Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake won a huge political victory tonight as the City Council voted against the very $6.1 million in savings it passed on Monday, paving the way for her original budget to go into effect without any changes.

The net effect of the Council’s action will be the elimination of three fire companies starting July 2 and a reduction in the number of municipal rec centers in some of the city’s poorest neighborhoods later in the year.

Essentially, the Council members who wanted to amend the mayor’s budget – led by City Council President Bernard C. “Jack” Young – failed to get the eight votes needed to pass their proposal.

Two Councilmen who had supported a number of amendments on Monday – James B. Kraft and Nick Mosby – voted against the amended budget tonight.

Another supporter of some of Monday’s amendments, William “Pete” Welch, also voted against the package tonight.

Young’s ally, Carl Stokes, did not attend the meeting, which left only four Council members supporting the amended budget with the council president. They were Warren Branch, Mary Pat Clarke, Bill Henry and Helen Holton.

The six Council members who joined Kraft, Welch and Mosby in defeating the amended budget were Brandon Scott, Robert Curran, Rochelle “Rikki” Spector, Sharon Green Middleton, Edward Reisinger and William H. Cole IV.

Defeat for Young

Today’s votes by the Council’s “committee as a whole” – the Council is expected to ratify the mayor’s budget formally on Monday – were a bitter defeat for City Council Young and his “Better Baltimore” budget supported by the firefighters unions and a number of community groups.

Because the City Council cannot increase the city’s budget, Young had crafted a plan to cut items from the mayor’s budget in hopes that she would allocate those savings into increased expenditures for rec centers and keeping three fire companies (Trucks 10 and 15 and Squad 11) from closing.

However, through her budget officer, Andrew Kleine, the mayor signaled that she would not shift her budget priorities and, instead, would allot any money removed by the Council to a small decrease in the city’s property tax rate.

Mayor: Budget Designed to Grow Baltimore

Tonight, the mayor’s office thanked the City Council for their support in the showdown votes and emphasized that her budget “was built around our vision for growing Baltimore’s population by 10,000 families in the next 10 years.”

According to the mayor’s statement, her budget “closes a $48 million deficit while fully funding the city’s obligations to public schools, continuing an aggressive plan to hire hundreds of new police officers to keep crime going down and providing funding for street repair and blight elimination” – while cutting property taxes by 2 cents (0.08%) next year.

She said the budget would increase funding for the YouthWorks summer jobs program, keep neighborhood library branches open and improve after school programs.

In a battling media release tonight, Young said, “I am deeply disappointed that a majority of my colleagues on the City Council decided to vote against the priorities that the citizens of Baltimore repeatedly asked us to support.

He said the cuts proposed in the defeated amendments “would have allowed the city to keep all recreation centers open, increase the number of youth summer jobs, increase after school slots for our children . . .  and keep all city fire companies open.”

A number of activist groups, including the Safe and Sound Campaign, held news conferences and staged events this afternoon in support of Young’s amended budget.