, we kept for a reason,” he said. “If Mayor Scott chooses to run again and the voters reelect him, he would join that list, right?’

“Term limits are wildly popular”

But one member of the committee expressed a different view, arguing for a kind of middle path.

Councilman Zac Blanchard introduced an amendment that would keep the current term limits in place, but move Council members and the comptroller to a three-term limit system. This arrangement, he said, would result in a system similar to those in place in other major Maryland jurisdictions.

“Two consecutive four-year terms for the county executive, and then three consecutive four-year terms on the county councils. That’s what we see across the other large counties in the state,” he said.

“Term limits are wildly popular with people,” he explained. “People like term limits for a lot of different reasons, and so I think that is that is a real consideration.”

“You would end up getting an elected body that is actually more representative of the people”  – Councilman Zac Blanchard.

The power of incumbency appeared to be still a fresh memory for the first-term councilman, who in 2024 narrowly defeated – by just 48 votes – the person who had held the 11th District seat for a decade, Eric Costello.

An “open primary” with no incumbent to beat “encourages a lot of candidates to run,” Blanchard said. “Coalitions form, people feel safe to support who they think is the best candidate, people in community leader roles and all sorts of things who would not do that when an incumbent were involved in the race.”

“I think you would end up getting an elected body that is actually more representative of the people,” he continued.

But Ramos and Jermaine Jones, along with Dorsey, expressed support for the unamended bill.

Mentioning her predecessor, Mary Pat Clarke, who represented the 14th District for four terms before retiring, Ramos said the voters kept returning her to office “because she made such an impact in the community, she made such a difference in peoples’ lives.”

She vowed to do a better job of educating the public after city lawmakers failed to take the term limit issue seriously in 2022: “It kind of, or at least to me, slipped by. It became October, and it was like, what is this on the ballot?”

“Whatever you think about the power of lobbyists and money in politics, it’s nothing that can’t and won’t be made worse by City Hall becoming a revolving door”  – Councilman Ryan Dorsey.

Responding to Blanchard’s observation that most other jurisdictions in Maryland have some form of term limits, Dorsey shot back, “Just because everybody else is doing it doesn’t make it right.”

On the subject of incumbents’ power to curry favor with moneyed interests, he had this to say:

“Whatever you may think about the power of lobbyists and money in politics, it’s nothing that can’t and won’t be made worse by City Hall becoming a revolving door.”

“Trust the voters”

When it came time for public comment, bill supporters were in the minority. Carolyn Carey, an 81-year-old city resident, said she was opposed to term limits (“we feel like you’re undermining us”) and mentioned Schaefer’s four terms in office.

“Trust us,” she said. “If you’re doing a great job, the voters will keep putting you in there.”

But most of those who testified spoke in opposition to the repeal bill, 26-0199.

“You all have been meeting for months now and this has not been discussed. All of a sudden it shows up out of nowhere,” said resident Deb O’Neill. “I didn’t hear a drumbeat from the citizenry saying, hey, we made a mistake, we’re not happy.”

“We need term limits to get people out of office that stayed too long”  – Jody Landers.

Former Councilman Jody Landers, who has previously locked horns with Dorsey over zoning changes, went further, saying he used to oppose term limits, but no longer does.

“We don’t need term limits to get good people elected, we need term limits to get people out of office that stayed too long,” he said. “This Council has shown itself to be tone deaf when it comes to listening.”

Landers ended with this prediction:

“If you pass this bill and put it on the ballot, you will galvanize more people to come out and vote in favor of this than voted in favor of it previously.”