Banner political notes: Mayor’s spokesman shifted to DPW, Hogan doesn’t like Cox’s chances

Mayor’s spokesman sent to DPW comms team

A top city aide who was pulled from the Department of Public Works to turn around Mayor Brandon Scott’s communications office has rejoined the DPW, several weeks after the administration was fiercely criticized for public outreach around an E. coli contamination in city water.

Scott’s former communications director James Bentley is once again the DPW’s director of communications.

A Labor Day weekend E. coli scare left much of West Baltimore and Baltimore County under a boil-water advisory for days last month. But frustration over the incident from both residents and elected officials has focused on the DPW’s delayed and confusing public outreach as much as at the contamination itself.

At a hearing investigating the city’s response last month, Councilman Isaac “Yitzy” Schleifer blasted the DPW’s decision to alert residents through Twitter and questioned how many residents agency workers reached through a door-knocking canvass in impacted neighborhoods.

Scott’s senior director of communications, Monica Lewis, said Bentley’s move back to the DPW has been in the works for months and was not related to the department’s response to the E. coli contamination, adding that the administration always planned for Bentley to hold a temporary role in the mayor’s office to stabilize its communications arm.

Meanwhile, the DPW’s communications chief, Yolanda Winkler, has transitioned into a community engagement role, duties that Lewis said already made up one-half of Winkler’s portfolio.

Public Works leaders acknowledged missteps in their response to the contamination at the initial council hearing, and Lewis said the mayor’s office would be “essentially running point” during similar emergency situations in the future. No DPW communications staff attended a follow-up hearing on the incident last month, and City Administrator Chris Shorter told council members that the agency would not be answering any more questions on the topic because of “changes in personnel” underway in the comms division.

Issues that occurred Labor Day were “not an indictment on any one person” and stemmed from a need for more hands on deck over the holiday weekend, Lewis said.

Public Works officials first detected bacteria at three test sites in West Baltimore on the morning of Saturday, Sept. 3, but it was not until two days later, on Labor Day morning, that the department began informing residents. After an initial series of tweets suggesting that residents in the area should consider boiling their water, the DPW’s digital and automated communications went dark for nine hours before the release of a sweeping boil-water advisory.

Bentley’s tenure spans three mayoral administrations. He previously served as a communications director for former Mayor Catherine Pugh; after she resigned amid scandal, he worked for her automatic successor Mayor Jack Young. After Scott was elected in 2020, Bentley joined the DPW.

In early 2021, Scott’s communications team experienced a string of departures. Deputy director Stefanie Mavronis left to join the Mayor’s Office of Neighborhood Safety and Engagement, followed by press secretary Sydney Burns. When communications director Cal Harris resigned after less than a year in City Hall, Bentley was shifted from the DPW to serve as his replacement and help rebuild the office.

Lewis joined the communications team over the summer as senior director.

emily.sullivan@thebaltimorebanner.com

adam.willis@thebaltimorebanner.com

Hogan’s assessment of Cox’s chances: Not good

We already knew that Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan refuses to support Dan Cox, the fellow Republican who is trying to become the next governor.

Now we have evidence of just how poor Hogan thinks Cox’s prospects are.

During Hogan’s swing through New Hampshire earlier this month, Hogan hobnobbed with political and business leaders attending his “Politics & Eggs” speech at St. Anselm College. And C-SPAN’s video team caught much of what Hogan had to say.

At one point, the C-SPAN video shows Hogan chatting about Cox with James Brett of the New England Council, one of the event sponsors. Hogan said that Cox took busloads of people to Washington on Jan. 6, 2021, and “he wanted to hang Mike Pence, my friend Mike.”

(Cox posted on Twitter that day that Pence was “a traitor” for not halting the certification of the election results. He later deleted the tweet, but it lives on in screenshots.)

Brett brought up Cox’s failed attempt to impeach Hogan. And Hogan offered that Cox called him “a Chinese spy or something.”

“Now he’s only 32 points down,” Brett said, referencing a Washington Post-University of Maryland poll that showed Democrat Wes Moore with a 32-point margin over Cox.

“Right, exactly,” Hogan said, chuckling. “He’s over-performing at 32.”

pamela.wood@thebaltimorebanner.com

Behind the scenes of debate prep

Political debates can be high-stakes affairs, so candidates typically spend plenty of time preparing.

They work with their teams to understand the logistics and rules, polish their talking points, and perhaps most importantly, anticipate the questions from moderators and attacks from their rivals.

The candidates often enlist the help of allies to play their opponent in mock debates.

Before Maryland gubernatorial nominees Wes Moore and Dan Cox took the stage in this week’s sole debate of the election season, each man practiced with a stand-in.

For Moore’s debate prep, the campaign turned to someone who knows Cox well to pretend to be the Republican nominee: Del. Eric Luedtke, the Democratic leader of the House of Delegates. Luedtke has spent four years watching Cox debate on the floor of the House.

Meanwhile Cox employed his campaign manager, Zachary Werrell, to play the role of Moore.

pamela.wood@thebaltimorebanner.com

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