Mayor Scott wants the cost of relocating the Sisson Street ‘Dump’ to be ‘net neutral’ to city taxpayers, officials say

How much will it cost the taxpayers of Baltimore to move the Sisson Street ‘Dump’ to a leased site at 2801 Falls Road, a storage yard owned by the Potts and Callahan construction company?

City officials haven’t released specific figures, but they do have a strategy for how the city can pay for it.

On Aug. 11, officials identified the Potts and Callahan property as the site where they want to move the Sisson Street Sanitation Yard and Citizen Drop-Off Center at 2840-2842 Sisson Street in Remington, also known as The Dump. They said the city intends to lease the property from Potts and Callahan, but they didn’t discuss financial details.

During a Greater Remington Improvement Association (GRIA) meeting leading up to the Aug. 11 presentation, Calvin Young, Mayor Brandon Scott’s Chief of Staff, explained that city officials can’t provide information about lease terms and other financial details because “that’s still in negotiations.”

Young also didn’t disclose a sale price for the Sisson Street property or give an estimate for the cost of converting the storage yard to serve as a drop-off center for bulk trash. But he did shed light on the Scott administration’s thoughts about the move and what it might cost.

“What I can tell you” about the lease with Potts and Callahan, he said at the GRIA’s land use committee meeting on Aug. 6, “is that their starting position will be a significant cost savings. Well, let me rephrase that because obviously we own the land [on Sisson Street] so technically we don’t pay anything. But what I’m saying is that, it’s very cheap from my perspective. We were actually kind of shocked that they were willing to allow this for such a reasonable price. So I think when the information ultimately comes out that you will likely agree. But until then, we’re not going to release that.”

The mayor’s objective, Scott said, is to complete the move at no additional cost to city taxpayers.

“The city’s goal is to be net zero,” meaning “all of these things happen and there’s no additional cost on the taxpayer,” he said. “We hope that we can sell the land for what it will cost to do all the things that we’re talking about. Now, granted, that may not happen, because the land that we’re looking to sell may have environmental issues or whatever. All of that stuff has got to get figured out. But that’s our desire.”

Grocery store proposed

On Aug. 18, a City Council bill was introduced that would authorize the city to sell the drop-off center property on Sisson Street to a developer. As introduced, the sales ordinance doesn’t identify a buyer or state a sale price. The likely buyer is Seawall Development, which submitted a proposal in 2024 to purchase the land and construct a commercial center anchored by a grocery store.

The budget for moving the drop-off center to make way for a developer will depend on a series of factors, Young said at the Aug. 6 GRIA meeting.

“Here’s how I’m thinking about it,” he said. There are “multiple pieces that have to happen. Part of the reason why the sales ordinance is going out now is that we can then see what the proposals come back as far as the sale. That will tell us how much capital the city could receive with the sale. Simultaneously, [the city’s Department of Public Works] is doing the design of what the new space [on Falls Road] would look like. That will tell us how much that is going to cost.”

In addition, Young said, the city wants to fund two Department of Transportation (DOT) related projects involving the same stretch of Falls Road – an initiative called the Jones Falls Gateway that enhances Falls Road just west of Maryland Avenue and improvements to the existing Jones Falls hiker-biker trail on the south side of Falls Road. The estimated construction cost for those projects is about $1.5 million.

“We’re talking a million and a half on the DOT piece, and we’re talking about whatever the actual site [costs] will be, and then we need to measure that against the sale price that we will get to see is it net neutral, and then if it’s not, the negotiation for that or other grants that may come in,” Young said when asked about a timeline. “I’m giving you all of this detail to tell you that I don’t have a timeline, but these are all the different pieces that I’m looking at as parts of the puzzle that gets us to that answer.”

‘What is the lease term?’

Former GRIA president Corey Jennings asked how long the city intends to lease the Potts and Callahan property, since that will help determine whether the plan is “net neutral” to taxpayers.

