O'Malley: City's Progress 'Irrefutable'

Annual Address Cites Education, Anti-Crime Efforts Over Tenure

BALTIMORE, Jan. 30 -- Baltimore Mayor Martin O'Malley on Monday used his final State of the City address before standing for election as a gubernatorial candidate to make the case that Baltimore has seen "progress that few people would have thought possible" since his arrival six years ago.

O'Malley (D) acknowledged that the "addicted and violent" city he inherited in late 1999 still faces major challenges. But during a 23-minute address laced with statistics, he argued that his city had made "sometimes nation-leading progress" in fighting violent crime, improving schools, reducing teen pregnancies, bolstering economic development and turning the city's finances around.

"Some in public service run away from tough challenges," O'Malley told a chamber packed with City Council members, city administrators and other dignitaries. "Together, we ran into the breach. Together, we chose to take responsibility."

The annual address, O'Malley's seventh as mayor, was notable for its lack of new initiatives for the coming year, during which O'Malley's agenda will be dominated by his campaign for governor.

Although O'Malley did not mention his bid for higher office, his speech, in effect, laid the foundation for how he would like Marylanders to judge his tenure as mayor: based on progress Baltimore has made rather than on a snapshot of its lingering big-city woes.

Which yardstick voters use could well determine O'Malley's future, some analysts believe.

Violent crime, for example, has dropped significantly since O'Malley took office, but Baltimore remains among the nation's deadliest cities-- a fact O'Malley did not mention in his address.

The city recorded 269 homicides last year, a figure police attribute in large part to a pervasive drug trade. And although test scores have improved in Baltimore schools in recent years, they are the lowest among the state's 24 jurisdictions.

Both O'Malley's Democratic primary opponent, Montgomery County Executive Douglas M. Duncan, and the Republican incumbent, Gov. Robert L. Ehrlich Jr., have sought to spotlight Baltimore's crime and education problems in the early stages of the campaign.

On Monday, Duncan campaign manager Scott Arceneaux dismissed the speech as "election-year rhetoric from a mayor looking to climb the next rung on the political ladder" and highlighted the fact that O'Malley has fallen short of a goal he embraced of reducing homicides to 175 a year.

Urban strife has hobbled statewide aspirations of many other big-city mayors across the country, who have struggled over the years to connect with unsympathetic rural and suburban voters.

Aides to O'Malley say that the dynamic in Maryland is different, partly because of the state's small size and because of an expansive Baltimore television market that has made O'Malley a household name in more than half the state.

The centerpiece of O'Malley's address was built around a comparison of data from last year and, in some cases, a decade ago, several years before O'Malley took office.

The number of victims of violent crime, he said, fell from 20,000 to 11,000 during that period. The number of children killed in Baltimore fell from 45 to 13.

A decade ago, O'Malley said, Baltimore ranked No. 1 in the country in teen pregnancies, with 12 percent of teenage girls having babies. Now the rate is 8 percent, and Baltimore ranks No. 15.

The graduation rate in city schools has risen over the past decade, O'Malley said, from 42 percent to nearly 60 percent.

While work remains on that front, "the path of progress is clear and it is irrefutable -- except to the narrowest-minded of city bashers," O'Malley said.