Baltimore City Comptroller Bill Henry had no trouble identifying the point at which he decided he wanted to be President of the United States. He was in high school and heard that there were talks of cutting the NASA budget. A life-long reader of Asimov and Heinlein, a lover of science fiction and real-life science exploration, this potentiality struck him as extremely short-sighted.
This is where upbringing took over. Henry comes from a family steeped in politics and action. His father worked in the Civil Rights movement in the 1960s and moved from being an outside agitator to wanting to change the government from within. He and a number of friends ran for House of Delegates in 1966. All his friends won, but Henry’s father lost to, in Henry’s words, “a young carpetbagger from the Eastern Shore named Paul Sarbanes.”
What Henry’s father learned from that was that he loved working on campaigns, but hated being the candidate, so he spent the next three decades running other campaigns. This meant that Henry and his sister grew up around city council members, delegates, and state senators. It was a perfectly attainable profession, as far as he was concerned, from the time he was very young.
What does this have to do with NASA? He had abandoned hopes of becoming an astronaut once he learned the logistical differences between being an astronaut and being a starship captain. “It is not cool for Captain Kirk to pee in his suit, but it’s an absolute job requirement for an astronaut,” Henry quipped. He even considered life as a space shuttle engineer or specialist, until he decided he would be better at being a political advocate for space exploration. Still, along with the events of 9/11, fifteen years later, Henry considered the tragedy of the Challenger explosion in 1986 to be among the most defining events in his lifetime.
“I wanted to be president because I thought it was important that we keep pushing the space budget,” Henry said.
He entered Johns Hopkins University as a freshman in the fall of 1986 with all four years of coursework planned out, along with his political career, a timeline, and a goal: Congress, U.S. Senate, President. Boom, boom, boom. (Full disclosure: your reporter also entered Hopkins as a freshman in 1986, and has been friends with Henry since those college days.)
Like the world of Star Trek and the other speculative fiction he loved, he saw a future with a world government where war is a thing of the past. All those stories he loved, however, happened after a World War III, when survivors banded together to say, “Never again.” Henry wants to skip the World War III part.
This is where the budget comes in. As a teenager, Henry felt we should be working to build a truly functioning world government now. If governments used the resources and budget they spent on defending themselves from each other for strengthening themselves and their citizens’ quality of life instead, wouldn’t the sky be the limit?
Henry sat down with Baltimore Fishbowl to discuss his job as Baltimore City Comptroller and so much more in this interview that has been edited for length and clarity.
Baltimore Fishbowl: You talk about the $650 million we spend on the police department in Baltimore City, and think, “If you could even just take half of that…” what would you do with that $325 million?
Bill Henry: I had a great lunch conversation with Jan Houbolt, who used to run the leadership program at the Greater Baltimore Committee. He told me that they’d looked at recidivism rates for people returning from different levels of incarceration, and what a large percentage of total crimes is committed by people who’ve already been caught once and sent away. He said that if there were a built-in pipeline, so that when you come back from incarceration you have a place to live and a mainstream job waiting for you, guaranteed for at least a year to give you a chance to get back on your feet and maybe transition to something else, he believed you could eliminate a significant amount of recidivism. And that would be a real-time reduction.
The only difficulty is that it’s expensive. But is it expensive compared to the $600 million we’re spending trying to keep people from committing crimes and catching them when they do? I told him that was a great concept, because for the 15 years before our lunch, I’d been focused on trying to spend more resources on youth development. There’s a Frederick Douglass quote: “It is easier to build strong children than to repair broken men.” As somebody who went to business school, I’ll add that it’s also more cost-effective. I’ve always felt that’s how local government can really affect public safety.
…
So, what would I do with the other $325 million? Some of it, Brandon [Mayor Brandon Scott] has already started doing. I give him total props for the violence reduction efforts, Safe Streets, ROCA, and the incredible effect they’ve had in reducing homicides. On some level, I wonder how previous mayors feel seeing that, because it wasn’t new information that if you did this, it would work. Other people had done little bits of it. What Brandon did was show that it works at scale.
BF: Say more about that.
BH: A couple of months ago, a guy over at Zen West leaned over and said, “Seriously, who’s responsible for the drop in crime, Brandon or Ivan?” [Ivan Bates, State’s Attorney]
I said, “Joe Biden.”
