Baltimore Development Corporation President and CEO Otis Rolley says he will participate in the next Sisson Street Task Force meeting and apologized for the agency’s no-show this week.
City Council member Odette Ramos, who chairs the task force for Mayor Brandon Scott, had told members that she invited a BDC representative to meet with them last Monday to discuss the proposed sale of a city-owned parcel on Sisson Street that’s currently used as a bulk trash drop-off facility, and the agency initially accepted.
But when no one from the agency showed up after she put BDC on her schedule, Ramos was unable to hide her frustration.
“The fact that they pulled out of being at our meeting today is unfortunate but also not surprising,” she said during the meeting. “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.”
Scott formed the 13-member task force to help him decide whether to relocate the Sisson Street Sanitation Yard and Citizen Drop-Off Center at 2840 Sisson Street to make way for private development, and to help determine the best way to handle bulk trash and hazardous waste disposal if the facility is relocated.
Since the panel began meeting in October the quasi-public BDC, Baltimore’s economic development agency, is the only public or quasi-public organization that has failed to send a representative to a task force meeting when invited.
Ramos noted that city officials are considering closing or moving the drop-off center because the BDC asked the City Council to pass legislation authorizing the sale of the Sisson Street property.
“They had promised that they would be here and then said that they cannot be here,” Ramos said. “That is a problem. That’s a huge problem.”
Not the ‘lead’
Rolley, who replaced Colin Tarbert as the BDC’s President and CEO last June, initially issued a written statement through a press representative.
“We were not ‘scheduled to make a presentation,’” Rolley said in his statement. “We were asked to attend. If we had attended all we would have been able to add/share is the sales ordinance needs to be approved by Mayor and City Council before a developer can be selected. We are not the ‘lead’ on this project/proposal.”
On a program that was widely distributed before the virtual meeting, Ramos had scheduled the BDC to address the panel immediately following a presentation from the Baltimore City Planning Department and right before a presentation from the Greater Remington Improvement Association. The three organizations were listed to appear during a portion of the meeting labeled “Neighborhood Plan,” right after the Roll Call of Task Force Members. It was the meat of the 90-minute session, and much of the time involved presenters answering questions from task force members.
Reached at a BDC meeting on Thursday morning, Rolley said he wasn’t aware that Ramos had blocked out time on the agenda of the task force’s Dec. 8 meeting specifically to hear from a BDC representative. He said there was a “disconnect” and he intends to come to the next meeting, which is scheduled for Dec. 15 at 7 p.m. He said he would contact Ramos to apologize for the miscommunication and to find out what she’s expecting from the BDC on Monday.
Rolley said he was surprised to see an article saying that BDC was supposed to make a presentation to the task force last Monday.
“There was some disconnect,” he said. “My understanding was that they just wanted us there. It’s like, this is not our project. We were doing the sale. But then you read the article and they were like, we were expecting BDC to do a presentation. No one had told me that. I was a little taken aback. At least if someone had been in the room, then none of this would have happened, so I will be there on Monday.”
When BDC was invited to come to the Dec. 8 meeting, Rolley said, a task force representative spoke with a different staffer at the agency, who “told them everything that we had done and they thought that that was enough.” He later learned, he said, that “they wanted someone from BDC there.”
BDC is not the lead for the Sisson Street project, and the agency wasn’t present at Druid Hill Park when the project was first outlined in August, Rolley said.
“We’re in charge of the sale ordinance, but we haven’t been involved in planning out this project,” he said. “We’re not the project manager.”
While Rolley has led the BDC only since June, the agency under Tarbert has played a key role in exploring plans for the possible relocation of the Sisson Street drop off center and redevelopment of the property, going back to the administration of former Mayor Catherine Pugh.
In January of 2024, the BDC issued a Request for Proposals (RFP) from groups interested in buying and developing the 5.6-acre property if the city relocated the drop-off facility, and it set Feb. 9, 2024 as the deadline for responses. Representatives haven’t disclosed how many bids were submitted, what has been proposed for construction or whether a developer has been selected.
The RFP issued by the BDC in 2024 contained a clause requiring that the “selected” bidder agree that “it will not solicit press coverage or answer unsolicited questions about its development program from print, radio, television, social media or electronic media until it has secured an Exclusive Negotiating Privilege with the BDC.” That restriction has limited the amount of information that has come out about the BDC-led proposal process, information that would be useful to the task force members in their deliberations.
In August of 2025, with the involvement of the BDC, City Council legislation was introduced that would authorize Scott and the City Council to sell the Sisson Street property to a developer. That legislation has been put on hold until the task force makes its recommendations to the mayor.
Information from the BDC about the bidding process is critical to the task force’s work, members argue, 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.
Questions from the task force
Since the task force began meeting, members have raised numerous questions about the Request for Proposals issued by the BDC and the status of developer selection. They say they’d like to know how many bids the BDC received, what was proposed for the Sisson Street parcel by the bidder or bidders, and how well the various proposals met the objectives of the 2017 master plan developed to guide redevelopment in Remington.
They also want to know if a developer has been selected and if so, what the chosen developer proposes to build on the Sisson Street property; what its design and construction time frame is; how much it would pay the city to acquire the land; how much the proposed development would generate in property taxes; how many jobs would be created; how many residences it would provide and other project-related details.
Asked who is the lead of the Sisson Street project if not the BDC, Rolley said the Mayor’s Office most recently has been in charge of planning and overseeing the work of the task force. While the BDC issued the RFP last year, he said, “this isn’t one of our babies, so to speak.”
Ramos said on Thursday afternoon that she has spoken with Rolley and that he apologized to her. She said she welcomes his participation in the Dec. 15 meeting.
