If the public had understood that members of the Baltimore County Council were arranging for their pensions to increase dramatically – to double in some cases – they might have cried foul. Wade Kach’s pension for 12 years of service, for example, is poised to jump 103% from $41,400 to $84,000. The actions that the council took to engineer such boosts, though legal, were very quietly carried out. Brew reporting shined a light on the maneuvering and sleight of hand.

Millions are raised through government grants and star-studded galas, yet Baltimore's homeless services have been mired in bureaucracy and increasingly-harsh policy prescriptions, including encampment razing. Meanwhile, curled up in doorways and on friends' couches, thousands in the city still lack a place to call home.

Links to Baltimore Brew's coverage of Baltimore State's Attorney Marilyn Mosby and her husband, City Council President Nick Mosby, including the story we broke on July 16, 2020, about Marilyn Mosby's travel and private businesses.

How good a job is Baltimore doing supplying residents with clean, affordable water and making changes that will finally ends its practice of releasing trash and millions of gallons of human waste into local waterways and Chesapeake Bay?

In August, the Brandon Scott administration shocked the city with a plan to sell the Sisson Street trash transfer facility to a developer and move the operation to a site down the hill beside the Jones Falls waterway. The Brew broke the story with an account of the meeting in which Scott's chief of staff unveiled the idea with all the trappings of a very done deal: A bevy of department heads and staffers, a pair of agreeable City Council members, a quickie PowerPoint, and an aggressive timeline. In the days that followed, we documented the horrified reaction by environmental groups, business owners and residents who said they cherish the lower Jones Falls Valley as a green oasis in the heart of the city. Put trash and hazardous waste in a floodplain? Beside a stream that flows into Baltimore Harbor? Along a path that people have worked hard for years to clean up and nurture into a safe and attractive place to bike, stroll or birdwatch? “This is 19th century thinking, putting your waste next to water,” one resident declared. After a month, Scott backed down, announcing he would convene a task force to ponder the future of the Sisson site - whether to leave it alone, replace it or shut it down. Its recommendations, he said, would be due in December (They have since been extended to late February or March 2026.) Under the original timeline, 2840 and 2842 Sisson Street would have already been sold.

In May, Mayor Brandon Scott, City Council President Zeke Cohen, Councilman Ryan Dorsey and other council members unveiled City Council Bill 25-0066. It removes single-family zoning in Baltimore residential districts with the aim of promoting density and population growth. It would permit up to four dwelling units on a single lot. Other measures in the package have already been approved and enacted, including a bill to eliminate the requirement for new apartment projects to have off-street parking and another to eliminate the requirement that new residential buildings taller than three stories have two internal staircases and a passageway connecting them. Another bill (also now signed into law) increases maximum allowable lot coverage and reduces minimum yard requirements in certain residential districts. Supporters said the bills will provide needed affordable housing and strengthen the city. Critics have argued they will decrease home ownership, encourage speculators and destabilize neighborhoods.

Coverage of Baltimore and the region for The Brew by Dan Rodricks. After writing an award-winning column for the Baltimore Sun for 46 years, Rodricks resigned in January 2025, a year after the Sun's purchase by David Smith, the conservative executive chairman of the Sinclair Broadcast Group.

Weeks before the death of Baltimore sanitation worker Ronald Silver II on a blistering hot August day, Inspector General Isabel Cumming had zeroed in on hazardous conditions at his workplace. We covered her findings at his workplace and others - no functioning air conditioning, broken thermostats, inoperable water fountains and no ice. Crews were dispatched on without cold water or Gatorade in trucks that, in many cases, were without air conditioning. After Silver died - he'd collapsed on a woman's doorstep, begging for water - the mayor promised a full investigation. But as The Brew reported, the D.C. law firm Scott hired was one that specializes in defending big employers and was leading an industry lobbying campaign to weaken OSHA's proposed workplace heat standards. Their report, which reached many of the same conclusions that Cumming did, will now guide the city, with officials promising improved conditions, safety training and procedures around workplace heat and more.

It takes real effort to penetrate the mysteries of Baltimore City government, where millions of dollars in public spending are approved in the blink of an eye and dollars disappear into the maw of departments that haven't been audited for decades. For citizens, there's plenty at stake, and we take you behind the headlines.

Pity the poor Baltimore resident seeking help on the city's website with things like paying a water bill - www.baltimorecity.gov was well-known to be confusing, dysfunctional and outdated. Yet, somehow, three years after city officials contracted with a company with close ties to Mayor Brandon Scott to overhaul it, the project's costs ballooned and the site remains as wonky as ever. What started out as a $1 million contract with Fearless Solutions LLC has now soared to $5.6 million and still isn't fully operational. We started raising questions in 2024, noting the soaring cost and went on to raise iother issues, including the fact that the wife of the company's founder, a deputy mayor, had not disclosed the contract on her ethics forms. (Hours after The Brew made the disclosure, she amended her ethics report.) Consulting with web development experts, The Brew verified that despite all the extra spending, the new site would operate on a soon-to-expire content management system. We also found an irregular selection process that rejected an original low bidder, discovered that website redesigns in other cities were completed at a fraction of the price Baltimore was paying, and raised concerns about whether the site's reliance on an outdated Drupal system makes the city vulnerable to a ransomware attack like the one that crippled city government in 2019.

