Backed by slideshow graphics and represented by one of Baltimore’s top real estate lobbyists, Johns Hopkins University officials were at City Hall yesterday seeking permission to make stormwater improvements to Wyman Park Drive that will entail cutting down trees and shutting down the roadway for years of construction.

Opposing them were neighborhood residents and Councilwoman Odette Ramos, who has been a biting critic of the project that is associated with the request: Hopkins’ new Data Science and AI Institute (DSAI).

“I think this is a terrible project. I think it is going to have a lot of impact on our residents that is unnecessary, especially from an entity that does not pay property taxes,” she began, addressing the Board of Estimates.

“In the absence of being able to have any leverage to be able to do anything about the project . . . the residents and I have been working on trying to make this project less bad,” Ramos said, kicking off a barrage of testimony by community members describing the problems the university has generated already at the site, at the intersection with Remington Avenue.

They recounted what they said were unkept promises to protect rather than cut the trees, the rivers of reddish-brown runoff from university projects during heavy rains, and workers plugging up the neighborhood parking spots and leaving trash and the occasional bottle of urine behind.

“Wyman Park Drive in general is going to be closed, not just for a little bit of time, but for a lot of time, which is super inconvenient,” Ramos said. “They are basically taking over all of Wyman Park Drive. That is unacceptable.”

“They are basically taking over all of Wyman Park Drive. That is unacceptable”  – Councilwoman Odette Ramos.

But in the end, the board approved an MOU and developer’s agreement that will give the university broad rights to close off and build in the public right-of-way during the four-year project and obligate them to maintain the improvements for 25 years after the project is completed.

(Voting Yes: Council President Zeke Cohen, Comptroller Bill Henry, Public Works Director Matthew Garbark and City Solicitor Ebony Thompson. Abstaining, as he routinely does with JHU-related items: Mayor Brandon Scott.)

Cohen asked the Hopkins representative to repeat the university’s promises about tree replacement, parking enforcement and other issues, vowing to “hold Hopkins to be their best self.”

But he said he voted to approve the requests because of his belief that “artificial intelligence is going to play a major role in the future, not just of this city, this state, this country but the entire world.”

“I think that it is critically important that the city of Baltimore be the intellectual capital of that conversation,” he declared.

Replacement Trees, Food Trucks

The critics’ focus yesterday, however, had not been on stopping the AI mission, so much as arguing that the university had failed to properly engage with the community as they pursued it.

“The lack of transparency here on this particular issue is astounding,” Ramos said, pointing out that that the plans and diagrams displayed at the meeting had never been shared with the residents. “I’m asking you to defer this item so that the groups in the community can hear from Hopkins directly and provide feedback.”

The lawyer representing JHU, meanwhile, questioned why the university’s requests were even put on the board’s “non-routine agenda” and opened  up for public comment.

“In my 20 years of practice, I’ve never seen a developer’s agreement that wasn’t on the routine agenda,” observed Rosenberg Martin Greenberg Managing Partner Caroline Hecker.

Comptroller Henry informed her that the rules require that “if there are statements of opposition or protest for an item, it must go on the non-routine agenda.”

In this case, the board had received 65 statements of opposition to the items, officials said. There is also a petition with more than 2,000 signatures that calls on Hopkins to find another site that doesn’t threaten Stony Run.

The board received 65 statements of opposition to Hopkins’ requests. A petition protesting the DSAI project has more than 2,000 signatures.

“We’re here to ask the board to make a finding that this is an appropriate use of city property, notably the city right of way within portions of Remington Avenue and the Wyman Park Drive right of way for use in furtherance of the data science project,” Hecker said, calling the items before them “technical in nature.”

But the more than two hour hearing was an opportunity for critics to argue that Hopkins has not addressed broad concerns about the impact of the project – a nearly 10-acre site with nearly 500,000 square feet of office, laboratory and classroom space contained in two four-story buildings, one of them positioned on the edge of a steep slope down to Stony Run Park.

Lee Coyle, senior director for planning and architecture, said Hopkins was taking pains to mitigate those impacts. He promised that the replacement trees on Wyman Park Drive and Remington Avenue would be “fairly substantial,” describing them as “six inches caliber at breast height, 25 to 30 feet tall and on average 10-15 years old before they’re planted.”

