Baltimore City will have two light shows to celebrate the Fourth of July this year, a fireworks display at the Inner Harbor and a drone show viewable from Cherry Hill and West Covington Park in south Baltimore.
Baltimore’s Board of Estimates, the city’s spending panel, on Wednesday approved a no-bid professional services agreement with Advanced Entertainment Technologies, doing business as Image Engineering, to provide drones and fireworks for the events. The cost of the contract is $184,817.
A memo to the board from the Mayor’s Office of Arts, Culture and Entertainment (MOACE) did not say what time the shows would begin. The July 4 Inner Harbor fireworks display last year started around 9:30 p.m. The south Baltimore drone show also started last year at 9:30 p.m. as part of the Cherry Hill Arts and Music Waterfront Festival at Middle Branch Park, 3301 Waterview Ave. Another recommended viewing location for the drone show is West Covington Park, a 12.2-acre waterfront green space at 101 W. Cromwell St.
Four of the five members of the spending board voted on Wednesday to approve the contract with Image Engineering and the fifth member, Comptroller Bill Henry, abstained.
Henry said he wasn’t against fireworks but his office didn’t receive an advance copy of the contract to review. Henry said he didn’t want to set a precedent by approving a contract during a public meeting that he hadn’t received in advance for review.
“I’m glad that the city is providing entertainment,” Henry said, but “it would be inappropriate for us to approve…items as a board that are not actually reviewed” ahead of time by the Comptroller’s Office.
Linzy Jackson, III, the director of MOACE, said he was waiting for the contract to be signed by the vendor and that didn’t happen until recently. He said he didn’t want to submit the agreement for review by the Comptroller’s Office “without actually having a signed contract, which was the holdup.”
Jackson told the board that negotiations with the vendor started two months ago but the city’s Office of Risk Management had questions about a couple of items in the contract and that delayed the negotiating process.
According to the MOACE memo, which was submitted to the board as a “walk-on” item, the light show contract was not put out for competitive bids because it was “not practical.”
MOACE is a division of the Mayor’s Office that was created within the last year to produce some of the festivals and other civic events that were formerly put on by the quasi-public Baltimore Office of Promotion and the Arts (BOPA), now called Create Baltimore.
The idea was to give the Mayor’s Office more direct oversight of arts- and culture-related events in the city so they go more smoothly, after Mayor Brandon Scott lost confidence in former BOPA CEO Donna Drew Sawyer and asked for her resignation.
Timing was an issue in awarding the fireworks contract, whose “period of agreement” was listed as running from 7/4/2026 to 7/4/2026.
“MOACE has been transitioning activities since its recent creation and expects to bid out this activity in the near future,” MOACE’s memo said. “It is hereby certified that the above procurement is of such a nature that it is not practical to obtain competitive bids at this time.“
