In a stinging defeat for the Brandon Scott administration, Circuit Court Judge Pamela J. White denied this afternoon the city’s motion to dismiss the lawsuit filed by Inspector General Isabel Mercedes Cumming to regain access to city government records.

She ordered the city to respond to subpoenas Cumming’s office had requested in an amended complaint. Cumming’s attorneys have said that the city has failed to fulfill 49 recent subpoena requests.

“OIG subpoenas are legal orders compelling attendance and production of evidence, serving as investigatory, fact-finding tools authorized by the Charter and seeking relevant information.”

White ruled that the Baltimore Law Department’s efforts to curb the inspector general’s access to records to examine complaints of fraud, financial waste and abuse go against two amendments to the City Charter overwhelmingly approved by voters.

In 2018, the electorate acted to create an “independent” agency, removed from control by the mayor and the city solicitor, and granted the Office of the Inspector General the right to issue subpoenas for both testimony from relevant officials and the production of documents and information.

Voters further strengthened its independence in 2022 by approving an Advisory Board free of appointees of the mayor and other public officials who could become the subject of an OIG investigation.

• The Brew has extensively covered the dispute between the Scott administration and OIG, which began after the watchdog office started looking at the Mayor’s Office of Neighborhood Safety and Engagement. Here are links to our key stories.

“The Office of Inspector General is not controlled by and does not answer to any directive from the Mayor, City Council or City Solicitor. Rather, OIG reports directly to Baltimore citizens,” White wrote today.

“Restricting the fact or manner of investigatory interviews or data research, for example, would infringe on the statutory independence and objectivity of the Inspector General,” she continued.

“As an independent watchdog for fraud, waste and abuse – and potential violations of law – in city government, OIG cannot be limited to acting as a supplicant for information potentially deemed ‘privileged’ by or for another government unit,” the judge added.

The latter refers to City Solicitor Ebony Thompson’s insistence that the OIG is subject to the limitations of the Maryland Public Information Act (MPIA), as determined by the law department.

Shropshire Case Set Aside

Those limitations resulted in the law department heavily redacting documents that Cumming had subpoenaed from the Mayor’s Office of Neighborhood Safety and Engagement (MONSE) as part of her investigation of the finances of the SideStep youth diversion program.

Thompson’s citing of the 2011 Shropshire case as the reason for refusing OIG access to MONSE records was criticized by White as ill-founded. She said the Shropshire case involved very different – and narrow – circumstances regarding the confidentiality of a police officer’s personnel records.

The 17-page ruling further stated that “the jurisdiction of the OIG to perform its work, including the issuance and enforcement of its subpoenas, is not in conflict with or restricted by the MPIA.”

The ruling means that the Cumming lawsuit can continue and placed the burden on the law department to identify and explain to the court what issues demonstrate a genuine dispute between the city and the inspector general.

Judge White said she will schedule a hearing after she reviews the city’s response to her request.

Full Text of Today’s Ruling

Judge White 8/14/26 Decision/Order in IG Isabel Cumming v. Mayor and City Council of Baltimore by Fern Marie