Incumbent Nicholas D’Adamo Faces Two Challengers In 2nd District City Council Race
This November, five-term incumbent Democratic City Councilman Nicholas C. D’Adamo hopes to trade in his 1st District council seat. He’s hoping that he’ll be elected instead to represent the newly drawn 2nd District, a pared-down version of the former sprawling 1st, by doing what he’s done all along: providing residents of the area with constituent service.
“I give people a straight answer,” D’Adamo says. “I go out to meetings. I personally return phone calls every night. People might not like me, but they respect my independence.”
D’Adamo’s independence has caused him to openly declare his support for Republican Gov. Robert Ehrlich when he was running for office against Democrat Kathleen Kennedy Townsend in 2002, criticize Mayor Martin O’Malley (a fellow Democrat) for being too self-centered, and denounce last spring’s $43 million city loan to the struggling city school system. When the redistricting lines were drawn in 2002, D’Adamo was left with only about 25 percent of his former Southeast and South Baltimore district in the new 2nd District (mostly in the city’s Northeast sector) in which he would have to run if he wanted to remain on the council. D’Adamo notes that during the redistricting process the mayor “took care of 10 of his friends” on the council—and that he wasn’t among them.
Like many Baltimoreans, D’Adamo says cleaner streets, better policing, and improving public schools are the city’s top issues. Asked how he’d improve the city’s school system, he first defines what the problem isn’t:
“The problem is not money,” he says. “We spend close to $9,300 per student. Some of the private schools’ tuition is $8,000.”
He says the real problem is “the absentee rate,” adding, “until we can get to the parents and make sure [the children] go to school, we will have problems.”
Ask how he’d accomplish that, D’Adamo folds. “I don’t know. Some of those kids don’t have parents.”
D’Adamo has been unscathed so far by the numerous federal investigations bubbling around the City Council since 2003. Unlike most council members, for instance, he reportedly kept careful records of his $5,000 council expense account, which many council members have been criticized for failing to keep track of.
D’Adamo says he doesn’t know his Republican opponent, William Bauer, but Bauer—a deli owner who says he’s running to “bring back the joy” of city living—knows D’Adamo.
“He is a real nice guy,” Bauer says from his deli, Sapori D’Italia in Cockeysville. “I voted for him a couple of times. I’m kind of surprised he’s running for this election, given that he has a full-time job with the state police.” (D’Adamo is the department’s director of community relations.) “Two public jobs is a little awkward,” Bauer continues. “I wish he would kind of come out of the closet and just say he’s a Republican—but I don’t want to bash him.”
Bauer, who sits on the Maryland Republican State Central Committee but has not held public office, says a strong force of will is what’s needed to set Baltimore on the path to glory. “If you can clean up Times Square in New York, then you can accomplish anything,” he says. He’d apply this principle to the city schools’ debacle as well.
“One person has to be responsible,” Bauer says. “If the person doesn’t do it, then you promote the guy behind him.”
A latecomer to the race is Libertarian Lorenzo Gaztañaga, a former candidate for lieutenant governor who first ran for City Council in 1999 in the old 1st District. Gaztañaga, who works as a private security officer, says the late start was due to trouble his party had maintaining its ballot status. Maryland has strict ballot access laws, and the Libertarians had to fight to keep the party status they earned in 1995.
Gaztañaga echoes Bauer’s faith in the power of a determined individual in an accountable system. “I don’t think you can say that most of the folks on City Council have been very accountable or have paid much attention to what was going on,” he says, taking as his example the city schools issue.
“The [city] councilman is not all that powerful,” Gaztañaga acknowledges. “But if you have a determined person who is willing to rattle cages . . . the title alone doesn’t tell who the person is.”
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