He said, “Joe Biden?” I said, “Joe Biden pushed for the ARPA program, and that gave Baltimore City $600-plus million to do with largely as we wanted. Brandon became the first mayor ever to have the opportunity to put real money into violence reduction without the challenge of taking it away from anywhere else. Jack [Young], Catherine [Pugh], Stephanie [Rawlings-Blake], Sheila [Dixon], Martin [O’Malley]—none of them had the luxury of doing that and continuing to put money into the police department without taking heat for cutting police money.”
The ironic thing is that Brandon campaigned on defunding the police department and then took a whole boatload of grief for it at his first Taxpayers’ Night for the Board of Estimates in spring of 2021. There were dozens of people online, person after person saying how disappointed they were in him, because he’d said he was going to cut the police budget and instead, he increased it. But in March or April of 2021, we didn’t have the ARPA money yet. When he got it, he was able to fund all the things people would want funded if there were $325 million extra available because we weren’t spending it all on the police department. The difference is he didn’t have to cut the police department.
The other difference is that the money runs out at the end of this year.
BF: So, what’s going to happen?
BH: Inside City Hall they call it the ARPA cliff. They may call it that elsewhere too. I’m waiting to see what they do.
BF: That hasn’t been discussed publicly?
BH: Certainly not publicly. They may be discussing it inside, but because the same mayor controls the police department and the finance department, there’s no need to have a conversation outside of themselves.
BF: But the mayor also serves on the Board of Estimates.
BH: The mayor runs the Board of Estimates. He serves on it with four other people, two of whom work for him. … Whatever the mayor decides almost certainly will happen. There’s the logistical possibility that he proposes something the council doesn’t want to agree to, and the council now has the power to move money around in the budget. Conceivably he could propose something that draws such huge public backlash that the council doesn’t go along. But that hasn’t happened in living memory.
[Henry’s director of communications, Geoff Shannon, interjected to say the Mayor has proposed the framework of what to do when the money runs out, involving a new department called the Department of Neighborhood Safety using $50 million of the opioid restitution fund to start it.]
If I were a living former mayor, I would be unspeakably jealous of Brandon. First Joe Biden gives him $640 million and says, “Go do what you need to do, buddy.” Then, just as it’s starting to run out, they get this opioid settlement fund with another roughly $350 million. The short answer is that Brandon will almost certainly be able to get through the rest of this term and get reelected to a third and final term if he so chooses, before hard choices need to be made.
BF: And the amount the city got from the opioid settlement is because the mayor chose not to attach the city to the main suit.
BH: Again, total props to him. He gambled on that, and he won. We didn’t buy into the main suit with everybody else, and we did better. So, it’s not like this was undeserved. It’s just very fortunate for him.
BF: (*in her best Toy Story’s Rex the Dinosaur/Wallace Shawn voice*) So, what does a city comptroller actually do?
BH: Okay, so, you know I love you, so this comes from a place of love when I say that’s not a very good Wallace Shawn impression.
BF: Just answer the question.
BH: Most people, when I go to community meetings, think I’m in charge of the money for the city. I think that’s because that’s what a comptroller is in all other scenarios, in businesses, at the state level, and in other governments. And that was the case here in Baltimore, where the comptroller oversaw the budget bureau, accounts payable, accounts receivable, collections, and procurement. … That’s how it used to work. Then, in 1963, Theodore McKeldin—and I love saying these words in this order—the last charismatic, populist Republican mayor of Baltimore, came along in his second go as mayor. He’d been mayor, then governor, and came back for one final term as mayor. He convinced the people of Baltimore in general, and the Charter Review Commission that was already up and running when he won, that Baltimore needed to professionalize its finances. I think what that meant was that rather than letting whatever schmo the people elect run the finances for the city, we need to hire somebody who does this for a living.
So, the charter review committee scooped up all the financial offices under the comptroller, created a Department of Finance, and hired a professional director, Charlie Benton.
But here’s the thing. If this was really about professionalizing the city’s finances, they could have done that and had the director of finance report to the comptroller. The comptroller would have remained the CFO for the city, and they’d have simply forced the comptroller to hire a professional manager for those departments. But they decided the director of finance should report to the mayor. So, it wasn’t about professionalizing the finances. It was a power grab. The mayor’s office already controlled all the operational offices, all the agencies like police, fire, transportation, housing, and health, and now it also got back-office control of finance.
