BALTIMORE — Baltimore City agencies are still struggling to fulfill Mayor Brandon Scott's highly-touted equity assessment law, according to two new audits.
The Equity Assessment Program was launched in 2019 as part of Scott's legislative efforts to tackle Baltimore's "long history of racial inequity."
But, based on a recent city audit, City Comptroller Bill Henry noted in a press release:
A city-wide equity plan targeting underserved communities and assessing outcomes does not exist.
The city's planning department in particular is supposed to analyze the equity of its capital projects - but has not been doing so, according to two new internal audits of the departments of planning and of Recreation & Parks.
Recreation & Parks, meanwhile, hired an Equity Coordinator in 2023, but has not taken any specific actions for the 2025 budget cycle.
The Equity Assessment program built on the planning department's 2017 work of analyzing where capital projects happened in the city based on race, income, and age group.
It was held up as a national model by groups like the National League of Cities, which said:
The City of Baltimore joined the short list of municipalities codifying racial equity into law by passing two groundbreaking pieces of legislation.
The city planning department blamed "leadership changes at the Office of Equity & Civil Rights, funding issues and competing priorities" for failure to implement the equity bill in its capital-budget practices, noted the comptroller's office.
The audit presentation, made to the city's Board of Estimates recently, can be viewed here.
Comptroller Bill Henry said in his press release: "The Equity Assessment Ordinance should support underserved communities while still allowing our residents citywide to request timely responses through from their elected officials or through tools like 311. We should either make our agencies actually follow the equity law, or we should have a public conversation about amending it in a way that will allow us to respond to our residents' concerns, without violating the law the way we are now. What we shouldn't do is keep doing nothing."
