Former City Councilman Ken Harris’ funeral is today. Baltimore lost him last Saturday morning. City police say one of three masked gunmen shot him as he tried to escape a robbery attempt. But we in the news media lost him when he left public office.
More than any other elected official from Baltimore — either at the local, state or federal level — Harris got the relationship between the media and government. I remember the last in-person interview I did with Harris.
It was in his City Council office. He was telling me how he’d been finagled out of the chairmanship of the City Council’s Education, Housing, Health and Human Services Committee, only days after he went before the school board and assured its members he’d have some questions about their sloppy budget reports.
Knowing Harris, you can bet he’d have some questions about that $58 million budget deficit the school system ran up several years back. He’d have asked similar questions a few months later, after the news media learned about repairs the school system paid for but were never done. But Harris was off the education committee by then.
A little less than a year before our last in-person interview, Harris was talking to the media about his letter to Deputy Commissioner Marcus Brown concerning the criteria Baltimore police used for locking up people for minor criminal violations. Harris asked Brown four specific questions, none of which Brown answered. Instead, Brown got downright personal in his response. Harris lost the vice chairmanship of the Public Safety Committee after that.
For Harris, it was all about accountability. And he treated the news media — the Fourth Estate — as a partner in getting that accountability from government officials.
Whenever I called Harris for a quote, he wouldn’t just get back to me. He’d get back to me in a hurry. He made sure I — and, I’m sure, other reporters — had his cell phone number so we could have easy access to him.
Harris realized that elected officials couldn’t get accountability alone, that without good, dedicated, hard-nosed journalists asking questions, prodding and getting answers, that some elected officials would try to pull the wool over our eyes, snatch away our rights or run buck wild with our tax dollars.
And Harris wasn’t having it. He ran for City Council president on a promise that he would make government more accountable. When Baltimore voters rejected him, I saw it as a rejection of accountability. I figured Baltimoreans — who acted like true, bona fide Balti-morons in this instance — really didn’t want the answers to those questions Harris put to Brown, or want to know about those sloppy budgets the school board put out or budget deficits of $58 million. Balti-morons would get exactly the municipal government we deserved.
For nearly a week, Harris’ former City Council colleagues — including those who left him hanging out there virtually alone when he was trying to get straight answers and some measure of accountability from the police and the school board — have been talking about his “legacy.” I believe their grief is sincere; their commitment to Harris’ legacy, if it could be packaged and manufactured, could fertilize a couple of dozen football fields.
If they REALLY want to honor Harris’ legacy, they can start by getting answers to those questions he would have asked the school board last year. They can track Brown down and get him to answer questions Harris put to him that were never answered. They can praise Harris for being one of the few independent voices on the City Council when most of them were too busy being Gov. Martin O’Malley’s fawning, adoring, butt-kissing Martinistas at a time when accountability was needed.
Many of those mourning Harris said they will miss him. I started missing him last September, when he lost his bid to become City Council president. I realized journalists didn’t lose an elected official; we lost one of us. Harris felt his job and ours were the same.
“My job is to ask questions and get answers,” he told me in June of 2006. “The day I stop asking questions for citizens who are calling me, that’s the day I step down.”
Gregory Kane is a columnist who has been writing about Maryland and Baltimore for more than 15 years. Look for his columns in the editorial section every Thursday and Sunday. Reach him at [email protected].