So, when we talk today about the really strong mayor system of government we have, which is really a strong Board of Estimates system that the mayor controls, it’s even stronger because the mayor also controls the money entirely. The mayor has to get the City Council to approve the budget once a year, and if substantial amounts of money have to move between agencies during the year, the council has to approve supplemental appropriations. But the literal thousands of individual little transactions are approved at the Board of Estimates, which means the mayor just makes them happen.
BF: What would you change? What have you changed?
BH: One of the things I’m proudest of, little victories that mean more than anybody has really noticed, is this. Until I became comptroller, the Board of Estimates met every Wednesday. The deadline for the next Wednesday’s agenda in City Hall was the Thursday of the week before. They would put out the agenda on Friday or Monday, and people had until Tuesday morning to protest something that was going to be on Wednesday’s agenda.
BF: Is that workable?
BH: It worked that way for decades. And the reason it worked for at least two and a half of those decades is that the comptroller’s office wasn’t making a strong effort to do content review. The focus was: this is the stuff coming in, we’re putting it on the agenda so everybody can see it, and we’ll approve it at next week’s board meeting. Habitually, meetings lasted five or ten minutes, because everything was on the consent agenda and they just approved it. Every now and then there’d be a bigger or controversial item and a longer conversation, but otherwise it just cranked along.
BF: What changed?
BH: We came in and said, “This is not really openness and transparency. This is technically openness and transparency.” So, we got the administration to slow things down. Now we hold two meetings a month. We require agencies to submit items 15 days before the meeting they want to be on, which gives us a week to put together the public agenda, so the public has a full week to know what’s going to be on it, in case they have concerns to raise or want to organize a real protest. It also gives us two weeks to read the agenda carefully, reach out to agencies with items we have questions about, schedule briefings, and talk about things.
Somebody told me the other day how much they appreciated it when I argued with the mayor and the administration over their interpretation of something at a Board of Estimates meeting. I said, “I’ll tell you the truth: you’re seeing 5 percent. For 95 percent of the issues we raise, we catch them before they get to the Board of Estimates. We go back to the administration and show them what’s wrong. And 95 percent of the time they either acknowledge our concerns and fix it, or—and this is not the majority—they share additional information that puts why they’re doing it this way in context, so I no longer have the same level of concern.” None of that was happening for the last 30 years.
BF: Have you gotten any pushback about the way you’ve started doing the job?
BH: Yeah. So, the pushback is that the mayor and the City Council are considering eliminating the Board of Estimates.
BF: That’s quite a bit of pushback.
BH: And we’re waiting to see what that actually looks like, because saying you want to eliminate the Board of Estimates is one thing. Actually sitting down and rewriting the charter to divvy up all the Board’s responsibilities among the remaining actors in government is not a trivial task. There will be hundreds of hours of work involved in figuring out how to do it.
I’ll be very candid: if it’s done by sitting down with the mayor, the City Council, and the comptroller and dividing those responsibilities in a reasonable, logical fashion—and my idea of reasonable and logical is this—I can see contract and vendor approvals being divided between the mayor and the City Council on a threshold basis. There are other cities where the council approves contracts over a certain threshold, and below that threshold there’s just an administrative process.
Then there are other responsibilities the Board of Estimates has now, and I can see those being divided between the mayor and the comptroller, depending on whether the key aspect is openness and transparency. If you’re changing salary ranges for a group of city workers, I don’t know that it’s a big deal to have a special public process, if you’ve already made a point of publicly posting all the ranges and publicly posting changes when you make them. I could see that staying with the administration as an administrative process. But if an agency wants to create three new positions at a certain price range, I think that should be open and transparent, so everybody can know.
I think those requests should come to the comptroller to approve, and then the comptroller can publicly post it. If that’s how they divvy up the Board of Estimates, that works. Because the truth is that right now the mayor gets everything he wants at the Board of Estimates anyway. What this really is, is the mayor being willing to trade away some unilateral approval for expediency on some things, because even though you control the Board of Estimates, you don’t get to do it instantaneously.
BF: Why do you think there’s pushback? Is it because the mayor is not pleased with having to account for the things he’s putting on the agenda?
BH: I don’t know that it’s that direct. In fairness, Brandon was already questioning whether we needed a Board of Estimates at the beginning of his first term, before he’d been frustrated by the process. The Board of Estimates takes two to three weeks if you want to follow the rules. I can see how it would be frustrating if a lot of the time one of your departments comes to you and says, “We just realized we need to do this next week.”