“If we aren’t going to own this…new piece of land, what is the lease term that we are considering is net neutral?” Jennings asked. “Is it a 10-year lease, a 20-year lease, a 30-year lease? What is that baseline that you are estimating it at? Because if we are doing this, then the assumption is that this property will probably continue to be open after the initial lease term.

“The secondary piece of it would be that those continuing costs would be taxpayer-funded at some point, right?” Jennings continued. “There will be maintenance of this site as well. So in those ways, it’s no different from any other site. But the fact that it’s going from a piece of land that is owned to a piece of land that is leased, that is the big change here.”

In response to Jennings’ question about the initial lease term with Potts and Callahan, Young said it could be 10 to 15 years. He noted that the sale of the Sisson Street property will generate funds that can be used to create a new sanitation yard on Falls Road. He also noted that selling the land means it will go on the city tax rolls and will generate revenue for the city that will help pay the cost of leasing land from Potts and Callahan.

“The contract value, that’s the point you’re getting at,” he said to Jennings. “The contract value of a three-year contract is obviously going to be smaller than a 20-year [contract], right?”

To determine the cost to taxpayers, Young said, it’s important to look at tax revenues coming to the city.

“We would lose the tax revenue of the location that we end up leasing, I think,” he said. “But the tax revenue on that is very insignificant now because it’s an undeveloped plot of land.”

By contrast, “the tax revenue on the land we sell will ultimately go up significantly higher after it’s developed,” he said. “So to your point, when we talk about net neutral, if we’re looking at the out years, we really should be also adding into it the net gain on tax revenues that the city would get from a development, and that ultimately depends on what the development is.”

Exactly how much revenue the city stands to receive in taxes from the Sisson Street parcel, once it’s privatized, will depend in part on what’s built there. Seawall co-founder Thibault Manekin told the land use committee in May that his company may be limited in what it can build because the land is part of a former quarry that was filled in, and construction of any tall buildings could be prohibitively expensive.

‘Hard to hear’

Jennings said the city also would need to factor into its equation any tax credits or abatements given to the Sisson Street developer.

“I just want to ensure that we’re considering not, as taxpayers, committing ourselves to a more expensive thing in the long run if the cheaper thing is just to stay where we are,” he said. “I’m pro-development generally, but I’m also aware that we’re in incredibly challenging budget times.”

“You’re thinking about it right,” Young replied. “For me, the driving force around this general thesis, without all the numbers right now, is that this will be a net positive from an income perspective for the city into the general fund. But if it’s not, if we do all the numbers and it’s not, it changes a lot of things. It changes the consideration. Now there are other considerations, like worker safety, environmental, all of that that we also have to add in. But from a technically, specifically financial perspective, I think you’re absolutely right that we have to be considering it like that.”

Jennings said he’s troubled by the difference in the timing for the City Council sales ordinance for a developer and funding for Falls Road improvements that benefit community residents.

“It does feel from a community perspective like we’re giving up city-owned land, potentially to a private developer…but then the community [projects] that could be potentially funded out of that sale or out of our tax dollars or other things, they have to wait,” he said. “We have to push the thing for the developer forward but we have to wait on the community [projects]…It’s really hard to hear…I want to make sure that we’re holding the members of the community who live here…first and not private developers first.”

Young said the Scott administration intends to seek $1 million for the Jones Falls Gateway project and another $500,000 for the trailway work in the city’s budget for Fiscal 2027, which begins July 1, 2026.

“I can’t make a budget commitment for Fiscal Year ‘27 today, but what I can tell you is that this is something that is top priority,” he said. “I’m going to make sure that it doesn’t fall into the cracks.”

He also said the mayor has committed that the Sisson Street drop-off facility won’t close until a replacement is open.

“The mayor’s directive has been that there needs to be a facility that is open the entire time,” he said.

Jones Falls Valley businesses oppose trash center plan

On Aug. 20, eight businesses located along the Jones Falls Valley expressed their opposition to the city’s drop off center relocation plan in a letter to Mayor Scott and other city officials. The letter was written by David F. Tufaro of Terra Nova Ventures LLC. The signers were: Baltimore Bicycle Works; Birroteca Restaurant; Cosima Restaurant; Meadow Mill; Mill Center; Mill No. 1; True Chesapeake Oyster Co. and Whitehall Mill.

