My second question is what are you doing to bring new jobs to Baltimore that will provide the most important underpinning to revitalizing the people in our city – not just the buildings?

Are you ever going to help families move (back) to the city? After living and growing our family in the city for more than 10 years (Mt. Vernon and Bolton Hill…), we had to move out to the county because our real estate tax bill grew to almost 10K a year.

We simply could not afford it anymore (and we make decent money). The equation HIGH TAXES + PRIVATE SCHOOLS just doesn’t work for us…I understand that everybody needs to help, but the bill is just way too high.

I have lots of questions I’d like to ask Mayor Dixon, but I generally don’t bother asking because I’ve rarely heard her answer with anything but platitudes or deliberate vagueness. I suppose my main question would be to ask her to justify all the money the city is spending beautifying Charles street while classrooms are so overcrowded that teachers are too busy trying to keep order to actually teach and while we still don’t have on demand detox/drug treatment programs.

But, because I am a fair-minded woman, I am also compelled to say I really like single stream recycling, so kudos for that.

Yes there are people interested in local community life. Remarks/questions for the mayor =under the thread of Miss Dixon.

But one topic has come up recently in conversations, and that’s the dismal state of public transportation in Baltimore and the surrounding areas. And I guess this is one of my big disappointments with O’Malley so far, because, like it or not, public transportation is a state issue not a local one. Nevertheless, the largest number of people affected by it are probably in and immediately around the city. So I’d like to ask the mayor what her view of, and commitment to, workable (emphasis on that) public transportation is, and how the city can pressure the governor to rework the mess that the Ehrlich administration made of the bus lines in particular.