Securing Baltimore's Future: A 10-Year Financial Plan for Baltimore (Fiscal Years 2026 - 2035)

Mayor Brandon M. Scott Announces City of Baltimore's 10-Year Financial Plan

BALTIMORE, MD (Wednesday, December 3, 2025) - Today, Mayor Brandon M. Scott released
Securing Baltimore's Future: A 10-Year Financial Plan for Baltimore. This plan is the second of its kind for the City and marks a pivotal moment as the city builds on current progress to put the city in the best position to meet its fiscal goals and obligations over the next 10 years.

"In the next decade, we have an opportunity to leave behind the disinvestment and budget deficits of our past, and instead build a Baltimore where all of our residents have access to a great education, a good job, a safe home, and an affordable, opportunity-filled life," said Mayor Brandon M. Scott. "Securing Baltimore's Future will help us get there. It provides a roadmap that, over the next decade, will allow our city to manage key fiscal decisions and meet our financial goals. I look forward to working with our partners to deliver on this Plan and build the thriving, equitable Charm City that we know is possible."

Securing Baltimore's Future is a multi-year strategy that as structured generates enough savings to sustainably balance the City's budget and reinvest in City services, infrastructure, and tax relief. The goal of the Plan is simple: to keep Baltimore growing and ensure residents thrive.

To retain our current residents and attract new investment, the Plan is built around three cornerstones: Core Service Delivery, Infrastructure Investment, and Tax Competitiveness. For the City to meet the goals as outlined in the plan, meaningful improvement is required across all three cornerstones in tandem over the next 10 years.

"In today's rapidly changing world, and in the face of economic and fiscal pressures, cities have to adapt and evolve to meet new challenges - which is why Securing Baltimore's Future places a strong emphasis on modernizing the way we serve residents," said City Administrator Faith Leach. "Whether it's expanding online services, digitizing revenue collections, or redesigning services with cutting-edge technology, we are committed to making city services more accessible, responsive, and effective."

Cornerstone #1: Core Service Delivery

The City of Baltimore is responsible for delivering essential services to residents, businesses, and visitors, which requires a dedicated, fully staffed workforce implementing effective systems. Recent workforce trends led to increased vacancy rates for positions, making it harder to deliver critical services. Through this plan, the City will work to ensure our workforce, who are already delivering for residents with a leaner footprint, are better-paid and more efficient.

This strategy seeks to address past challenges through a balanced approach - pursuing opportunities to improve compensation while simultaneously streamlining and optimizing service delivery.

This cornerstone calls on the City to provide a better overall experience to taxpayers at a lower cost. This will be achieved by modernizing operations, improving resident services, and eliminating waste across key operational areas through:

• Rebalancing Compensation
  The City will work with managers and municipal unions to rebalance compensation packages with an eye towards creating a more competitive and modern salary structure.
   
• Leave Modernization
  The City will modernize leave practices to stay competitive with peers and to foster a family-friendly work environment.
   
• Parking & Traffic Modernization
  The City will leverage technology and best practices to modernize parking enforcement and traffic control functions.
   
• Public Safety Reforms
  The City will continue to modernize our public safety agencies, building on the progress from the Police Consent Decree and bringing our workforces in line with comparable jurisdictions.
   
• Technology & Modernization
  The City will take aggressive steps to modernize City services and utilize emerging technologies to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of government services.
   
• Opioids Restitution
  The City will utilize proceeds from the opioids legal settlement to create programs that begin to remediate the harm caused by the crisis.
   
• Competition
  The City will leverage market-competitive forces to further improve City services.
   
• Oversight & Governance
  The City will strengthen oversight of City agencies with a focus on rooting out inefficiencies and delivering the best service at the lowest possible cost to the taxpayer. The City will re-examine the structure and governance of City functions, targeting opportunities to make City agencies more responsive to resident needs.

Cornerstone #2: Infrastructure Investment

Baltimore has made significant progress in tackling pressing infrastructure challenges. To continue to grow, the City must increase ongoing structural investments. Modernizing the built environment will improve the quality of service delivery, reduce City operating costs, and send a powerful message of progress to both residents and visitors.

This strategy requires partnership with the State and federal government, as well as local non-profit and private organizations, to provide ongoing quality investments in everyday infrastructure.

This cornerstone emphasizes investments that address aging infrastructure while positioning the City for future development and vitality across three areas:

• City & State Investment
  The City will take immediate steps to ramp up infrastructure spending while planning for a longer-term sustained investment.
   
• Rightsizing
  The City will work to optimize city resource allocation and infrastructure footprint to ensure that available resources are directed only to the most critical City assets and buildings.
   
