On Monday, Mayor Brandon Scott’s 13-member Sisson Street Task Force was scheduled to hear from representatives of the Baltimore City Planning Department and the Baltimore Development Corporation (BDC) about the pros and cons of selling a city-owned parcel in Remington that’s currently used as a bulk trash drop-off center.
The planning department’s Northern District Planner, Marie McSweeney Anderson, made a detailed presentation about the documents that guide development in Remington and answered questions afterwards. But the BDC, the quasi-public economic development agency that had asked the City Council to sell the land on Sisson Street to a developer, was a no show.
The agency’s failure to send a representative to the online meeting drew a rebuke from the task force’s chair, City Council member Odette Ramos. Under a tight deadline to make recommendations to the mayor about the best way to handle bulk trash and hazardous waste disposal in north Baltimore, Ramos said the BDC is “not transparent” and called its failure to show up “a huge problem.”
“We had invited the Baltimore Development Corporation to our meeting and they had initially accepted,” Ramos told the task force members halfway through the 90-minute meeting. “The reason that we wanted to bring them to this meeting is because they were the ones who brought to the City Council, through the Mayor’s Office and through the Council President’s office, the legislation to sell the Sisson property. The fact that they pulled out of being at our meeting today is unfortunate but also not surprising. I have had several challenges with the Baltimore Development Corporation. They are not transparent and the fact that they do not want to be a part of this discussion is very problematic to me.”
The task force has been meeting since Oct. 20 to help Scott decide whether to relocate the Sisson Street Sanitation Yard and Citizen Drop-Off Center at 2840-2842 Sisson Street to make way for private development. Monday’s meeting, its fifth, was the first time any city agency or quasi-public agency has failed to comply with an invitation to appear at a task force meeting. It was a rare sign of discord since the group was created.
Ramos pointed out that city officials are considering closing or moving the drop-off center, and the task force was formed, largely because the BDC asked the council to pass legislation authorizing the sale of the Sisson Street property.
“I don’t know that I will be inviting them again to this meeting, although I will take input from task force members,” she said. “But if they want to fight for a development that they have said that they wanted, and wanted to sell the land in order to do that development, I would think that they would show up to our meeting. That is all I have to say about that and we can get some input on that later, but I do think that it is unfortunate. They had promised that they would be here and then said that they cannot be here. That is a problem. That’s a huge problem.”
Deputy Mayor of Operations Khalil Zaied said the task force might still be able to get the BDC to participate.
“I don’t think the door is shut on that thing,” he said at the meeting. “We still have some more conversations to have with BDC within the next couple of days about that request. That response that we got, we didn’t get it from the top. So I’ll reserve the right until having further conversations with the top at the BDC to figure out what the next step is. Since we realized earlier today [that the BDC would not be participating], I just reached out to the leadership for some explanation and we’ll get some to figure out what the next step is.”
“Thank you,” Ramos said. “I appreciate that. We have a specific cadence to our meetings to try to get certain themes taken care of at each meeting, so this kind of breaks our cadence here and also it’s going to extend the time that we can give recommendations to the mayor.”
At the next meeting, Ramos said, she wants to get community stakeholders such as a representative from the Midtown Community Benefits District to “talk to us about their uses of the [Sisson Street] site as well and how important it is to them.”
“If [the BDC wants] to come before us, I think that would be a helpful part of the discussion,” she said. “But I certainly can’t design an entire meeting around their schedule when we’ve got a cadence and a schedule that we’ve been following.”
More than 50 people attended the Sisson Street meeting on Monday. The task force did not take public testimony at the meeting, but many people wrote comments in the group chat while it was underway.
A BDC representative on Tuesday did not immediately respond to questions about why the agency didn’t send a representative to the task force meeting after initially agreeing to do so or whether a BDC representative would come to a future meeting if invited.
Critical to the deliberations
In January of 2024, the BDC issued a request for proposals from developers interested in buying the Sisson Street parcel if the city decides to close or relocate the drop-off facility, and it set Feb. 9, 2024, as the deadline for bids. The agency has never disclosed how many proposals it received or announced the selection of a developer. One bidder is Seawall, a local company that has numerous other projects in Remington. Co-founder and partner Thibault Manekin has spoken at community meetings about his vision to build a grocery store-anchored commercial center on the property, which he calls Sisson West.
In August, City Council legislation was introduced that would authorize Mayor Scott and City Council to sell the Sisson Street property to a developer, but that bill was put on hold after the task force was created. Whether it moves ahead will depend on what the task force recommends.
Information from the BDC about the bidding process is critical to the task force’s deliberations because city officials have said the creation of any new drop-off center would be funded by proceeds from the sale of the existing facility on Sisson Street.
If the task force doesn’t have information about the proposed Sisson Street development or how much a buyer would pay for the land, members say, they’re limited in their ability to recommend other sites for the mayor to consider.
Zaied stressed on Monday that any plans to relocate the Sisson Street center would be contingent on the sale of the existing site and how much revenue it would generate.
“I hate to put a damper on this, but I think I have to say that as we look for other options that are available, I wanted to make it very clear that there are no [funds] at this point for any of those locations. Nothing even in the next six years or so,” he said.
Even if the task force identifies “the perfect location” for a new drop-off facility, he warned, the city does not have the means to build it “unless enough funding comes out of the Sisson Street…sale that will satisfy putting some money into the new location. So I don’t want the expectation that, if we find the perfect location, the funding is going to be there. Because at this point, there is no funding for this project. Just wanted to make sure everybody understands just as we start looking at everything around the area.”
“Thank you, director, for that reminder,” Ramos said. “I will say that the Planning Commission is starting to have their hearings about the [city’s] capital budget starting in January. The capital budget is where we would see any funding in this regard. We’ll make sure that the task force has the dates for that, but also that our recommendation would have to include some thinking around that — whether it’s a recommendation to put some dollars into the capital budget in some way, we’ll certainly make sure that’s part of the recommendation, or any other creative financing that we can come up with.”
“To add on to the deputy mayor’s point, I think that the other important thing to recognize is that we do not have the funding to do the rehabilitation of Sisson Street either, so even if the recommendation was to keep it open and rehabilitate it, there is no money for that,” said task force member Jed Weeks.
Off the table
In its discussions, the task force has decided to take several sites out of consideration as candidates for relocating the drop-off facility, including a storage yard at 2801 Falls Road that’s owned by the Potts and Callahan construction company. Other sites previously taken off the list include the “Camp Small” area west of the Jones Falls Expressway (JFX) and 560 W. North Ave., near where a large salt dome is visible from the JFX.
On Monday, task force members talked about taking another candidate off the list, a closed landfill at Monument Street and Edison Highway. Ramos told the task force members that the site will no longer be considered because there are other plans for that property that haven’t been announced. Another site that has been suggested, a city-owned parcel beneath the JFX at Monument Street and The Fallsway, may not be feasible because it is in a floodplain, she said.
Ramos said the task force will be making site visits to several properties on Jan. 10. The original deadline for the task force to make its recommendations was December, but Ramos said it may need one or two more months to complete its work. She said the next meeting will be Dec. 15 at 7 p.m.
