Accusations and recriminations are flying among the three Baltimore Council councilmen running for the county executive’s job, while a fourth candidate accuses the council as a whole of letting “a moral outrage” happen on its watch.

Julian E. Jones Jr., Pat Young and Izzy Patoka – now busy denouncing others or voicing regrets – voted for one or both of the bills whose ultra-generous pension and salary provisions have become toxic among county voters.

And Nick Stewart, an attorney running for county executive, is letting the incumbents know this. “The only thing forcing them to reconsider their position was being caught,” he told The Brew today.

“If the council truly wants to restore trust, repeal is the bare minimum,” Stewart said. “Accountability means changing the culture that allowed this to happen.”

Were such disparagement not enough, three former council members sent out a press release calling the current body’s actions “a betrayal of the public trust” and “a sharp departure from the ethical standards they observed while serving on the council.”

Vicki Almond, Sam Moxley and Tom Quirk said the council restructuring its own retirement and salary plans was “an inherent and unavoidable conflict of interest” that resulted in “a pension structure that is unjustifiably inequitable when compared to other county retirees.”

“It violates the basic principle that elected officials should not use their office to enrich themselves,” added the ex-members, who were expressly excluded in the legislation from enjoying the pension bonanza.

Unintended Consequences?

At the center of the controversy are two bills, approved in 2024, that together could double the salaries and pensions of sitting council members.

The Brew has been covering Bill 40-24 since it was introduced in May 2024 by Councilman Wade Kach.

The bill recalculated the pension of members who retired after January 1, 2025 so that every time a current council member got a pay raise, so did the retirees. Now age 78, Kach says he will retire this December at the end of his fourth term.

Under a second piece of legislation, Bill 47-24, which designates part-time council jobs as “full-time for the purpose of determining compensation,” Kach’s pension would increase from $41,000 to $84,000 a year. (Kach currently receives a pension from the Baltimore County School System and from the state for his 40 years as a Maryland delegate.)

Backbiting

Jones and Patoka, who would also get similar pension jumps in the future, are now critical of one or both bills. Patoka says he will introduce legislation next month to repeal Kach’s pension recalculation bill that he, Jones and Young supported in 2024 (see vote chart below).

Meanwhile, Jones said repealing Kach’s bill is not enough because does not address the “root cause” of the problem, which Jones describes as “a backroom charter amendment,”engineered by Patoka, that reclassified the county council as a full-time body for compensation purposes.

“If Councilman Patoka is serious about fixing what he broke, he should support a ballot question to undo the full-time designation and slash council salaries and pensions back to reality,” Jones said today.

The charter amendment originated from a Patoka-crafted bill, 47-24, which was advertised to the public as expanding the council’s size from seven to nine members. Hailed as a way to diversify the all-male, nearly all-white council, the measure was overwhelmingly passed by county voters in November 2024.

Jones said he opposed Bill 47-24. But legislative records show he was absent the night the council approved the bill (see chart).

How They Voted

“Tricking voters”

Councilman Young was the only council member to oppose Bill 47-24. Today he denounced his colleagues in a statement to The Brew:

“The same council members who engineered the council expansion debacle and tricked voters into increasing their salaries are now trying to walk it back. I’ll review the repeal language [to be introduced by Patoka and Ertel], but this is damage control, not reform.”

He added, “If the council was serious about accountability, this would have been handled transparently from the start, not rushed through and fixed only after public backlash.”

Three council members have retreated from the public storm.

Kach, arguably the instigator of the whole dispute, has not made any known statement and did not respond to a request for comment from The Brew.

Crandell, who, like Kach, plans to retire this December, would receive a $41,000 to $84,000 pension hike under the current plan. He also did not respond to a request for comment.

The third member, David S. Marks, also has not commented. His pension, for 16 years of service, would increase from $48,300 to $98,000.

Long-Planned Hikes

Significantly, efforts to make the compensation for county lawmakers “on par with full-time professionals” have been in the works for several years.

Two months before the Kach bill was approved in 2024, the Baltimore County Council Structure Workgroup issued a report calling for “full-time equivalent pay” for elected officials as well as substantial increases in the council’s staff budget.

Thus, the salaries proposed last month by the Personnel and Salary Advisory Board – raising council compensation from $69,000 to $140,000 a year – would not be a shock to current members.

Nevertheless, Patoka said last night on Facebook that the salaries proposed by the advisory board “prompted me to reconsider my initial vote” and that he now will introduce legislation to repeal Bill 40-24.

For the pay hikes to go into effect, they will have to be approved by the council sometime before November 2026.