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 at 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 two 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 Inner Harbor fireworks display last year started around 9:30 p.m. on July 4.
This is the first year the city has scheduled a Fourth of July drone show at West Covington Park, a 12.2-acre waterfront green space at 101 West Cromwell St. In 2025, the city had a 9:30 p.m. drone show at Middle Branch Park, 3301 Waterview Avenue, as part of the Cherry Hill Arts & Music Waterfront Festival.
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 memo on the board’s agenda, 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, 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 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.“