They have to wait two weeks to get to the next Board meeting. In a situation like that, your only choices are to tell the agency, “No, I’m sorry, figure out some way not to have that deadline,” or to walk it onto the agenda. Walking it on means either getting the council president and the comptroller to agree that it’s time-sensitive, or documenting that it’s critical to city operations and can’t be deferred.
BF: What happens if the Board of Estimates is eliminated?
BH: If the City Council and the mayor move forward with eliminating the Board of Estimates, my hope, expectation, and strong recommendation is that they also move Finance back under the comptroller. If the council is now going to have responsibility for approving contracts, it will want financial analysis and information. Right now, the Department of Finance does that for the Board of Estimates, and there’s no political concern, because Finance works for the mayor and the mayor controls the Board. But the council isn’t going to want to approve the mayor’s agencies’ spending requests with only the mayor’s finance department giving them analysis. They could set up their own department and spend a couple of million dollars duplicating the effort. Or they could recognize that part of the reason the comptroller was the CFO in the first place, with the budget bureau under them, was so the comptroller could give independent financial analysis and advice to both the mayor and the City Council, even though they’re supposed to provide a check on each other.
BF: What else needs fixing?
BH: I like fixing things. And the reality is, I love city government, but there are dumpster fires all over the place, and I want to fix them.
BF: What’s your priority dumpster fire right now?
BH: That’s part of my problem. They don’t work for me. I fixed everything under us. In 2022, voters approved a charter amendment to move accounts payable out of the Finance Department and over to the comptroller. We went to them and said, “Give us the Finance Department back, because you’ve got a lot of problems in Finance, and we can work on fixing those while you work on fixing everything else.”
They said, “We’re not giving you Finance.” But they were taking a lot of heat for the city being really, really bad at paying people. We had lots of people complaining about invoices 12, 15, 18 months past due. That kind of thing can kill a small business.
So, they said, “We’re not giving you all of Finance, but if you want accounts payable, we’ll give you accounts payable.” And we said, sure, we’ll take it. Accounts payable is now its own department under the comptroller. It went from being one of three divisions in one of six bureaus of the Finance Department to being its own department under our control.
I told somebody the other day that the city has gone from being really awful at paying people to just kind of bad at it. We have significantly reduced the backlog. I’m a big believer in giving credit where credit is due. A chunk of that wasn’t us. Before he left, and before they turned accounts payable over to us, the first city administrator [Chris Shorter] authorized hiring a whole bunch of temp employees to help accounts payable churn through the backlog. We continued that, and we’ve now phased out most of the temps, because we’ve also filled full-time vacancies that hadn’t been filled. … Accounts payable went from taking about a week to cut a check or do an electronic funds transfer after receiving an approved invoice to doing it in 24 hours or less.
BF: Is there anything you’d like to say about future political aspirations?
BH: My driver is the ability to fix things and make city government better. If I can do that in the job I’m in, I’m happy to keep doing that job. If the way my job is currently designed doesn’t give me much additional opportunity to do that, that’s a different question. But we’ve made a lot of substantive changes to how the Board of Estimates works, and we think it works better now for the people of Baltimore. It’s more open and more transparent.
My biggest for 2028 is I am trying to get the city council to move forward with restoring those financial powers to the comptroller because I really think the city would run better if it had the two-person rule, the rule where you have two keys in the silo when it’s time to launch a missile. … I really think that the city would be in a better position if you had to have two different citywide elected officials agree for some things that are of sufficient importance.
For example, the fact that the mayor was able to push through the original BGE conduit deal, when absolutely nobody else in City Hall thought it was a good idea. We’re in the process of walking it back, and I’m glad, and I think we’re gonna go do what we probably should have done then and just keep the same franchise arrangement with BGE that we have with everyone else who uses the conduit, and we’re just going to raise the franchise fee. In fact, we have raised the franchise fee.
But when the mayor decided we’re going to do this deal where we’re just going to let BGE be responsible for doing all the maintenance, and they can just keep their money and spend it on that, the council president at the time and I, we both had a lot of questions that never got answered. The council had questions, and there’s 17 elected officials in City Hall, and 16 of them either flatly said it was a bad idea or wanted more information before committing to it. But the mayor thought it was a good idea, so the mayor just did it, and I think that’s not the best way to run a democracy. So, that’s what I’m focused on for 2028: restoring the comptroller to being the independent and elected CFO for the city.
Presidential aspirations will have to wait.
Editor’s note: The introduction has been edited to clarify Henry’s thought process on choosing a career in politics.
