Open up, Joan Floyd is trying to tell the City Council. Open up and do your jobs! Floyd, the Green Party candidate for City Council president, says the council conducts too much of its business out of the public eye and often seems to be asleep on the job. She’s challenging incumbent City Council President Sheila Dixon for the seat, and Floyd says, should she win, she’ll change the way the council is run.

A community activist, freelance writer, and teacher, Floyd earned her spurs in the battles over zoning and development in her Remington neighborhood. “That’s pretty much how you learn about the workings or nonworkings of government,” she says. The lessons she’s taken are harsh, and they’ve led Floyd to take to the streets in a station wagon, attending meetings in every neighborhood to carry the message of reform.

The trouble with Baltimore government is twofold, she says. First, decisions are made in secret in violation of the state’s open-meetings laws. Floyd and her husband, Doug Armstrong, have been among a small group of citizens who have pushed their way into the so-called “pre-meetings” of the City Council and Board of Estimates. These meetings, typically held in a small office to discourage public observation, are where the decisions get made. The public meetings, where the official votes are taken, are often rushed, pro forma affairs, Floyd says.

Floyd’s second lesson is this: City Council members often don’t know what they’re voting on. She takes as an example Council Bill 701, a 2002 measure designed to give the city of Baltimore sweeping new power to condemn private property in order to assemble large parcels for private developers. It almost passed without comment, Floyd says, because “the City Council wasn’t paying attention. They weren’t reading what was in front of them.”

Floyd and a few others who had read the bill asked the commissioners at a meeting of the city Planning Commission to read the bill. “There was a long silence while they read it,” Floyd remembers. Then some of them found problems with it, and began the process of amending it. The amended bill eventually passed.

This summer, The Sun credited Floyd’s “eagle eye” with saving a city park that was erroneously slated for sale to a developer.

“I think the [O’Malley] administration counts on this council not paying attention,” Floyd concludes. “I’ve seen it time after time.”

To repair these flaws in the system Floyd proposes to conduct government in the open and to force, under threat of public humiliation, council members to attend their committee meetings and do the scut work of governing, such as reading and understanding the sometimes complex measures they vote on. She’ll take attendance at those meetings, she says, and require council members to listen to citizen input.

By holding the real votes in public, Floyd says, the council will be forced to slow down the voting process. “It’s an observation that everyone notes at their first [City Council] meeting,” Floyd explains. “If a council member wants to vote against something, they almost have to leap out of their chair with at least one or maybe both arms flailing.”

The current Baltimore City government is about “inevitable result,” says Floyd. “You take off half a day, get someone to take care of the kids, give your impassioned testimony, and they tell you, ‘Oh, thank you for your input.’” Then, Floyd says, they ratify the deal they made in the back room.

Floyd won’t touch on Democratic opponent Dixon’s ongoing involvement with U.S. Attorney Thomas M. DiBiagio’s public-corruption investigation, which subpoenaed financial documents from all 19 council members and embarrassed several of them for the way they spent (or pocketed) their expense accounts. She prefers to see matters in a broader context.

“Has she led the council in such a way that corrupts the process? I can say, ‘Absolutely,’” Floyd says. “If you have a right on paper but you’re not given the opportunity to exercise it, I have a problem with that.”

To the contrary, Dixon says, she’s already reformed the council’s voting system to make it more open. Asked to describe her “toughest moment” during her current council tenure (she was elected City Council president in 1999 with 83 percent of the vote), Dixon does not mention firing her sister, Janice, last fall after the city’s Board of Ethics said that keeping her on the city payroll as a council aide violated the law. (Janice Dixon is now treasurer of her sister’s reelection campaign.) Instead, Dixon recalls the fallout after a commission she created “made the recommendation to downsize the council from 18 to 14” members. To try to massage those recommendations, Dixon lobbied her council colleagues in a secret meeting, which was exposed and ruled illegal by state open-meetings officials. Dixon maintains that her aims were honorable, “but maybe I should have just voted up or down.” Chastened by experience, Dixon says, she opened up the council committee meetings earlier this year. “I decided to institute that system,” she says, “so the committees now have to vote in public.”

But that fateful open-meetings violation occurred in August 2002, two years before the change in council rules. And Dixon has been quoted several times since then demanding the removal of citizens from public meetings. In a story on Oct. 11, for example, The Sun quoted Dixon, who chairs the Board of Estimates, making a journalism intern give up a seat in board’s pre-meeting in favor of a “real person.” She also had police remove public-access TV reporter Leonard Kerpelman from another Board of Estimates pre-meeting, saying, “Get him out of here now, because if I have to put my hands on him, I’m gonna be in trouble.”

But as she explains it, Dixon is all about “process,” and the sometimes difficult matter of serving constituents who are not all that familiar with the way their government works. Floyd’s complaint about Bill 701, Dixon points out, was with the Planning Commission, not with the council. And while Dixon acknowledges that some current lame-duck members of the council don’t attend all of their committee meetings, that problem should be solved automatically with the election, Dixon says, adding that with the new council she plans to “decrease the number of committees.”

All of this, in Dixon’s view, continues her process of “moving the council to be more accountable. We [now] have a council that operates all year round.” She also takes credit for “creating the HIV/AIDS commission, which is now at the forefront of stopping the spread of AIDS in Baltimore.” She has worked for better fiscal management of the city’s schools, and creatively used the council’s very limited power to create a “hold-back through our budget process, where money is held back from some agencies until we see progress” addressing citizen complaints.

Dixon cites such measures as the temporary withholding of funds (which is more effective than using the council’s formal power of cutting agency budgets) with improving service at the Department of Public Works, curbing police overtime, and getting better housing inspection, though she acknowledges that there is more work to do on that front.

The word “process” comes up again and again as Dixon outlines her accomplishments and her challenges during her current term. She takes credit for a law to remove lead from city schools’ drinking water, curb the advertisement of tobacco and alcohol products in city neighborhoods, prohibit children from having BB guns, and to create a statewide “prohibition of race-based traffic stops.”

It’s an attention to the nuts-and-bolts reality of governance at which Dixon, who is said to have mayoral aspirations, thrives. And she contrasts this institutional knowledge with what she seems to regard as the amateurishness of Floyd. “A lot of people looking at it from outside—and to some degree my opponent—don’t understand,” Dixon says. “Which is why, after this election is over, I’m going to invite her in to spend the day being [City Council] president.”

The offer seems to overlook the possibility that Floyd might beat Dixon on Nov. 2. But the reality in Baltimore, with its 80 percent Democratic voter registration, is that Green candidates like Floyd (and Republicans) stand little chance of winning. It’s been 40 years since anyone other than a Democrat has won citywide election in Baltimore.

Floyd says her mother told her long ago that she had to register as a Democrat to have any impact on Baltimore politics. She refused. “I just don’t like that,” she says. “With this election we’re telling people there’s an alternative. That’s key.”