City taking $578,000 loss on sale to developer, state records show

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(Stephen Janis / Examiner)
Arnold Jolivet, president of the Maryland Minority Contractors Association, shown on Walbrook Avenue, filed a formal protest Friday with the city over the $578,347 loss. “It’s really criminal,” he said of the deal.

BALTIMORE (Map, News) - Minority contractors filed a formal protest Friday over a loss of more than half a million dollars that Baltimore City is taking on a property sale to a politically connected developer.

The city’s Board of Estimates approved the sale of four vacant lots on the 3300 block of Walbrook Avenue in Northwest Baltimore for $96,000, roughly $24,000 per parcel.

But in 2005, the city paid $674,347 for the same four properties, according to state property records.

The properties were purchased in 2005 from Inez Cherry, a Baltimore landlord, after the city sued to condemn the properties and won, according to court records.

“It’s really criminal,” said Arnold Jolivet, president of the Maryland Minority Contractors Association. “The city keeps saying it doesn’t have the money for schools or for minority business and now they do something like this.”

The property was seized as part of the city’s Project 5000 program, which tries to acquire vacant and abandoned properties and get the properties back into productive use.

The Board of Estimates on Wednesday approved the sale of the properties to the Orion Group — a developer that gave money to the mayoral campaigns of both Mayor Sheila Dixon and Gov. Martin O’Malley.

The deeply discounted sale has angered advocates for black-owned businesses, who said minority businesses should have been allowed to bid on the land.

“The city misrepresented the value of the property and used that to make the deal exempt from the city’s minority business ordinance,” Jolivet said. “Given the discount and the assistance provided, the city’s minority business ordinance should apply.”

In a formal protest to the board mailed Friday, Jolivet is seeking to have the deal overturned.

The Orion Group, a Mount Vernon-based development company, contributed $2,000 to Dixon’s 2007 mayoral campaign and $2,000 to O’Malley’s 1999 mayoral campaign.

Calls to the Orion Group executives seeking comment on the deal were not returned. An unidentified employee who answered the door at the firm’s offices declined to comment. According to the firm’s Web site the company has offices in Guam and the Philippines, where it provides construction and engineering services.

Ryan O’Doherty, spokesman for City Council President Stephanie Rawlings-Blake, who heads the Board of Estimates, declined to comment on Jolivet’s protest or the sale, referring questions to the city’s housing department.

sjanis@baltimoreexaminer.com

lbroadwater@baltimoreexaminer.com

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