In August 2020, Baltimore Brew broke the story of trouble at Strong City Baltimore - disclosing that the fiscal sponsorship powerhouse's finances were in deep disarray, with the small grassroots groups whose funds it manages wondering why they were unable to access their money. But even after the serious issues were exposed and Strong City officials said they were making corrections, the groups reported that their finances were still being mishandled. "The mismanagement and lack of transparency impacts tens of thousands of people, including youth, parents, homeless people, survivors of violence and other vulnerable populations," they said in an op-ed. Since then, Strong City ended its fiscal sponsorship initiative. And, as The Brew revealed, Baltimore's Inspector General began a probe, the U.S. Attorney's Office launched an investigation and the FBI was conducting interviews. The organization was also hit by a federal tax lien and a lawsuit by clients. In August 2023, three years after our initial story, former Strong City CEO Reginald Davis was indicted by a federal grand jury on three counts of wire fraud and money laundering.

For years, photographer Amy Davis and Baltimore Brew have been closely following the story of Baltimore's Superblock. That's the name city leaders gave Baltimore's beautiful old Westside shopping district when they seized acres of it 25 years ago for a big mixed-use development project - that never materialized. The merchants and building owners protested being displaced, preservationists decried the treatment of the buildings, many of them gorgeous old architectural gems. But the structures, never rescued, stood vacant and began to deteriorate. A fire last year prompted the mass demolition of many of them, prompting this series recording images of the destruction and reflecting on the bitter lessons of this huge civic fail.

Interim Baltimore County Executive Kathy Klausmeier declines to reappoint Baltimore County Inspector General Kelly Madigan, whose investigations angered many powerful politicians. Did Madigan step on too many politically sensitive toes? Who's behind this push to oust a watchdog? With citizens, good government advocates and all but one county councilmember siding with Madigan, will Klausmeier back down?

Ex-offender Ellsworth Johnson-Bey advocated for city youth, helping them steer clear of the rough side of Baltimore. But the fatal blow for “Brother Bey" came not from the streets, but from a nursing aide who pushed him down in a hallway of the long-term care facility where he was living. Within four months, he died of complications from his broken hip. The incident, captured on video, led his daughter to doggedly pursue accountability from the facility and prompted deep dive reporting by The Brew into the incident at that facility and state nursing home regulation in general. What we found paralleled the allegations of a class action lawsuit against state regulators by nursing home residents and confirmed by a federal judge: “Deficiencies in the quality of care and protection of resident rights at these facilities," he wrote, "have caused, and placed plaintiffs at risk of, pressure ulcers, skin infections, falls, psychosocial harm and other medical complications."

Maryland’s system of letting party operatives fill legislative vacancies has led to some recent embarrassments, such as the House Majority Whip’s daughter getting a seat in Annapolis after breaking a 2-2 tie – by voting for herself. (A party leader tried to bar a Brew reporter from that meeting.) It's also led to some big, systemic problems - nearly a quarter of the legislature was not elected by voters, but rather appointed by small committees. Critics say when state politics is dominated by insiders - offspring, spouses, cronies - it's no surprise Maryland has been beset with corruption scandals.

Speak up at a Planning Commission meeting. Sign a Liquor Board petition about a problem business. Within your rights? Well, the first group was hit by a $25 million lawsuit and the second got a letter from lawyers threatening them with a suit. These are SLAPP (Strategic Lawsuits Against Public Participation) suits, generally filed by powerful parties that want to intimidate and shut down critics. There's a reason they're popping up so regularly around Baltimore and the region - watchdog groups say Maryland's laws to discourage them are among the weakest in the nation.

Baltimore Brew broke the key aspects of a controversy that dogged Baltimore County Executive Johnny Olszewski Jr. ahead of his 2024 election to a Maryland Congressional seat. County pension officials had rejected the claim by a retired firefighter that he was entitled to credits from his days as a Baltimore City firefighter. Then came a change of tune: Philip Tirabassi, older brother of one of Olszewski’s high school buddies, got a $83,675 payment, obscured in public records under the fake name of "Philip Dough." The Brew revealed that the same two brothers had arranged for the purchase of land and the sale of a house for the county executive. We further disclosed that the county was spending hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal fees to thwart a PIA lawsuit about the secret payment. Or as County Administrator Stacy L. Rodgers said in an email published by The Brew, “Just so wrong on so MANY levels."

There was fear among state employees in November after health-harming Legionella bacteria was found in their aging office buildings in Baltimore. Even more concerning was information exclusively reported by The Brew: the “lack of potable water” had been casually discussed for years and acknowledged specifically by an agency official in an email to staff January 25, 2024, eight months earlier. As we reported, employees had tried, without success, to get answers to reasonable questions: “Why the water was not potable. What was in it. Why we suddenly had these filters. How long there had been these problems with the water.”

What should come next for Baltimore's Harborplace, the waterfront park and plaza that was wildly successful after it opened in 1980, but whose two retail pavilions now stand largely vacant? The latest revival plan - which includes removing height restrictions, razing the pavilions and letting a developer replace them with two tall harborside apartment towers - has sparked intense debate. Will the 900 new luxury residential units at the water's edge revive the city's "crown jewel"? Or privatize and deaden a cherished public space? And what to make of the process whereby P. David Bramble was chosen - "secretly," Mayor Brandon Scott declared in public remarks - to be the developer for the project?

At the ideal tavern, there's a jolly barkeep, convivial regulars and everybody knows your name. At the nuisance establishment? They sell cheap little bottles from 6 am to 2 am, attract loitering and drug-dealing, and thwart community leaders' efforts to lift up their neighborhoods. Critics say the Baltimore Liquor Board fails to protect communities from troublesome licensees. Reform efforts are underway. But so are powerful forces dedicated to keeping the status quo.