Fred Homan waited to be the last public speaker in the County Council chamber he once oversaw.

But the former Baltimore County administrator — once so powerful that the county nerve center he commanded was known as “the office of Fred” — needed more than the two minutes allotted for public speaking. He adjusted his hooded sweatshirt, his shoulder-length gray hair straggling out from under a baseball cap. He walked past the table where he once held court in tailored suits with the very leaders he was about to accuse of misconduct and fraud.

“Members of this administration are guilty of conspiracy to defraud the entitlement system,” Homan said of the county government, before going on and on about the alleged misdeed.

He continued past the buzzer, citing various statutes that he said the administration and the council violated in 2020 when they approved an $83,675 settlement for a former firefighter who was a friend and former real estate agent of County Executive Johnny Olszewski Jr. When Homan stopped speaking, Council Chairman Izzy Patoka asked if anyone had questions. No one did. Patoka adjourned the meeting.

Homan sued for public records, and the county could spend as much as $550,000 fighting the suit.

As Olszewski heads to Congress, two things are clear: Neither the county staff nor the council members want to hear from Homan anymore, and Homan has no plans to stop.

“They broke the law,” said Homan, 72. “I spent 40 years here, and it was always about staying inside the lines, and they went outside.”

The Homan Tenure

For decades, some residents and county employees talked about Homan as though he were some sort of dark force behind the scenes, a bureaucratic Lord Voldemort.

The volume turned up in 2017, when the county cut down trees at a Towson site to benefit a powerful private developer, Caves Valley Partners, without public notice. Neighbors held a vigil at the stumps, lamenting the loss. Homan owned up to the decision, saying it had to be done.

Homan began working for Baltimore County in 1978. Eleven years later, he was budget director. In 2006, then-County Executive Jim Smith appointed him as county administrator, the highest non-elected position. He stayed through the Smith tenure, the election and subsequent death of Kevin Kamenetz, and the fill-in term of Don Mohler.

While many praised his confirmation as county administrator in 2007, some complained about his 23% pay raise. In 2009, a county employee sued Homan and an assistant county attorney, claiming that Homan fired her because she caught them in a compromising position. A judge dismissed the claims. In 2017, Homan supported the same attorney’s effort to extend a sewer line to her property in Reisterstown. The County Council reversed a decision approving it after learning that the applicant was a county employee.

Homan recognizes he’s hasn’t been perfect, but those who know him best say no one tried harder.

Councilmen and department heads praised his fiscal acumen, indefatigable work ethic and no-nonsense approach to running Maryland’s third-largest county. Mohler credited him as the “chief architect” behind the county’s coveted AAA bond rating in a letter sent to county employees when Homan’s retirement was announced, according to The Baltimore Sun.

John Hohmann, a former longtime county fire chief, said Homan dedicated himself to the county and was often the first in and the last to leave. As for his motivation now, Hohmann said he understands it: You give your life to a cause, and want to make sure it was time well spent.

After Olszewski was elected in 2018, he asked Homan to resign. Homan said he understood that Olszewski wanted his own lieutenant and left quietly. Olszewski eventually named to the position the first Black woman in county history, Stacy L. Rodgers. Another Black woman, D’Andrea Walker, followed Rodgers.

But in June 2020, as Homan searched the Board of Appeals site for an unrelated case, he stumbled on the name “Tirabassi.” Recognizing it, he read the file. Phillip Tirabassi had withdrawn an appeal for retirement funds “with prejudice,” meaning he could not try again.

Homan was puzzled; Tirabassi, he remembered, was relentless in seeking the pension adjustment. Why walk away?

In February 2021, Homan filed a Public Information Act request for the minutes of the retirement system’s board meetings. The county attorney denied it. He asked for the Tirabassi settlement agreement in April; he was turned down again. He sued. A judge required the county to turn over the records — 2,000 emails and 9,000 pages of documents; Homan estimates he’s received about half of them.

What the lawsuit uncovered

Tirabassi, a county firefighter for 27 years, was preparing to retire. For years, he had requested that his two years of Baltimore City service be added to his county career to increase his pension benefit.

County officials repeatedly told him he needed to have asked within the first six months of his employment there to qualify. As he pressed his case, discussions involved several high-level officials.

The county finally agreed to pay Tirabassi $83,675 and planned to take at least some of the money from the retirement system. When attorneys for the system balked, the county paid him from the liability fund.

At the time, a new law required council approval for all settlements. However, the name listed in the agenda was “Philip Dough.” Homan eventually made the connection after finding a check to Tirabassi for the matching amount.

Former budget director Ed Blades, now retired, admitted in a deposition that he changed the name to Doe “so that if anyone were to go into the system unauthorized to look up the settlement, they would not be able to find it.” He did not know how “Doe” became “Dough.”

While Rodgers approved the settlement, she said in an email obtained by The Baltimore Brew that it was “just so wrong on so MANY levels.”

Olszewski’s administration has maintained that the Tirabassi matter amounted to a series of errors by former staffers, and that the county paid him because lawyers mistakenly entered into a settlement that they had to honor. Olszewski, who was running for Congress in Maryland’s 2nd District at the time, told The Baltimore Sun that he was not close with Philip Tirabassi.

Embarrassing revelations, few consequences

Olszewski’s assertions that he did not know Tirabassi well came into question. The Brew reported that Tirabassi was his real estate agent on two transactions, including one involving his waterfront home on Miller’s Island. The Baltimore Sun reported that Philip’s brother, John Tirabassi, went to high school with Olszewski, and it uncovered a deal for trucks that the Olszewski administration gave to Peterbilt, where John Tirabassi works. County officials maintained that Olszewski was not involved in that contract.

Olszewski easily won election to Congress.

Asked about the council’s silence, Council Chair Patoka said Homan may be correct about some grievances, but the public comment period is not the place to air them.

Republican Todd Crandell agrees — Homan’s concerns are a matter for the courts, not the council. Republican David Marks said the Baltimore County inspector general should investigate.

Wednesday morning, after this article published, the inspector general released a report on her investigation into the matter. She found no wrongdoing related to the Tirabassi settlement by county officials save for the initial effort to not disclose it, which was overturned by the court.

Democrat Julian Jones said he believes the county should release all the records that Homan seeks. Yet in May, he voted along with his colleagues to authorize payment of up to $550,000 to fight the disclosures.

Crandell and Jones both say they’d hesitate to vote that way again, that perhaps the time has come to stop paying to withhold documents and start looking at what Homan wants to see.

Regarding the continued withholding of some documents and the associated legal costs, Inspector General Kelly Madigan said in her Wednesday report that her office “found no evidence that documents were willfully withheld to hide nefarious conduct on the part of the County.

“To date, the County has produced nearly all of the documents in some form and are currently waiting for a final decision on the outstanding issues by the Court. The litigation has been costly since an outside firm had to be hired to handle issues that are typically resolved by [the Office of Law],” the report said.

‘You’ve exceeded your time’

On Nov. 18, Homan was back before the County Council, alleging again that the county violated state law.

“The question from here is, what are you going to do? Because we all know they violated the law, right?” he said.

Homan urged the county to stop paying high-priced private attorneys the last $200,000 in legal fees and release everything to the public.

“What the hell can be in those documents that is so scary to this administration?” he railed.

Patoka asked if the council members had any questions. None did.

“You’ve exceeded your time,” the chair told Homan before adjourning the meeting two minutes later.

This article has been updated to reflect the release of an investigative report by the Baltimore County Office of the Inspector General after it was published.