Here is the text of the letter:

Dear Mayor Scott,

Seawall Development Company has been planning to acquire and redevelop the City’s recycling center located on Sisson Street between 28^th and 29^th Streets to eliminate what it describes as a negative eyesore. The City’s response is move the “eyesore” to Falls Road at the Potts and Callahan site just north of the Streetcar Museum. As Sandy Sparks, president of Friends of the Jones Falls, said: “This plan is just crazy. We’re talking about destroying a beautiful place that has huge potential.”  A strategic plan is in the works for the restoration and enhancement of the Jones Falls Valley from Maryland Avenue through the City and ultimately out to Baltimore County to the source of the Jones Falls. The purpose is to make this treasure of a valley more desirable for residents, walkers, hikers, bike riders and patrons of the restaurants and businesses located along Falls Road and Clipper Mill Road.

To add insult to injury, the Department of Transportation announced that the new dump location requires closing Falls Road between Mill No. 1 and the 29^th Street Bridge.

The relocation plans should never have proceeded this far. There has been no consultation with any of the businesses or owners of property along this Jones Falls corridor who have invested tens of millions of dollars to restore historic mill buildings and bring new energy to this corridor. There has been no community engagement whatsoever. Our elected officials and City agencies have avoided communicating with us.

The undersigned business and property owners strenuously oppose the plans to relocate the City’s trash site from Sisson Street to Falls Road. If a suitable alternative site for the current City recycling center on Sisson Street cannot be found, then it should remain where it is.

Updates from GRIA’s Aug. 20 meeting  

During GRIA’s monthly meeting on Aug. 20, members had a lengthy discussion about the drop-off center relocation project and the sale ordinance. GRIA’s board has not taken a position on the proposed move or the sale legislation, but land use committee chair Jed Weeks said his committee is prepared to consider the matter on an advisory basis, if asked. He said his committee would then forward its recommendations to the GRIA board, which would take any official action.

Weeks said GRIA has already taken the position that it would like any development in place of the drop-off center to be pedestrian friendly and relatively dense, not car-oriented.

“Seawall had initially talked very strongly about a dense, mixed-use, walkable, non-auto-oriented use at the Sisson Street site, and that is what the community plan calls for,” he said. But his committee is “definitely not getting those vibes now. The vibes now are like a big surface parking lot with a one-story shopping center, very similar to a suburban-oriented development. That’s contrary to the intent of our community’s original support for the idea of closing that site.”

Weeks said his committee would like to see “a real plan” from the developer to show what it wants to build. “What it sounds like they might be proposing right now,” he said, “I think the community would oppose.”

Staying in the city

Baltimore City Council member Odette Ramos, who attended the meeting, said Potts and Callahan decided on its own to move. She noted that the company is staying in Baltimore but moving to the far east side of the city.

In addition to its main office at 500 W. 29^th Street, the company has a recycling center at 5001 Pulaski Highway. “It’s not like the city approached Potts and Callahan and said, hey, can you do this?” Ramos said.

Set up for failure

One resident questioned the Baltimore Development Corporation’s (BDC) role in seeking a developer for the Sisson Street property, given its reputation for not being transparent. He noted that the BDC’s Request for Proposals (RFP) process forbids any prospective developer from responding in public to questions about its plan until it’s selected, and said that essentially shuts the community out of the process.

“The one thing that I think is very interesting, and I think we should definitely look more into, is the process, that the developer, if they sign an agreement with the Baltimore Development Corporation to not speak on exactly what they are going to do…it basically becomes an NDA where they can’t really talk about it until it gets full approval on all levels, and so I think it kind of sets us up for failure in terms of trying to understand what Seawall or whoever…is going to do,” he said to Weeks. “Because if they do sign an agreement with the development corporation to say, hey, we’re going to buy the land and they can’t talk about it until they actually buy the land and it becomes a big surface parking lot nightmare and Giant grocery store, then that is really antithetical to what you’re saying the idea was that we’re looking for in this type of environment.”