Why couldn’t the trees on Remington be saved and the construction entrance restricted to Wyman Park Drive?

“Unfortunately, that is probably the most intensive portion of this project site,” Coyle said, noting additional plans there include “a new landscape deck between the Agora building and the DSAI south building” and a tunnel between the north and south buildings, allowing truck access “from Carnegie Way, Hopkins’ own private road.”

There will be financial penalties for DSAI construction workers who park in the neighborhood and that parking, he said, and a shuttle, as well as food trucks, will be made available at the former Eastern High School building on 33rd Street.

Coyle promised the university would share the cost with the city for additional parking enforcement to police the restriction.

Record on Runoff

But a major focus of the hearing was on the stormwater upgrades, which involve ripping out a controversial stormwater upgrade the city allowed Hopkins to make 10 years ago.

In 2015, saying it needed to make state-mandated stormwater improvements, Hopkins persuaded community members to agree to give up parking spaces along the portion of the road between San Martin Drive and Remington Avenue.

In return, Hopkins planted elm tree saplings in “bioswales,” those shallow, landscaped depressions designed to capture stormwater runoff. The only problem: they haven’t worked properly.

• Neighbors call on Johns Hopkins to control construction site’s river of runoff (7/18/25)

Amid heavy rains this past summer, residents’ photos and videos documented rivers of muddy-red runoff cascading down Wyman Park Drive from the SNF Agora construction site toward the Stony Run. Residents said they have complained to Hopkins about the problem for years.

“Our community supported that project in good faith, after being assured it would protect Stony Run and the surrounding environment.,” said longtime Wyman Park South resident Jessica Hudson.

“In exchange, Johns Hopkins removed 20 old-growth trees and 40 public parking spaces and replaced them with 18 newly planted trees we now know are most likely inappropriate for what the bioswales needed to do,” Hudson said.

“Ten years later, JHU has admitted that this storm water system never worked and must be removed to make way for another development,” she continued. “JHU has had 10 years to fix these bioswales, and they did not.”

Nicole Ucheya, a Hopkins graduate who lives in Remington, echoed her remarks.

“The history shows the university cannot be trusted on this issue,” Ucheya said. “They had their shot, and unfortunately it failed.”

Coyle recounted what Hopkins did in response, explaining that the intention with the bioswales was “to have grasslands, wildflowers, whatnot. The right plants that would help, basically, with the filtration,”

“So those were planted, those were put in place, they did not survive. They don’t work very well in that environment,” he continued. “So invasive species came in. We pulled them out, replanted.”

Now, he said, the new plan is for an entirely underground system using a commercial product that uses lightly compacted soil called Silva Cell.

He said the university had high hopes for the newest green infrastructure: “The technology of water purification has come a long way.”

Asked how much the stormwater upgrades will cost Hopkins, he estimated $5 million to $10 million. (Asked for Hopkins’ estimate of the cost for the whole DSAI project, he demurred, saying, “We have not disclosed that number publicly.”)

Data Center Concerns

Another issue tackled during the more than two-hour session was whether DSAI will be “a data center.”

Hecker and Coyle both emphatically stated, it will not.

Nationally and locally, concerns have been raised about the energy and environmental risks of these massive facilities, which house the computer systems that enable internet activity and, increasingly, artificial intelligence .

At the meeting, Comptroller Henry pressed Hopkins to define the term and read aloud some definitions he found on the internet.

“The watt-per-square-foot used by this building, quite frankly, will be no different than any other academic or research building on our campus,” Coyle responded, calling DSAI “a people building.”

At this point, some people in the room called out, including Ramos who said “What about the substation?”

Residents have pointed to the new electrical substation planned on Hopkins property that the university has said will include duct work on city streets.

But Cohen shut the questioners down, saying “One thing we’re not going to do is shout out from the audience.”

Henry suggested the university could reassure the community by providing a more technical explanation that conveyed DSAI’s scale and scope (“like ‘watts of power’ or ‘stores more than x terabytes’”).

But the Hopkins representatives kept it simple, and Henry never pressed them.

“The fact that we have a server room in my office doesn’t make it a data center, and it doesn’t make it something that could be turned into a data center,” Hecker said. “The principal use of this building is as an academic building.”