Amid pressure by community residents for limits on the construction of Johns Hopkins University’s sprawling Data Science and Artificial Intelligence (DSAI) Institute, Baltimore officials have reached an agreement with the school.

The university will pay Baltimore up to $60,000 for parking enforcement around the site, and “if city services exceed that amount” up to $401,000 annually, until the project is completed. (Estimates are that will take another four years.)

Those were the terms of a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) approved without comment by the Board of Estimates yesterday.

But before the vote, a city resident said the document fell short, pointing out that it lacks multiple items promised by Hopkins officials at a contentious board meeting on December 17.

“Parking enforcement was just one dimension,” said Theodore Eccleston, who addressed Mayor Brandon Scott, City Council President Zeke Cohen and others on the five-member board.

“There is a lot more here that we believe the community should be able to provide input on and have a transparent process to make sure that Johns Hopkins University is held accountable for the promises that they made in front of this board in December,” Eccleston said.

• Community takes its case against Johns Hopkins’ DSAI project to City Hall – and loses (12/18/26)

Residents have long warned about the impact of work on the roughly 10-acre site that Hopkins has promised to mitigate. Nearly 500,000 square feet of office, laboratory and classroom space are to be contained in two four-story buildings, one of them positioned on the edge of a steep slope.

Tree removal – a hot button issue that drew street demonstrations and a forest of angry protest signs – should have been covered explicitly in the MOU, Eccleston told the board.

“We wanted to make sure that there’s writing – not just on Johns Hopkins’ DSAI project page, but on an actual MOU with the city – documenting that they will replant over 300 new trees, especially the ones on Remington Avenue that they promised would be mature trees 15 to 20 years old,” Eccleston said.

He argued that residents, especially upset about the loss of the mature city-owned street trees on Remington Avenue, should have been given notice of when the trees would be cut down.

Such notice must be posted, “as stated in Baltimore City Code, five days before, so that community knows what’s happening,” Eccleston reminded the board.

(Hopkins has not yet provided a response to The Brew’s questions about the meeting.)

Rampant Runoff

Another serious omission in the MOU, Eccleston testified, is any kind of  promise against further stormwater runoff from the construction site, which sits above Stony Run, a Chesapeake Bay tributary.

“To approve it as is, with just the parking enforcement, doesn’t feel appropriate given the long history of stormwater erosion documentation that we’ve had” from the construction, Eccleston said.

Hopkins has run afoul of the Maryland Department of the Environment and Chesapeake Bay Foundation, not to mention area residents who have filmed rivers of muddy brown water pouring down from the site into Wyman Park.

Speaker after speaker had hammered Hopkins on that issue at the December meeting.

Lee Coyle, senior director for planning and architecture, explained that the university hhad mixed success with previous stormwater infrastructure installed along Wyman Park Drive, but said he had high hopes for a new system being installed as part of $5 million to $10 million in planned upgrades.

• Citing a history of stormwater violations, Chesapeake Bay Foundation urges city to deny waiver for Hopkins DSAI (4/3/26)

The runoff problem persists. “Every time we have heavy rain, there’s massive amounts of sediment that is draining off of the project site into storm drains and into the Jones Falls, into the Chesapeake Bay,” Eccleston noted.

“It’s a very sensitive watershed, and we cannot allow this kind of inappropriate stormwater management not just by Johns Hopkins but by the contractors involved,” he continued.

A visit to the site yesterday – just hours after the board’s vote – backed up Eccleston’s point.

The Brew observed a lake of yellowish-brown stormwater backed up in the tree pit bioswales alongside Wyman Park Drive.

The water was flowing onto the sidewalk and into gaps in a manhole cover marked “Communication” and then out to Remington Avenue. There had just been an intense period of pounding rain. See video below.

Construction Noise, Surveillance Cameras

Another issue Eccleston raised was construction taking place outside of the originally promised construction hours, beginning as early as 6:45 a.m.

“Neighbors hear beeping, slamming and rocking,” he said. “Who knows what’s going to happen when they decide to build their retaining wall where they’re going to have to drill 65 feet into the bedrock?”

Another concern he cited is the presence of the surveillance cameras that Hopkins set up near the site at Wyman Park Drive and Remington Avenue – devices that use technology developed by Utah-based LiveView Technologies.

Residents have raised privacy concerns about the devices, noting that they are trained to recognize behavioral patterns and movements and connect to Axon Fusus, a real-time crime center platform.

“We didn’t know that these were going up,” Eccleston said. “We’d like to have more transparency around 24-hour, AI-assisted mobile surveillance cameras.”

Spotlight on Zeke Cohen

Some community leaders have quietly bristled at the fact that they were not consulted in the drawing up of the MOU approved yesterday.

Those negotiations were conducted by Council President Zeke Cohen, who disappointed community members last December when he and other board members approved an MOU and developer’s agreement giving the university broad rights to close off and build in the public right-of-way during the four-year project.

The board had received 65 statements of opposition to the items, officials said. A petition with more than 2,000 signatures called on Hopkins to find another site that wouldn’t threaten Stony Run. Neighborhood signs along Remington Avenue called out not just JHU, but Cohen.

Cohen recited a litany of promises the university must keep – including to replant trees, pay for a parking control officer, never let DSAI become “a data center,” and have someone on call to deal with situations that arise “from an intense amount of rain.”

Each time, Hopkins’ Lee Coyle replied, “Yes, Mr. President.”

Residents were left wondering where these commitments would be recorded beside the Charm TV video of the meeting. See below, starting at about 6:45.

But only the parking enforcement ended up as a provision in the MOU.

Asked by The Brew about Eccleston’s contention that the MOU left out key protections, Cohen office had “no response at this time,” adding that he “will be meeting with the aforementioned community member.”

Asked who would hold Hopkins accountable to the only substantive provision that Cohen hammered out – to pay for extra parking enforcement – the council president’s office said:

“The city will enforce the agreement, and if the community does not feel like it is being followed, they can contact the Council President’s Office. Hopkins also provided their own point of contact for complaints. You can reach them at DSAIproject@jhu.edu or at (667) 250-8145.”

Cohen’s vow of accountability sounded promising to Hillary Gonzalez, whose group, Sacred Parks and Waterways, has been a steady critic of the project.

“We hope his intention is to hold JHU accountable,” she said, “so our neighborhood can finally experience some kind of relief.”