BALTIMORE — Despite an $85 million city deficit, Baltimore Mayor Brandon Scott’s final fiscal 2026 budget found funds for 271 more full-time positions and accounts for some big paydays recently inked by city leaders.

That was part of the criticism leveled against the $4.6 billion plan by District 5 Councilman Isaac “Yitzy” Schleifer, one of two members to vote against the budget’s final passage on Monday. Schleifer said these measures, as well as fine and fee increases for city residents, were not the way to fill in the gap.

“Over the past five years, some agencies’ budgets have exploded, and many leadership positions within those agencies have received historic salary increases,” said Schleifer, who represents Northwest Baltimore. “… Many others have received massive overtime payments, and yet our lowest-wage workers have continued to be left behind.”

Monday’s budget vote came months after the Baltimore Board of Estimates — on which the mayor appoints a majority of members — approved widespread pay increases for seven city leaders, all earning at least $200,000 annually through the end of Scott’s second term in 2028. These leaders are:

•Berke Attila, Department of General Services director, from $199,000 to $211,013.01.

•Faith Leach, chief administrative officer, from $260,100 to $275,940.09.

•Reginald Moore, Department of Recreation & Parks director, from $216,490.59 to $229,674.87.

•Ebony Thompson, Baltimore city solicitor, from $245,000 to $259,920.50.

•James Wallace, Baltimore City Fire Department chief, from $218,000 to $$224,540 annually.

•Richard Worley, Baltimore Police Department chief, from $285,000 to $311,427.20.

•Khalil Zaied, Department of Public Works director, from $245,000 to $252,350.62.

A separate contract this spring saw Calvin Young ascend from a senior advisor to the mayor, earning $140,000 per year, to Scott’s chief of staff at $250,000 per year, a 79% increase after working in the mayor’s office for just seven months. Young, a longtime friend of Scott, was treasurer on the mayor’s 2024 reelection campaign before joining his administrative team last September.

City Comptroller Bill Henry abstained from the board’s April 2 votes on the salary increases, arguing the city should do more to explicitly define how employees can qualify for employment agreements. A spokesman for the Baltimore Department of Human Resources, the agency responsible for offering compensation for city employees, did not respond to specific questions about the justification for Young and other leaders getting pay raises while the city faces a budget deficit.

Baltimore City’s top oversight official, Inspector General Isabel Mercedes Cumming, took issue with the raises while her office had to fight hard for increased staffing. Leaders should come to government to serve the public and not to enrich themselves, Cumming told The Sun last week.

“You’re talking to a person who, when was hired, she took a $25,000 pay cut to come to the city,” Cumming said in a phone interview. “So I don’t know why people suddenly think that we are the prices of New York or even D.C.”

City data shows Cumming earned a $147,900 salary upon joining the city’s Office of the Inspector General (OIG) in 2018 — considerably less than the roughly $170,000 she earned working for the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority in 2017. The inspector general earned $195,997.17 in fiscal 2024, according to the data.

OIG funding

Cumming was critical of Scott’s budget because OIG did not receive any new positions in his initial proposal, despite OIG’s independent advisory board recommending two new, $75,000-a-year inspector jobs for the agency last December. She said Budget Director Laura Larsen’s May 30 testimony that Scott “did not include funding” for the inspector positions was the first time she learned it was not the city’s Bureau of Budget Management and Research, but the mayor himself who “actually denied the request.”

“It pretty much defies logic because my office pays for itself, in that this year we’re going to be identifying over $10 million in waste or savings,” Cumming said of the positions being left out. “You would think an organization who actually helps the city — we’re trying to make government better — would be one that would be allowed to flourish.”

Cumming asked City Council to fund the inspector positions, which they partially did Monday by shuffling $112,000 from the office of State’s Attorney Ivan Bates for one new OIG investigator. While it was not what she initially asked for, Cumming was happy to receive her first staffing increase since 2022 — a period she noted has seen the “Mayoralty” expand from 77 to 118 positions, according to city budget documents.

“Thank God … I think that the Office of the Inspector General has been an effective watchdog for the citizens,” Cumming told The Sun Tuesday.

Asked about the funds sought by Cumming, Scott’s office pointed to a June 6 interview with WBAL during which the mayor said he “did not cut any positions” from OIG’s budget, but merely denied her request for additional positions. The mayor’s office has also said many of the personnel changes in his proposed budget are designed to fill vacancies rather than create new positions.

“What I wish would have happened is the inspector general would have reached out to me, or the city administrator, or even our city solicitor, so we could have had that conversation in a better way and not in public, because she knows I love the work she does,” Scott said.

Cumming said that the independent nature of her oversight role means she “can’t ask for a favor” from other leaders, because she “will be reminded of” such favors upon issuing reports critical of practices within city agencies.

“He said that wished that I had spoken to him or the city administrator prior to taking it public,” Cumming told The Sun. “Well, that’s not the way this office is supposed to be. We shine a light on facts.”

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