Add state Del. Nick J. Mosby to the list of Democratic candidates for Baltimore City Council president in the April 2020 primary.
Mosby announced his intention to run in an 80-second video that he released Tuesday.
“I’m Nick Mosby, and I’ve dedicated my life to public service for one reason — I love my city,” Mosby says at the opening of the video.
Mosby becomes the third major Democratic candidate in the race for the city’s second-highest office, joining City Councilman Leon F. Pinkett III and City Councilwoman Shannon Sneed.
The job is becoming vacant because Council President Brandon M. Scott (D), who was appointed to the position in the summer, is running for mayor. While they have yet to formally endorse each other, Scott and Sneed are close political allies.
Mosby, 41, is making a second bid for citywide office. After serving one five-year term on the City Council, representing West Baltimore, he ran unsuccessfully for mayor in 2016, and wound up being appointed to the House of Delegates to fill a vacancy in early 2017.
During his three years in Annapolis, Mosby has been associated with the push to save Pimlico Race Course, with criminal justice reform legislation, and with efforts to combat lead paint poisoning in low-income housing.
In his largely biographical announcement video, Mosby introduces himself to voters and touts his experience. He also references his more famous wife, Baltimore City State’s Attorney Marilyn J. Mosby (D), who appears with Mosby and their two daughters in video footage.
“You probably know that I’m married to a woman who shares my passion for equal opportunity and fairness,” the candidate says in the video. “But you may not know my professional background as an electrical engineer and that I served on the City Council passing groundbreaking new laws.”
(Marilyn Mosby made headlines Tuesday afternoon when she announced that her office had indicted 25 corrections officers and other prison personnel for operating “a criminal enterprise” at the city jail.)
Mosby also does not sugarcoat the challenges facing the city.
“We’re all neighbors here,” he says. “And neighbor, we have so much work to do.”
But he pledges to fight for “a safer, more just, more equitable Baltimore than we’ve had in the past.”
Based on fundraising totals that are almost a year old, Mosby has a decent-sized war chest to fund his citywide bid. He reported $103,937 in campaign cash in mid-January, compared to $58,047 for Sneed and $22,053 for Pinkett.
Mosby held a fundraiser Tuesday night at Union Craft Brewery in Baltimore.
Unlike Pinkett and Sneed, who will be in Baltimore full-time for the run-up to the April 28 primary, Mosby will be working in Annapolis during the 90-day General Assembly session, which runs from Jan. 8 to April 6. Although state lawmakers are banned from raising money during the legislative session, exceptions are made for those running for non-state offices.
Josh Kurtz
Founding editor
Founding Editor Josh Kurtz is a veteran chronicler of Maryland politics and government. He began covering the State House in 1995 for The Gazette newspapers, and has been writing about state and local politics ever since. He was an editor at Roll Call, the Capitol Hill newspaper, for eight years, and for eight years was the editor of E&E Daily, which covers energy and environmental policy on Capitol Hill. For 6 1/2 years Kurtz wrote a weekly column on state politics for Center Maryland and has written for several other Maryland publications as well. Kurtz regularly gives speeches and appears on TV and radio shows to discuss Maryland politics.
Related Articles
State Police superintendent says divers will move to ‘search and recovery’ mode on Wednesday morning after fruitlessly searching for at least six missing road workers.
President calls on Congress to authorize full federal funding for bridge reconstruction — a politically cumbersome process.
A relatively drama-free evening at the Maryland State Board of Elections office in Annapolis.
Creative Commons Attribution