• Economic Development & Vacants Remediation
  The City will use creative financing tools to solve two infrastructure challenges: the modernization of the convention center and the remediation of vacant properties.

Cornerstone #3: Tax Competitiveness

The City's higher property tax rate creates a competitive disadvantage compared to neighboring jurisdictions. By steadily and responsibly reducing this burden, while broadening and diversifying the City's tax base, this cornerstone seeks to make the City more affordable for current residents and more attractive for new investment.

• Tax Rate Alignment
  The City will better align the tax rate with best practices in other Maryland jurisdictions, providing a more accurate apples-to-apples comparison of the City's tax rate with other Maryland counties.
   
• Direct Tax Relief
  This plan outlines a commitment to steady rate reduction, particularly around property tax burden, in the long-term, prioritizing revenues from future initiatives to provide direct relief for residential homeowners.
   
• Protect Vulnerable Residents
  The City will better utilize existing programs to protect our most vulnerable homeowners, putting cash back in the pockets of Baltimoreans and reducing the risk of tax sale and other predatory practices.
   
• Broaden the Tax Base
  The City will broaden the overall tax base, focusing on revenue sources that reduce the burden on residential homeowners and protect the average taxpayer.
   
• Finance Recoveries
  The City will modernize and tighten the City's revenue collections processes, ensuring fairness and compliance for all taxpayers.

"Baltimore residents deserve a city government that delivers world-class daily services and invests wisely in their future," said City Council President Zeke Cohen "This financial plan provides a roadmap for delivering on those promises, and the Council will ensure these initiatives are achieved with fiscal stewardship and accountability."

"The new 10-year financial plan is a vital action plan that will help us clean up our fiscal processes and allow us to prepare for the future." said City Comptroller Bill Henry "We know we're in an entirely new environment than we were a decade ago. Inflation is still a burden, and prices for necessities continue to rise. We need to respond to our residents' short- and long-term financial concerns."
 

Initiatives

To put these Cornerstones into action, the 10-Year Financial Plan includes 85 initiatives that are strategically aligned to advance one or more of the three Cornerstones. While the initiatives vary in size and scope, they collectively represent a comprehensive blueprint for strengthening the City's financial position and community appeal.

Most initiatives are designed to either generate new revenue or reduce costs compared to the City's baseline 10-year projection.

Others involve targeted investments - upfront costs that will yield long-term benefits, such as improved infrastructure, enhanced services, or greater competitiveness.

Implementation and Collective Results

Although each initiative comes with its own level of complexity, the combined effect is both ambitious and achievable. The pathway for each initiative differs. Some can be implemented under the Mayor's existing authority. Others will require new local or State legislation or approval by the Board of Estimates, the City's spending board. Still others will depend on collaboration with community organizations, private partners, or employee unions.

Importantly, financial results will not be pursued in isolation. The Plan is structured to ensure that new revenues or expenditure savings are reinvested in ways that reinforce the City's broader goals.

Taken together, the initiatives are projected to generate over $1 billion in net resources over the next decade. These resources will be critical not only to closing the City's structural budget gap, but also to advancing the Cornerstone goals - improving services, upgrading infrastructure, and lowering taxes.

Measures of Success

In addition to tracking the progress of individual initiatives, the success of this 10-Year Financial Plan will be evaluated against a balanced set of fiscal and operational outcomes. These measures are designed to provide accountability to residents, ensure the City's financial stability, and demonstrate progress toward long-term priorities. To balance the financial sustainability goals with the broader City-wide operational goals, the Plan incorporates two sets of measures:

• Overall Fiscal Health: Indicators that monitor the City's financial foundation, measuring reserve levels, debt ratios, and unfunded liabilities, which are closely aligned with the benchmarks used by municipal bond rating agencies. These indicators also reference the City's first 10-Year Financial Plan introduced in 2013, Change to Grow, on reducing long-term liabilities and strengthening reserves.
   
• Cornerstone-Specific Outcomes: Indicators that track progress within each of the Plan's three Cornerstones, measuring how investments in service delivery, infrastructure, and tax competitiveness translate into tangible improvements for residents and businesses.

The Next 10 Years

The initiatives outlined in Securing Baltimore's Future: A 10-Year Financial Plan for Baltimore provide the fiscal discipline needed to ensure long-term, sustainable growth, while at the same time directing resources toward what matters most to residents and businesses: better services, renewed infrastructure, and lower taxes.

Full Plan Available Below:
Securing Baltimore's Future: A 10-Year Financial Plan for Baltimore

Additional information available at: bmore10yearplan.com