If the BDC could provide the community with a list of developers who have expressed interest in the site and have them present their potential plans, he said, “then we could provide that conditional support — to be able to say we are fans of X, Y, Z plan because they are not for the car, they’re for the community.”

‘Loves to be confidential’

 “The way it came about is Seawall essentially submitted an unsolicited bid for the property” and then the BDC created an RFP process to give others a chance to submit competing proposals, Weeks said. ”BDC loves to be confidential about all that stuff.”

City Comptroller Bill Henry oversees the city’s Real Estate Office, which was one of three city divisions that sought proposals for land where the city could move the drop-off center. He said the Scott administration decided that BDC should take the lead when the city sought proposals for the Sisson Street property in January of 2024 because it had led a previous call for developers for that site when Catherine Pugh was mayor.

“That was just a division-of-labor thing,” Henry said. “BDC had already been working on the larger issue of working with Seawall to try to deal with that property. Real Estate did not want to get into the middle of that existing relationship, so we said we’ll focus on the lease” for the relocation site.

Dumpster days and pop-up events

Several residents expressed support for alternative methods of collecting bulk trash, including “community dumpster days” and pop-up events with trash trucks traveling to city-owned lots in different neighborhoods, instead of relying on a fixed location. They said having pop-up sites in different parts of the city would give residents in more areas access to some form of bulk trash disposal over the course of a year.

One resident said she doesn’t drive and “one of the reasons I moved to this neighborhood was for the dump. It’s pretty critical for me…Having one within walking distance is pretty life-changing for me.”

If the city moved the Sisson Street facility, she said, “it would mean having to move house and home to relocate to a place that had a closer dump station.” If no developer submitted a proposal consistent with the community’s vision for high-density development of the site, she said, she would urge that the city not relocate the drop-off center.

“No one wants a dump in their neighborhood, sure,” she said. But “I think there are a lot of people, especially young people without cars, who really, really benefit” from what’s available.

Conditions on the sale

There was some talk about the possibility of amending the sales ordinance, Bill No. 25-0094, to require that more information be disclosed about the buyer and plans for the site, or that certain terms be met, before any sale goes through. Ramos said she had a case two years ago where she asked for more information about a proposed city properly sale in Waverly before she would support a sale ordinance.

“I didn’t approve going to the sale ordinance until I had everything all locked up, in terms of making sure that the community was OK with the development and the developer understood what the community wanted,” she said. “We made all the concessions. It was a big process to get to where everybody said, Great, we’re good, and we’re going to go ahead with the ordinance.”

As far as reservations about the BDC are concerned, Ramos said, “this is one thing that I think there is some leverage here, in terms of the transparency side…One of the things you might consider, as the neighborhood, is to say that there needs to be conditions put on the sale. You could write that into the ordinance. Or you could say we’re not going to do this, we don’t want to pass it, until such and such happens.”

“The BDC aspect, I’m not happy with,” she added. “But I will say that because it’s a public ordinance that’s happening, there’s a lot of opportunity for participation.”

Atkinson quarry

On social media, some residents have expressed surprise that Manekin said he didn’t know the Sisson Street property was part of quarry that was filled in. One commenter noted that Manekin’s company in 2016 sponsored a National Register of Historic Places nomination about the land on the east side of Sisson Street, where Seawall plans to build a large mixed-use development.

The National Register nomination stated that the area targeted for Seawall’s Sisson East development used to be known as the Atkinson quarry, “which later filled with water, until the land began to be developed with commercial buildings after the mid-1930s.”

Manekin said in May that he didn’t find out about the quarry until Seawall had begun “design and geo-tech work” on its Sisson East project. He said he knows there was also a quarry on the west side of Sisson Street, where the drop-off center is, and that makes it difficult to plan a high-density development there.

“How did they not know that there was a quarry there when they bought the Sisson east properties?” the commenter asked. “I thought that was a pretty well known fact.”